Caught In The Crossfire

A debut crime thriller novel.
Hayden was just an ordinary guy living in south London until he ended up in prison, awaiting trial for triple murder. His victims? His mother and her parents, but Hayden, swears that he's innocent and that the person responsible is the shady, wealthy, and feared menace, Tony Lovell; his half-sister's father, and his mother's fiancé. Hayden doesn't have any idea how bad things had been for his mother before her death. He had never liked Lovell, but he'd thought his mother and his grandparents had worshipped the man. And they had at one point.

Stuck in prison, fearing he will be wrongfully convicted if his father Errol doesn't do whatever is necessary to avoid that, Hayden recounts his past to a psychiatrist. That past features a mostly absent father, racist abuse from his own relatives, and a highly dysfunctional family.

When Hayden's English mother got pregnant by Errol, a black man, at the age of sixteen, his racist grandparents had been mortified. Although they'd learned to live with it eventually and had loved Hayden in their own way, he'd never felt truly accepted by them. Lovell, on the other hand, with his English charm and wealth, had been welcomed into his family without caution.

Hayden believes that Lovell killed the three most important adults in his life and set him up to look like the perpetrator, but when Errol uncovers the truth, it's tragically shocking and proves that Hayden had been right not to trust Lovell. That offers no comfort to him and his much younger sister, who have lost their mother.

As the lives of many different people become connected, the person who links them all is Lovell.

Secrets, lies, and betrayals are revealed, and the depth of Lovell's narcissistic and sadist persona and the dysfunction of Hayden's family, will have you wondering if your seemingly ordinary neighbours are living extraordinary lives behind closed doors.