Book of Scars: Breen & Tozer 3 (Breen and Tozer)

1969.

Five years ago, teenager Alexandra Tozer was murdered on her family farm. Her sister Helen Tozer will never forget. Returning home after quitting the Met Police, she brings with her the recovering Detective Sergeant Cathal Breen, who slowly becomes possessed by the unsolved case.

He discovers the Tozers were never told the whole truth. Alexandra was tortured for twenty-four hours before she died. But when he tracks down the original investigating sergeant, the man goes missing. And so does Helen.

Suspicion falls on her. But Breen is on a trail that goes far beyond the death of a schoolgirl. For the two men connected to this case met in Kenya, during the Mau Mau uprising; and the history that Britain has turned its face from is now returning to haunt it.

So when another innocent woman is abducted, Breen knows he has just twenty-four hours to save her.

The third book in a powerful deconstruction of the sixties, A Book of Scars tears strips off the Drug Squad, the Kenya Emergency and the upheaval of society as we knew it - to lay bare forgotten crimes, and tell the history of the losers.

William Shaw was born in Newton Abbot, Devon, grew up in Nigeria and lived for sixteen years in Hackney. He is the author of the acclaimed Breen & Tozer crime series set in sixties London: A Song from Dead Lips, A House of Knives and A Book of Scars. For over twenty years he has written on popular culture and sub-culture for various publications including the Observer and the New York Times. He lives in Brighton.