
Its Manchester July 1996 the month after the IRA bomb & the Evening News is carrying reports of two murders. On the front page theres a photograph of a glamorous Egyptian woman a socialite & heiress to an oil fortune whose partially clothed body has been found in the basement of a block of flats. It would appear that she has been the subject of a sexual attack. In the back pages of the same paper there is a fifty-word piece on the murder of a young prostitute whose body has been found dumped on a roadside near the Mc Vities Factory. For Bane
- fixer loanshark & legman for one of Manchesters established ganglords
- its the second piece of news that hits hardest. Determined to find out what happened to his childhood sweetheart he searches through the tribes & estates of his bombed city for answers. It soon becomes clear that the two newspaper stories belong on the same page & that Banes world belongs to others
- those willing to profit from gun arsenals human trafficking & a Manchester in decay. The Doll Princess" introduces the mesmeric narrator Henry Bane a conflicted man caught up in a mire of evil & his creator Tom Benn
- an assured & exhilarating new voice in literary crime fiction."