Dan Starkey

Dan Starkey is a young journalist in Belfast, who shares with his wife, Patricia, a prodigious appetite for drinking and dancing. Then Dan meets a beautiful and apparently impoverished student. And then, terrifyingly, she is murdered. Is it because she was not exactly who she claimed to be? Is it the IRA? A Protestant extremist group? A jealous lover? Before long, Dan is a target himself…

The title, the terrorist and the punch-drunk pugilist…Fat Boy McMaster is a hopeless heavyweight boxer, who has somehow managed to become the champion of Ireland. His devious manager has set up a St Patrick's Day fight in New York against Mike Tyson, and he wants journalist Dan Starkey to write about it. Once in New York, however, McMaster's wife is kidnapped, the Champ is chased all over town by gunmen, and there's the Big Fight to consider too...

Dan Starkey arrives on Wrathlin Island to investigate the residents' belief that the Messiah is alive, female, and about to start school there: it's not a commission that turns up every day. He finds a mess of religious intolerance and illicit drinking in a tiny community that is big on religious fervour but small on hospitality. Apart from the Messiah's mum of course, who's clung to her sanity. And her lager.

Radio shock-jock Jack Caramac is used to controversy - but when his four-year-old son is kidnapped, he knows he may have gone too far. Jack has no choice but to turn to Dan Starkey for help. Dan has finally given up on journalism, and resolves to catch whoever kidnapped Jack's son. Instead, he finds himself in the middle of a violent feud between rival drug gangs, as the case spirals ever more out of his control...Dan Starkey, the ducking and diving hapless investigator, takes centre stage again in this brilliant new novel by the master of comic crime.

A media billionaire's daughter disappears following a massacre at a Belfast student party and nobody knows if she has been kidnapped or caught in the crossfire. A controversial new abortion clinic is firebombed, and a fire-and-brimstone church movement is blamed. Hired to both find the missing daughter, and prove the church's guilt, Dan Starkey suddenly finds himself struggling to cope with two very different investigations... or could they possibly be connected?

Hired to find the missing son of retired political activist Moira Doherty, Dan Starkey knows his new case is going to be challenging. Billy 'the Bear' Doherty, a criminal with a nasty drug habit, isn't an easy man to find - his mum is convinced he's been murdered. But when Moira herself is killed, Dan finds himself in the middle of a deadly game of cat and mouse.