Byrne and Walsh: Book One
Red Dress
The first Byrne and Walsh mystery: an atmospheric Liverpool thriller where every clue brings the past closer. A novel by Trevor Davies.
Some cases do not go cold. They wait.
A fourteen-year-old girl is found at the dead end of a Liverpool flyover. Barefoot. Her hands carefully folded. Dressed in red. DI Jack Byrne has seen that detail before — in a file that went quiet years ago, and should not have.
The papers christen the killer the Mersey Murderer. Byrne doesn't believe in phantoms. With DS Emma Walsh — Toxteth-born, sharp-eyed, twice as prepared as anyone in the room — he starts pulling at threads the city would rather leave alone: streets that have learned not to talk, cases closed too conveniently, an informant who is always at the edge of everything.
Every clue brings the past closer, and the trail leads somewhere no detective wants to follow — through the docks, through the gangs, and into the station itself. Byrne made a promise: this girl will not become another unnamed file. Keeping it may cost him everything he has left.
Ebook and paperback
Byrne keeps his father's harmonica, carried down into the ships' holds and played on Sundays by the Stanley locks. Tin Sandwich is the novel about how an instrument like that gets from a German factory bench into a docker's pocket.