Saturday's child - Ray Banks

It's criminal up north ...Cal Innes is fresh out of Strangeways, playing PI and running from a past muddied with ties to local gang lord 'Uncle' Morris Tiernan. When Tiernan tells him to track down a rogue casino dealer who's absconded with a hefty chunk of cash, Innes is thrust into a cat-and-mouse game with Tiernan's psychotic son. Finding the thief proves potentially fatal as the case points north to Newcastle and the sordid truth threatens to put blood on his hands. With Tiernan's son on his tail, and a Manchester cop determined to put Innes back on the spurs, "Saturday's child" definitely has to work hard to keep living.

Ray Banks was born in Kirkcaldy and now lives by the sea in Newcastle-upon-Tyne with his wife, Anastasia. He went to school. He went to university for two years before he dropped out. After that, he spent his time as a double-glazing salesman, croupier (he left after the casino was ramraided by armed gunmen) and dole monkey. He think he's a cult. He's almost right. Check his website: www.thesaturdayboy.com.

'Audacious and volatile . . . The shabby Manchester /Newcastle world of drugs, booze, and violence is wonderfully described in a vibrant, often hilarious slang'
Boston Globe

'Ray Banks steps up into the majors. This is already the best UK novel of the year and I'd love to read what tops it'
Ken Bruen

'British noir in all its sordid splendour by a writer who has taken more than just an excursion on the dark side'
The Guardian

'Saturday's Child is a knockout, written with the kind of energy and passion that far too few writers can muster. Fresh and fierce, it raises the bar for hardboiled fiction on both sides of the Atlantic'
Laura Lippman, author of the"New York Times bestseller "What the Dead Know"