The Fireworks Start at Midnight
By Laurence Watkinson
First published: September 2012 (first Kindle edition)
Brian Barnfield, police informant extraordinaire, has a problem. He’s been arrested in Saudi Arabia for smuggling drugs. He maintains it’s a set-up. He needs the police back home to persuade the Saudi authorities of his important part in the War on Drugs, so he can get back to the UK without being flogged.
Douglas Crosland, Blackpool’s greatest drugs mogul, has a problem. Some of the smaller gangs whose drugs supply he controls are in rebellion. They want a free market, but Crosland will go to any lengths to protect his monopoly.
Blackpool’s police commissioner Tristan Spratt has a problem. It seems that a civil war has broken out between some of the gangs rooted in the city’s immigrant communities, and the resulting bad publicity won’t help his re-election chances.
DCI Bill Ramsbottom and his sidekick DS Lucy Brown of City CID have a problem. The pattern of beatings and shootings involving members of the Iraqi, Kurdish and Turkish communities doesn’t seem to make sense. And soon a hellish new spate of violence emerges, with horrific attacks on Arab women staying in the city’s hotels.
Will Ramsbottom and Brown work out how all the above are connected, and who is responsible? Not if a certain gangster gets his way, and his hit-man manages to kill Lucy Brown first.
The Fireworks Start at Midnight is the second Ramsbottom and Brown crime story set in Britain's favourite seaside resort.
Purchase The Fireworks Start at Midnight from Amazon for Kindle.
Print 