Today’s
post is again duplicated on both poetry blogs.
Some
readers who also enjoy my fiction blog have been in touch to ask for more
details about my novel Catching up with
Murder published by Raider International last year. So I am publishing a
synopsis (+ poem) here today.
I
cannot publish it as an e-book until next year (due to publishing contract) and
may well serialise it on the blog eventually. Meanwhile, interested readers who
may be interested can buy the novel from
http://amazon.com & http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ (overseas)
while UK readers can purchase from http://www.amazon.co.uk;
all readers can access at the publishers’ own site: http://raiderpublishing.com/Home_Page.html
CATCHING
UP WITH MURDER: a novel in
three acts
(approx. 100,000 words)
By
Roger N. Taber
SYNOPSIS:
The
novel divides itself naturally into three acts. Act One commences with a young woman,
JULIE SIMPSON, asking retired Chief Inspector FRED WINTER to investigate the
death of an aunt, RUTH TEMPLE, found dead in her bath. Since a large amount of
alcohol was found in Ruth’s body, the coroner records a verdict of accidental
death. Julie thinks otherwise but cannot
convince Winter at first...
Once
Winter is on the case, he not only embarks on various avenues of enquiry
regarding Ruth Temple but is also reunited with an old flame CAROL BRADY whose
husband had been murdered some years ago and whose son LIAM has been killed in
a car accident although no body recovered and assumed washed out to sea. One
potential lead after another leads to the same dead end, a village on the south
coast called Monks Tallow. Moreover, Winter starts to suspect that Liam Brady
is not only alive but inextricably linked to a series of tragic ‘coincidences’
there.
Act
Two now
takes the reader back twenty years to the early 1980s. A young man, RALPH
COTTER, shoots his friend, SEAN BRADY, at Brady's home, witnessed by Brady's
young son, LIAM. Cotter, a married,
closet homosexual, is terrified that Brady will expose him. Cotter runs to his
lover, Darren “Daz” HORTON for help. They head for a cottage belonging to
Horton’s aunt. (The aunt is visiting her daughter in New Zealand so the cottage
is empty). En route, they stop to give a lift to a woman, SARAH MANNERS, whose
car has broken down in a storm. Shortly afterwards, the car skids and smashes
into a tree, killing Sarah. The two men
bury the body and Cotter evades capture by taking her identity. Darren’s aunt dies and he inherits the
cottage. He and Cotter live there, happily enough, as man and ‘wife’ in an
obscure English village called...Monks Tallow.
In
due course, the past catches up with Cotter and Horton, driving them to commit
three more murders.
Act
Three
follows Fred Winter to Monks Tallow where he slowly pieces together this jigsaw
of audacious masquerade and murder while inadvertently putting himself and
loved ones in mortal danger...
Copyright R. N.
Taber 2007
Meanwhile...
Here’s
a poem about dark secrets if not the necessarily as dark as those that Horton
and Cotter hug to themselves for so long. For me, as regular readers well know,
one of my darkest secrets was once my sexuality. I had acknowledged to myself
that I am gay by the time I was 14 years-old.
In
those days, same sex relationships were a criminal offence here in the UK.
Throughout my teenage years, I told neither family nor friends. I wasn’t
ashamed, just scared. Even as a young adult, it would still be some years before
I’d find the self-confidence to come out once and for all. It had been drummed
into me during my vulnerable formative years that being gay was something dirty
if not perverted.
Within
my family I only ever discussed my sexuality with my mother just a few years
before she died of cancer in 1976; she warned me against telling my father or
brother. It took a severe nervous breakdown in my early 30s before I came out
of that dark, lonely closet once and for all.
This poem is a villanelle.
DARK
SECRETS
Dark
secrets of the heart,
like
claws of a trapped bear
ready to
tear us apart
Under
threat at the start,
nature’s
soul stripped bare;
dark
secrets of the heart
See
truth’s unerring dart
sent
flying through the air
ready to
tear us apart
No sweet
a fruit or tart
than
words we cannot share;
dark
secrets of the heart
Tools of
a far subtler art
than
Medusa’s stony glare,
ready to
tear us apart
Endgame,
a poison dart
(any
time, anywhere);
dark
secrets of the heart
ready to
tear us apart
Copyright
R. N. Taber 2008
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