Cath Staincliffe at Tangled Web UK

Page Updated: 14/03/2011

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Cath Staincliffe - Page 2

First British Edition Allison & Busby (2003)

Bitter Blue
On her first day back after the Easter break Manchester based Private Investigator, Sal Kilkenny takes on two new cases. The first is to discover who is sending offensive poison pen letters to hotel receptionist Lucy Barker. The second is surveillance work for a couple who want reassuring that there are no nuisance neighbours or criminal activity in the area they're planning to buy a new home.
As Sal prepares to stake out the streets a bitter cold snap plunges the country into arctic conditions. Her stress levels are not helped by the escalation of the campaign against Lucy Barker and her inability to nail the perpetrator who maddeningly avoids capture. Plus there's trouble at home as Sal's daughter Maddie seems unable to settle at school. When Sal's normally mundane surveillance duties bring her face to face with a grim discovery and violent crime she's sure that it just can't get any worse before it gets better. Unluckily for Sal there is more than one surprise in store for her and a nightmarish sequence of events may well turn out to be a matter of life and death...

Trio
1960, Manchester. Three young Catholic women find themselves pregnant and unmarried. In these pre-Pill days, there is only one acceptable course of action: adoption. So Megan, Caroline and Joan meet up in St Ann's Home for Unmarried Mothers to await the births of their babies. Three little girls are born, and placed with their adoptive families. Trio follows the lives of these mothers and daughters over the ensuing years.

First British Edition Allison & Busby (2002)

Towers Of Silence
See Review by Martin Edwards - creator of the highly acclaimed, Liverpool based Harry Devlin Mysteries
It’s the count down to Christmas and Sal Kilkenny is exhausted even just thinking about the festive season - the tree, presents for the kids, who to invite and what to have for Christmas dinner. So when she is asked to investigate a suicide that a grieving family cannot come to terms with, she turns the case down. Miriam Johnstone had a history of mental instability and the coroner’s verdict seemed justified. But eventually persuaded, against her better judgement, to help the family trace their mothers’ last hours, Sal is ashamed to realise how little the authorities had bothered to investigate and starts to have her own suspicions about the death. Why would a woman so petrified of heights choose to jump from the top of Manchester’s Arndale Centre car park?
While Sal tracks down Miriam’s friends and acquaintances, she also has a personal dilemma on her hands. When should she introduce her daughter Maddie to her new boyfriend, Stuart? The responsibility of being a single mum is preying on her mind when she receives a call from a woman desperate to get some answers about her own child. With mixed feelings, Sal agrees to tail the difficult teenager and discover where he goes and what he does. The results are puzzling and before long she is led in unexpected directions that will take her closer to danger and heartbreak than ever before...
Written with beautiful attention to the nuances of everyday life, Towers of Silence is an emotionally involving journey into the heart of a city hiding dark secrets.
Acclaim for Cath Staincliffe’s Sal Kilkenny novels
'Uncommonly engaging… zestful and involving… A writer with wit, energy and a point of view. Stand back and watch her go' Literary Review
`Real people, real problems ... Staincliffe writes brilliantly and compassionately about the things that matter.’ Literary Review
`Cath Staincliffe is a writer who understands that events have consequences that reverberate throughout people’s lives, and she never shies way from the difficult answers. A must for anyone who wants to understand the beating heart of contemporary Mancunian life.’ Val McDermid, Manchester Evening News
`As good as the British private-eye novel gets’ Time Out

First British Edition Allison & Busby (2001)

Paperback - Allison & Busby (2002)

Stone Cold Red Hot
See Review by Martin Edwards - creator of the highly acclaimed, Liverpool based Harry Devlin Mysteries
When private eye Sal Kilkenny is asked to discover the whereabouts of Jennifer Pickering, disinherited by her family twenty years ago, it seems that Jennifer does not want to be found. Her brother Roger is determined to find his sister- their mother is dying and he craves an emotional reunion to bury their differences before it is too late. Despite her initial reservations, as the events of the past gradually unfold, single-mum Sal finds that she is becoming engrossed in the mystery even against her better judgement.
There are dark secrets waiting to be uncovered but can Sal break the conspiracy of silence that surrounds this case?
As she spends her days tracing Jennifer, Sal’s nights become shattered by an emotional and often dangerous assignment on one of Manchester’s toughest housing estates. In this highly charged atmosphere of racial tension it is not surprising when tempers flare. These two cases collide when events, past and present, spiral out of control...

Paperback - Headline (1999)

First British Edition Headline (1998)

Dead Wrong
Sal Kilkenny, single mother and private eye, has two very frightened clients on her hands. One, divorcee Debbie Gosforth, is the victim of a deranged stalker; the other, teenager Luke Wallace, is afraid he might be a murderer. Both are likeable, vulnerable but frustratingly unreliable - Debbie through blind fear, Luke because he simply cannot remember the night when, off his head on a cocktail of Ecstacy and alcohol, he is alleged to have stabbed his best friend Ahktar Khan to death.
But as Sal sets about finding the identity of the stalker who's making Debbie's life a living hell, the city goes up in smoke. The IRA bomb the Arndale Centre and, against a backdrop of Euro 96 and Oasis, a summer of terror begins. And as she unearths disturbing new shreds of evidence about Ahktar's death, Sal finds herself and her family in a much more personal firing line…
'A fast, witty novel with a rip-roaring finale' Gwen Moffat, Shots
"Has her finger on the pulse of her city [and] that rare ability to write about love, motherhood and friendship without sentimentality. She paints a picture of Manchester that its inhabitants recognise only too well." Val McDermid, Manchester Evening News, 12.10.98
"Remarkable for its keen sense of actuality (on her way into Manchester to meet a client, Sal's appointment is blown away by the IRA bombing of the Arndale Centre), and warmed by its affection for family and friends. Compassionate, exciting, and down-to-earth. Infused also with that rare and precious ingredient: true feeling." Philip Oakes, Literary Review, December 1998