The Hanging Secrets

Forget sparkly vampires and well-muscled werewolves, this is a world where the Bella Swans disappear without a trace...

"In 1954 murder was abolished. A criminal, regardless of how minor or severe his misdemeanor, is to be imprisoned for life without parole. Torture is to be the mother of all peace"

Murder is unheard of. This kind of thing isn't supposed to happen - surely not like this...

It is a Britain in which the murder rate is kept at a tightly-controlled zero, a fact made known to almost all. But just when the brutal police force look set to celebrate another year without murder, devoted uncle Caleb Archer is found by his teenage nephews hung next two unidentified men.

Caleb's nephews, Christopher and Peter, want answers and justice for their beloved uncle. But who can they turn to? Unable to trust even the police, Christopher and Peter are forced to start a search for answers of their own, attempting to unravel their family's unsettling dark past for information - the family they realise they know almost nothing about.

Caleb, trapped between life and death, watches on as his nephews uncover old family friends willing to spill the beans on their parents' revolutionary past, his hidden life and dark family secrets that had until now gone unspoken. And that boating accident that killed their parents off when they were little? It might not have been so accidental after all.

As if Caleb's nephews' lives weren't difficult enough, his killer, disturbed and weary Aldous Morris - mysteriously only the second man to have ever been released from prison in recent British history! - is close behind on a similar quest to disinter the truth about their family's past. Blaming their parents for leaving him to rot in prison, he's willing to do whatever it takes to find out why...

The Hanging Secrets could be described as a cross between The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold and 1984 by George Orwell, although written more for a younger audience.