Christopher Hatherall
When 19-year-old Adam agrees to do a day’s driving for his mum’s gangster boyfriend Peter, it takes him on a 24-hour journey into a nightmarish world of murder, sex trafficking and revenge, in the company of aging hit man Roy.
Tony is a notorious gangster with a big problem. He has woken up in an abandoned farmhouse, with blood on his shirt, and no memory of how he got there. He stumbles into a small town and discovers he’s in an Italian village that seems to be lost in time.
Yorkshire, 1978. A mother, father and their three year old son are brutally stabbed to death while they sleep. There is no motive. They were a model family. The nation is outraged by the senseless killings. Incredibly, the British public are overwhelmingly in favour of bringing back the death penalty to see justice carried out. Even more incredibly the killer, who is caught red-handed trying to drag the father’s body out of the house, manages to hide the three year old’s body in a place where the investigators, the police and even their dog teams would never find it. For months all the nation can talk about is the “Kid Killer” but, and this is the most incredible fact of all, not because he cold-bloodedly stabbed to death a three year old, his mother and his father, but because these innocent victims were also his family. The “Kid Killer” was their twelve year old son William.
Ten strangers, drawn away from their normal lives to an isolated rock off the Devon coast. But as the mismatched group waits for the arrival of the hosts — the improbably named Mr. and Mrs. U.N. Owen — the weather sours and they find themselves cut off from civilization. Very soon, the guests, each struggling with their conscience, will start to die — one by one, according to the rules of the nursery rhyme ‘Ten Little Soldier Boys’ — a rhyme that hangs in every room of the house and ends with the most terrifying words of all: ‘… and then there were none.