The Bug House
3 total works
Nobody likes a loan shark and the list of people who wanted Ged Salkeld dead would fill the Newcastle phone book. But who would go to the extreme of torching his house while his wife and kids were sleeping upstairs? This is the question facing DCI Theo Vos and his team of detectives from the Bug House as they search through the charred wreckage for clues to the identity of a cold-blooded multiple murderer.
Newcastle, it seems, is a city up to its eyes in debt and, for once, there is not shortage of suspects. But are the dead as innocent as they seem?
DCI Theo Vos does not regard himself as a typical middle-aged cop. He doesn't have a drink problem, he's not depressed and he really hates jazz. So he's divorced - but that's because his wife ran off to Florida with a dentist, leaving him to bring up their teenage son.
In any case, who has time for domestic problems when your job is presiding over the Bug House? Like all close-knit families, Vos's team has it's fair share of dysfunction, dark secrets and competing egos - except when they are working on a case.
And when a dead drug dealer seemingly falls from a clear blue sky into a premier footballer's back garden, the team are faced with their most baffling case yet.
Two men have been found beaten to death in a Newcastle park. One is a mild-mannered librarian, the other a member of a gang of armed robbers from the 1970s. It's no mystery who killed them. But Walter Oyston - ex-boxer turned violent wino - is also dead, his heart having given out before his liver.
Is it a simple case of mistaken identity? Or have the ghosts of Newcastle's criminal underworld returned to seek vengeance on one of their own?
Following hot on the heels of their last investigation comes another baffling case for DCI Theo Voss and his team from the Bug House.