Fire and Brimstone

Peace time Belfast seems like the perfect spot for media billionaire's daughter Alison Wolff to study anonymously, but when she disappears following a massacre at a student party nobody knows if she has been kidnapped for ransom or caught in the crossfire.


Hired to find Alison, Dan Starkey discovers that Belfast's underworld has shifted rapidly since he was in his journalistic prime. Religion and politics have taken a back seat to drugs and greed, defended with a ruthlessness undreamt of even in the worst days of The Troubles. This is the street violence of Mexico with an Irish twist.

In response to the drug wars a new fire and brimstone church movement springs up, but when the controversial new abortion clinic is firebombed, they get the blame and Dan is hired to prove their guilt.


In a Belfast rapidly descending back into a city of violence, Dan suddenly finds himself struggling to cope with two very different investigations..... or could they possibly be connected?

Bateman was a journalist in Northern Ireland before becoming a full-time writer. His first novel, DIVORCING JACK, won the Betty Trask Prize, and all his novels have been critically acclaimed. He wrote the screenplays for the feature films DIVORCING JACK and WILD ABOUT HARRY and the popular TV series MURPHY`S LAW starring James Nesbitt. Bateman lives in Ireland with his family.