A noir tale of love, suspense and guilty secrets
Compromised is the first story in a series of romance/crime/mystery novellas featuring Roz Benedict and Guy Attwood.
Guy formerly worked as a criminal lawyer in a town in Hertfordshire, England. He chucked in his job when his marriage broke down and his wife Liz left him for a very rich man, Desmond, taking their daughter and son with her. Guy moved to Lincoln and became a university lecturer. His daughter Andrea and son Boris are now aged respectively 26 and 24.
On a visit to his old home town to see Andrea and Boris, Guy meets Roz by chance. He recalls that he had a major crush on her years ago when he was a criminal solicitor and she was a uniformed police constable. By now Roz is a detective inspector, very much a career woman. They become involved and spend weekends together.
Over Guy’s and Roz’s growing intimacy, the recent murder of a Romanian girl hovers uncomfortably. Roz is on the team investigating the crime and finds that Guy, on the whole an easy-going person, is cagey and unforthcoming about his past in certain areas.
Guy and Roz struggle to maintain their relationship as the difficulties accumulate and facts emerge, overwhelming one of them in particular.
Compromised includes some police activity, but is not a hard police procedural novel. Compromised can be read alone, as can all the stories in the series.
Gill Mather
I was a practising solicitor for several decades and at various times worked in most of the basic areas covered by general practice in England (crime, family, employment, civil litigation, wills, probate and property). I ran a small solicitor’s practice from my home near Colchester until 2020. I’m a member of several writers’ groups in Essex and Suffolk, and also a member of Dedham Players. Some of my earlier novels were originally published under the pen name of Julie Langham.
My love of reading led to writing informally on and off during the 1990s and 2000s but I thought the ‘day job’ didn’t allow time for me to write more seriously. In about 2013 I made a firm decision to find the time and started work on a romantic/crime novel set in a solicitors’ practice, ‘Internment’. This turned into 5 novels in the same series, Colchester Law World charting the lives of different characters over about 10 years… READ MORE
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