Patricia Hall - Page 1
First British Edition Allison & Busby (2004) |
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The Masks Of Darkness
Recently divorced, Jay Morton returns to her hometown of Pendle Bridge with her young daughter Kate. She quickly secures a job helping to set up a museum at the sinister-looking Pendle House, now derelict and overgrown. But her new life takes a disturbing turn when she suspects she is being stalked. Then, whilst searching for artefacts in the attics at Pendle House, Jay stumbles across some extraordinary original masks and is intrigued by their malevolent and threatening eyes...
Those very eyes haunt Donna in her nightmares. A once innocent girl at Pendle House when it was a children’s home, she remembers the menacing masks all too clearly. Following the death of her young friend, another child living at Pendle House, Donna disappeared and had not been seen or heard of since - until now.
Lurking below the surface of the seemingly pleasant town of Pendle Bridge, lies a sinister and disturbing secret that has remained hidden for the past two decades. But with history threatening to become appalling reality once again, the two women must combine their knowledge and race against time in order to prevent another tragedy.
The Masks of Darkness is an exciting and entangled crime mystery with a truly startling conclusion.
Praise for Patricia Hall
`Hall’s characters have the smack-in-the-face quality of real life, are well developed and, most importantly, co-exist with some very fine plotting indeed’ Crime Time
‘A Patricia Hall novel combines the best elements of mystery, detection and thriller in one novel ... Her storylines are complex, but not hard to follow. They entertain with good detection, people to care about and a heroine of great courage and intellect’ Deadly Pleasures
`Hall’s style is refreshingly clean and uncluttered, and her narrative achieves a powerful momentum as the layers of deception are stripped away. Her journalist protagonist is an intelligently realised character’ Times Literary Supplement
‘A modem Yorkshire setting for a modem upbeat crime story that ventures into thriller territory. Hall’s clean-cut style adds to the enjoyment’ Yorkshire Post
`Psychologically acute, with graphic description and characters who are often as chilling as the place. Absorbing stuff’ Kirkus Reviews
`Hall’s remarkable balancing of the professional and personal lives of her characters... proves as riveting as the mystery itself’ Publishers Weekly
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First British Edition Allison & Busby (2002) |
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Death in Dark Waters
The Carib Club is one of Bradfield’s most popular night-spots amongst the black community - but it’s in the heart of a Muslim district and the, local mosque are keen to get the club closed down. So when, after a night out clubbing, Jeremy Adams is knocked down by a taxi and left in a coma, the pressure on the Carib starts building.
Jeremy had taken Ecstasy tablets before the accident happened and his father, wealthy local businessman Grantley Adams, wants to know who supplied him with the pills. DCI Michael Thackeray is put on the case but when none of the boy’s friends seem willing to talk he finds himself getting nowhere fast.
Meanwhile Thackeray’s girlfriend, reporter Laura Ackroyd, is conducting her own investigation into Bradfield’s drugs problem. A young boy has died after falling from a tower block on the Wuthering Heights housing estate - the police are blaming the accident on a heroin overdose, but his friends swear that he was clean.
A gripping and thought-provoking mystery, Death in Dark Waters is the latest in Patricia Hall’s acclaimed Thackeray and Ackroyd series.
‘Patricia Hall weaves two distinct but related threads through this novel: the murder investigation and the changing relationship between Thackeray and Ackroyd ... it has tension and a strong detective plot to keep me turning the pages’ Sherlock Holmes Magazine
| Paperback - Allison & Busby (2002) |
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Deep Freeze
As one of the few local clinics to offer abortions, the May Anderson Hospital is used to controversy. But when a young girl is gunned down as she leaves, almost everyone is outraged. Only thirteen years old, Dana’s life has ended before it had really begun.
Reporter Laura Ackroyd and her policeman boyfriend, DCI Michael Thackeray, are both soon immersed in the case. Could the bullet have been intended for Dr Fenton-Green, the maverick surgeon who is deeply unpopular with the pro-life campaigners? A flamboyant American evangelist has just swung into town and tensions are certainly at fever pitch.
But things don’t add up. Ackroyd and Thackeray are convinced that there is more to the case than meets the eye. And with very different attitudes towards the subject of abortion, it is not long before the issues raised threaten to destroy their own relationship...
