BOOKS
NORTH YORKSHIRE CRIME THRILLER BOOK 1
by Barry N Rainsford
When the very public and brutal murder of a prominent businessman, Paul Webb, friend and mentor of the prime minister, stretches North Yorkshire police and intelligence resources to breaking point, the discovery of the suicide of a young woman in a remote barn presents as a routine case safely assigned to DI Zara Fisher, a troubled detective undergoing mandated therapy for anger management issues.
Restricted to desk duties, Fisher’s boredom and resentment show through, but when she learns of two other suicides assigned to different members of her therapy group, she finds herself stirred to considerations of connections. Ideas that find a possible motive in the fictional musings of another member of the group, ACC Neil Musgrove, a career plateauing senior officer whose obsession with hard-boiled detective fiction and hard-boiled sweets makes him almost as much of an outsider as Fisher herself.
As the body count rises around them, what at first was merely Musgrove’s writerly flight of fantasy takes on a darkly compelling logic, one drawing other members of the group into Fisher’s off-book investigation: DS Pan Demetriou, recently transferred from the West Midlands for assaulting a senior officer, and Sophie Doyle, a young police IT specialist whose politically embarrassing security hacks presented the choice of black site prison or mandatory therapy.
Dubbed Broken Wings, the group come to believe that not only are these suicides linked, but that they connect to the heart of the major terrorist hunt occupying the rest of the force. It is a link that if true points to the existence of a serial killer, one with a taste for the particularly brutal, the theatrical, and the bizarre.
Broken Wings is the first in a series of darkly comic crime thrillers featuring the odd-ball members of the fictional Police Anger Management Therapy Group. Set in North Yorkshire, the series has been described as Slow Horses meets the Thursday Murder Club.
Also in series…
Keeper of Souls
The second book in the series will be published
Summer 2026
Only the Silence Moves
The third book in the series will be published
Winter 2026
Based on the gripping WWII cold case of Hagley Wood
by Barry N Rainsford
When the body of a young woman is discovered in a remote Yorkshire barn, DI Zara Fisher is called back to duty before she’s ready. Haunted by her own past and exiled to an anger-management group for “difficult” officers, she’s forced to share therapy with three equally broken colleagues.
Assumed to be a traveller or a vagrant, it is an investigation that in the midst of the Blitz no-one is interested in pursuing. DC Alec Porter, a wounded Spanish Civil War veteran, is the officer tasked with completing the paperwork, a routine assignment he takes more seriously than his superiors anticipate. He soon finds his enquiries pull him to the heart of a terrifying conspiracy, one that threatens not only those he loves and all that he believes in, but one placing the fate of the country and the outcome of the war itself in his hands.
Drawing on archived police files of the still unsolved murder, the author imaginatively weaves a tale around actual events and characters at times more fantastic than fiction.
From the writer of the acclaimed political-crime thriller
All the Dead Men Lie.
One murdered picket. One exposed government.
Six hundred suspects.
All The Dead Men Lie
by Barry N Rainsford
October 1984. After six months the miners' strike is at its fiercest.
Everyday brings yet further hostile confrontation between police and pickets at collieries across the country. In the aftermath of one such incident a picket is found brutally beaten to death.
With 600 hundred suspects, hundreds of them fellow officers, the challenge to Detective Inspector Peter Kalus is difficult enough. That the outcome of the investigation is seen as a political cause for both the supporters of the strike and those who oppose it only adds to the pressure for a rapid solution.
Kalus soon discovers that the victim was much more than a simple miner. He was a man with enemies, any one of whom profited from his death. As the plot unfolds Kalus - a man fighting his own personal and professional demons - is lead further and further into a complex nightmare of political conspiracies, betrayals and murder. It becomes evident that others will also die unless Kalus can unravel the truth of the murdered picket; a truth that if revealed could bring down the Thatcher government and change the face of British politics forever.
Keeper of Souls
by Barry N Rainsford
With a politically sensitive NATO conference occurring in the North Yorkshire region, the last thing Chief Constable Hyland and newly elected regional Mayor Gina Hargreaves want is for the anger management therapy group dubbed the Broken Wings to wreak the kind of mayhem experienced a few months previously.
The discovery of the long buried body of a young woman missing for almost twenty five years appears a sufficiently harmless enough distraction to occupy the social and professional hand-grenade that is DI Zara Fisher along with the missing woman’s original investigating officer, the then young detective, now ACC, Neil Musgrove.
But as more and more of those linked to this cold case begin dying, Fisher and Musgrove find themselves forced once again into drawing upon the wayward skills of their outcast therapy group if they are to find justice for the dead young woman. Soon, they find their investigation connecting to the NATO meeting, and through it to powerful figures in the military and intelligence communities, men with a great deal to lose who are prepared to kill to protect both themselves and their secrets.
Only The Silence Moves
by Barry N Rainsford
It’s a new year, and after the perils of the previous winter the members of the Broken Wings anger management therapy group hope for a happier New Year.
Assigned once more to routine desk duties, DI Zara Fisher finds herself starting the year overseeing a junior officer’s routine meeting with a new informant he’s cultivating.
When the meeting goes terribly wrong - the would-be informant abducted and her fellow officer badly injured - Fisher is propelled into an investigation that soon brings to the surface the dark secrets she has struggled for more than two decades to keep hidden. She will have to choose between catching a brutal professional killer or protecting a secret whose revelation will destroy her career, her life, and the lives of her estranged family.
Enlisting the assistance of the only ones she can safely turn to - the wayward outsiders that make up the Broken Wings - she knows she must act quickly before even more people die.