Trouble Man

It's Manchester, at the close of the millennium, and Henry Bane is now manager of an exclusive nightclub. He has a beautiful mistress, a teenage son, and is making moves in a violent underworld to which he is increasingly numbed.
     
When a young girl is found tortured and unwilling to go to the police, Bane offers to help, and finds horror in a feral community with a respectable veneer. But, by meddling, he ends up endangering those he wants to protect. Not only that, he also manages to incur the wrath of an ailing ganglord, and soon finds himself tangled in a penthouse robbery and an underground boxing match.

From the casual sexism of Bane's clubland, to the savage misogyny of a killer targeting the young and dispossessed, Trouble Man takes Bane through a hell, perhaps of his own making, where he is pushed to his limit – and the trouble only gets closer to home.

Tom Benn 'does for low-life Manchester what Trainspotting did for Leith' (Maggie Fergusson, Intelligent Life) and has created a teeming underworld of extraordinary criminals, victims and possible heroes – all with their own brilliantly rendered vernacular – and a noir backdrop of rain, city streets, sharp diagonals of light and very long shadows.

TOM BENN was born in 1987, and grew up in Stockport. He is a graduate of the UEA Creative Writing MA and was the recipient of the 2009 Malcolm Bradbury bursary. His first novel, The Doll Princess, was shortlisted for the 2012 Dylan Thomas Prize and the Portico Prize. Chamber Music was published in 2013.