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First British Edition Allison & Busby (2000) |
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Skeleton at the Feast
Packed off to his old Oxford college on a course, with his career in limbo, Chief Inspector Michael Thackeray broods on an uncertain future and allows his former tutor to persuade him to investigate the disappearance of a senior don. Why has Dr. Mark Harrison abandoned his wife, his family and his students so abruptly? And why has no one heard from him or his girlfriend since the day they left St. Frideswide's? The college needs some answers urgently
Tormented by unhappy memories of his own time at the university, Thackeray finds himself adrift in an Oxford where nothing is as it seems. Are Harrison and his girlfriend alive or dead? How many horrors, so effortlessly covered up over the years, are coming back to haunt St. Frideswide's and its reluctant investigator? And what crimes link the privileged world of college cloisters to the drug dealers and squats outside the walls?
Back on home turf, his lover, reporter Laura Ackroyd, watches and waits - and asks her own questions - as the ripples caused by a young policewoman's death throw sergeant Kevin Mower into turmoil and an ambitious woman copper sets her sights on Thackeray's job.
The wrongs inflicted on the young by an older generation and on the present by the past provide a unifying theme to Patricia Hall's exploration of violence, deceit and greed in settings as far apart as an Oxford college and a high rise estate in Yorkshire.
'A Patricia Hall book combines the best elements of mystery detection and thriller in one novel ... They entertain with good detection, people to care about and a heroine of great courage and intellect.' Deadly Pleasures
'Hall's characters have the smack in the face quality of real life, are well developed and most importantly, co exist with some very fine plotting indeed.'Crime Time
'Psychologically acute, with graphic description, characters who are often as chilling as the place, and the tense, tortured love affair between Laura and Thackeray. Absorbing stuff.' Kirkus
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First British Edition Constable (1999) |
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Dead on Arrival
Patricia Hall's eighth crime novel to feature journalist Laura Ackroyd and her lover Chief Inspector Michael Thackeray deals with a very contemporary Britain. Hall addresses such emotive and topical issues as the transportation of illegal immigrants, police racism and the alienation of ethnic: minorities in this exciting new thriller.
On her own in London's Docklands, reporter Laura Ackroyd discovers that the surface glitz conceals a vicious underworld when she witnesses the murder of a young African. Outrage leads to terror as it becomes apparent that the police are scarcely interested In the murder and that someone else is very determined indeed to cover up what lies behind the teenager's brutal death.
Meanwhile in Bradfield, DCI Michael Thackeray's career is on the line when he finds it hard to concentrate on murder and abduction on his own patch while Laura is away. Desperation and greed are compounded by police incompetence and lead to a dark climax to this gripping new novel.
About The Author
Patricia Hall is the pseudonym of journalist Maureen O'Connor who was brought up in the area of West Yorkshire she uses as the background to her crime novels.
She is the daughter of a headmaster and was educated at Bradford Girls' Grammar School and Birmingham University, where she read English Literature and edited the student newspaper.
She moved into a career in journalism, on the staff of The Guardian, the London Evening Standard and the BBC and freelancing for a range of newspapers and magazines, radio and TV programmes, mainly as a writer on education. The Poison Pool, her first novel, was published in 1991.
She is married and has two grown-up sons and now lives in Oxford.
Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.
The Masks Of Darkness
(Allison & Busby,
2004)
Jul 04
Death in Dark Waters
(Allison & Busby,
2002)
(Laura Ackroyd & Thackeray)
Deep Freeze
(
2001)
Allison & Busby Sep 01
Allison & Busby Pbk Nov 02
Skeleton at the Feast
(Allison & Busby,
2000)
(Laura Ackroyd & Thackeray)
Dead on Arrival
(Constable,
1999)
The Italian Girl
(Constable,
1998)
(Laura Ackroyd & Thackeray)
Perils Of The Night
(Constable,
1997)
(Laura Ackroyd & Thackeray)
In the Bleak Midwinter
(Little,Brown,
1995)
Warner 1997, Published as The Dead of Winter, St. Martins (NY) 1997 (Laura Ackroyd & Thackeray)
Dying Fall
(Little,Brown,
1994)
Warner 1995, St. Martins (NY) 1995 (Laura Ackroyd & Thackeray)
Death by Election
(Little,Brown,
1993)
Warner 1995, St. Martins (NY) 1995
The Coldness of Killers
(Collins,
1992)
The Poison Pool
(Collins,
1991)
St. Martins (NY), 1993, Worldwide Mystery, 1996 (Editor's Choice, 1993 Drood Review on American publication)
The Masks Of Darkness
by Patricia Hall
