If you are looking for a new crime series with a nicely complicated investigator then this is for you. Philip Dryden is an investigative journalist, this is his second case. His first, The Water Clock won the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Dagger for Best First Crime Novel, this is better. Dryden’s wife is semi-conscious in hospital and as Dryden sits by her bedside he hears a death-bed confession that reopens a curious case of a plane crash years before and gives us the title of the book. The now dying woman once walked out of a burning wreck with a baby in her arms.
Summer, 1976. A plane crashes on a farm in the Cambridgeshire fens. Out of the flames walks young Maggie Beck, clutching a baby in her arms. Twenty-seven years later, investigative journalist Philip Dryden - visiting his wife, Laura, in hospital - is witness to Maggie's deathbed confession. But some secrets are best kept secret, and what started out for Dryden as a small and curious story about the only survivor of an almost-forgotten plane crash soon escalates into a full-blown murder investigation. And while Dryden is wondering what other secrets Maggie carried, his semi-conscious wife is trying to tell him something that might just save his life...
Jim Kelly is a journalist and education correspondent for the Financial Times. He lives in Ely with the biographer Midge Gilles and their young daughter. The Water Clock, his first novel, was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey Award for best first crime novel of 2002. His second, The Fire Baby, publishes in February 2004 and also features Philip Dryden.
