Chloe: Never Forget
An off-duty detective gunned down. A dead woman. A student missing, feared dead. And now, a former policeman in search of his past. All these people, dead or alive, have one thing in common. D.I. Carl Sant must discover what it is.
A series of cold-case enquiries leads D.I. Sant and his colleagues to investigate a botched assassination plot dating back to the 1980s. The deeper they dig into the case, the more secrets are revealed, including shocking connections to the infamous National Front.
Meanwhile, the memory of former P.C. Tanner, survivor of the assassination horror, is beginning to recover. Sant must find Tanner, and find out who is behind it all - before his superiors lose their rag and more lives are lost.
Purchase Links:
US - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07PH2MXQR
UK - https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07PH2MXQR
Read an Excerpt
CHLOE: NEVER FORGET – Book 2 in my Carl Sant Murder Mysteries series – features a retired policeman suffering from amnesia. This is a crying shame because the memories locked away inside him need unlocking. Why? Because without these memories, solving the murder he once witnessed would prove impossible. The following extract from the book is our first encounter with Police Constable Frank Tanner, now going by a different name. He starts by expressing a personal responsibility to the past; to tragic events he decides to confront after sidestepping them for so long.
Your name is Nigel Fleming.
You are seventy years old. A fraction older. Age never lies.
Once upon a time you were known by a different name.
A name you no longer use. Or care to remember.
A name you can’t shake off – lashed to an incident you can’t shake off either. An incident you’ve spent half your life coping with.
But you can’t. So you revel in distraction.
You play golf. You’d like to play more often. The pain after eighteen holes is excruciating. So you stick to nine.
You don’t tell anyone about the pain. Or the cause of it.
You are married to a lovely person. Mrs Fleming. Her Christian name escapes you.
You have three children who are no longer children but working-adults-stroke-parents not bothered about old gits like you, thank you very much. You watch the telly. Your favourite pastime. You watch the football, the cricket, the dogs, the horses, the rugby, the golf and the weather.
But most of all, you watch the news. The local news, the national news, the world news.
Politics, business, crime.
The same news. Every day.
TICK TOCK TICK TOCK.
On the hour. Every hour.
You want to remember. You also want to forget.
TICK TOCK TICK TOCK.
You cannot get to sleep.
Tanner wants to remember. He also wants to forget. An ambiguous stance if ever there was one! The point is, though, that even if he really does want to remember, he is unable to. Or at least, he was unable to. I’m not throwing any unwanted spoilers out there by revealing a plot device I could hardly call my own: the one about the character who begins to recall things long forgotten, usually following some form of psychiatric intervention.
That’s the sublime beauty of the human mind. Its resilience should never be underestimated. Of course, PC Tanner is pure fiction. It’s all very well inventing someone whose memory returns, yet in reality such a feat of mental recovery is the exception, not the rule. But the fact that it can happen, albeit infrequently, provides all sorts of delightful possibilities, especially for the writer of suspense; the writer who wants to keep all doors open as long as possible, before finally and reluctantly closing them for the sake of a story, a tying up of loose ends, a wholly constructed yarn.
I do hope readers enjoy Frank Tanner. The way his restored memory-clock plays tricks on him, the way these tricks pull at other threads of the CHLOE narrative continuum from Book 1 through to Book 2. Tanner is deeply imperfect, but aren’t we all?
Dan Laughey is a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University where he teaches a course called ‘Youth, Crime and Culture’ among other things. He has written several books on the subject including Music and Youth Culture, based on his PhD in Sociology at Salford University. He also holds a BA in English from Manchester Metropolitan University and an MA in Communications Studies from the University of Leeds.
Dan was born in Otley and bred in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, a hop and a skip away from the Leeds setting of his Chloe novels.
His crime writing was purely academic to begin with. He’s written about media violence and tackled the age-old concern about television and video games influencing patterns of antisocial behaviour in society. After years of research and theoretical scrutiny, he still hasn’t cracked that particular nut.
He’s also written about the role of CCTV and surveillance in today’s Big Brother world, the sometimes fraught relationship between rap and juvenile crime, football hooliganism, and the sociocultural legacy of Britain’s most notorious serial killer – the Yorkshire Ripper.
All in all, Dan’s work has been translated into four languages: French, Hebrew, Korean and Turkish. He has presented guest lectures at international conferences and appeared on BBC Radio and ITV News in addition to providing expert commentary for The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph.
Social Media Links –
Twitter: @danlaughey
Facebook: fb.com/laughey
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