He is a driven, compassionate, workaholic, with an unfortunate temper that he struggles to control and a tendency to respond to situations with his fists, something that almost resulted in him going to prison when he was in his teens. He loves the sea, sails when he has the time and is generally very sporty. He plays the piano, loves music and sport. He lives alone in a modern apartment block in Stranmillis, near the university area of Belfast.
His parents, his extrovert mother Mirella (an Italian pianist) and his quiet father Tom (an ex-university lecturer in Physics) live in Holywood town, six miles away. His rebellious sister, Lucia, his junior by ten years, works as the manager of a local charity and also lives in Belfast.
Craig is now a Superintendent heading up Belfast’s Murder Squad, based in the thirteen storey Co-ordinated Crime Unit (C.C.U.) in Pilot Street, in the Sailortown area of Belfast’s Docklands. He loves the sea, sails when he has the time and is generally very sporty. He plays the piano, loves music by Snow Patrol and follows Manchester United and the Northern Ireland football team, and the Ulster Rugby team.
D.C.I. Liam Cullen: Craig’s Detective Chief Inspector. Liam is a fifty-year-old former RUC officer from Crossgar in Northern Ireland, who transferred into the PSNI in two-thousand and one following the Patton Reforms. He has lived and worked in Northern Ireland all his life and has spent thirty years in the police force, twenty of them policing Belfast, including during The Troubles.
He is married to the forty-year-old, long suffering Danielle (Danni), a part-time nursery nurse, and they have a four-year-old daughter Erin and a two-year-old son called Rory. Liam is unsophisticated, indiscreet and hopelessly non-PC, but he’s a hard worker with a great knowledge of the streets and has a sense of humour that makes everyone, even the Chief Constable, laugh.
D.I. Annette McElroy (née Eakin): Annette is Craig’s Detective Inspector who has lived and worked in Northern Ireland all her life. She is a forty-seven-year-old ex-nurse who, after her nursing degree, worked as a nurse for thirteen years and then, after a career break, retrained and has now been in the police for an equal length of time. She’s in the process of divorcing her husband Pete, a P.E teacher at a state secondary school, because of his infidelity and violence. They have two children, a boy and a girl (Jordan and Amy), both teenagers. Annette is kind and conscientious with an especially good eye for detail. She also has very good people skills but can be a bit of a goody-two-shoes. Since her marriage broke down, she has acquired a newly glamorous image and is now dating Mike Augustus, a pathologist who works with Dr John Winter.
Nicky Morris: Nicky Morris is Craig’s thirty-nine-year-old personal assistant. She used to be PA to Detective Chief Superintendent (D.C.S.) Terry ‘Teflon’ Harrison. Nicky is a glamorous Belfast mum, married to Gary, who owns a small garage, and the mother of a teenage son, Jonny. She comes from a solidly working class area in East Belfast, just ten minutes’ drive from Docklands.
She is bossy, motherly and street-wise and manages to organise a reluctantly-organised Craig very effectively. She has a very eclectic sense of style, and there is an ongoing innocent office flirtation between her and Liam.
Davy Walsh: The Murder Squad’s twenty-eight-year-old computer analyst. A brilliant but shy EMO, Davy’s confidence has grown during his time on the team, making his lifelong stutter on ‘s’ and ‘w’ diminish, unless he’s under stress.
His father is deceased and Davy lives at home in Belfast with his mother and grandmother. He has an older sister, Emmie, who studied English at university. His girlfriend of almost three years, Maggie Clarke, is a journalist and now News Editor at The Belfast Chronicle. They recently became engaged.
Dr John Winter: John is the forty-five-year-old Director of Pathology for Northern Ireland, one of the youngest ever appointed. He’s brilliant, eccentric, gentlemanly, and really likes the ladies, but he met his match in Natalie Winter, a surgeon at St Mary’s Trust, and has now been happily married for over a year.
He was Craig’s best friend at school and university and remained in Northern Ireland to build his medical career when Craig left. He is now internationally respected in his field. John persuaded Craig that the newly peaceful Northern Ireland was a good place to return to and assists Craig’s team with cases whenever he can. He is obsessed with crime in general and US police shows in particular.
D.C.I. Andrew (Andy) Angel: A relatively new addition to Craig’s team and its second D.C.I., Angel is a slight, forty-year-old, twice divorced, perpetually broke father of a five-year-old son, Bowie. A chocoholic with a tendency towards lethargy, he surprises the team at times with his abilities. His spare time is spent in the constant search for a new relationship and romantic subtlety isn’t his strong point.
D.C.S. Terry (Teflon) Harrison: Craig’s old boss. The fifty-seven-year-old Detective Chief Superintendent was based at the Headquarters building in Limavady in the northwest Irish countryside but has now returned to Docklands where he has an office on the thirteenth floor. He shared a converted farm house at Toomebridge with his homemaker wife Mandy and their thirty-year-old daughter Sian, a marketing consultant. Mandy is now divorcing him, partly because of his trail of mistresses, often younger than his daughter.
Harrison is tolerable as a boss as long as everything’s going well, but he is acutely politically aware and a bit of a snob, and very quick to pass on any blame to his subordinates (hence the Teflon nickname). He sees Craig as a rival now and is out to destroy him. He particularly resents his friendship with John Winter, who wields a great deal of power in Northern Ireland.
Key Background Locations
The majority of locations referenced in the book are real, with some exceptions.
Northern Ireland (real): Set in the northeast of the island of Ireland, Northern Ireland was created in nineteen-twenty-one by an act of British parliament. It forms part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and shares a border to the south and west with the Republic of Ireland. The Northern Ireland Assembly holds responsibility for a range of devolved policy matters. It was established by the Northern Ireland Act 1998 as part of the Good Friday Agreement.
Belfast (real): Belfast is the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland, set on the flood plain of the River Lagan. The seventeenth largest city in the United Kingdom and the second largest in Ireland, it is the seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly.
The Dockland’s Co-ordinated Crime Unit (The C.C.U. - fictitious): The modern thirteen storey headquarters building is situated in Pilot Street in Sailortown, a section of Belfast between the M1 and M2 undergoing massive investment and re-development. The C.C.U. hosts the police: murder, gang crimes, vice and drug squad offices, amongst others.
Sailortown (real): An historic area of Belfast on the River Lagan that was a thriving area between the sixteenth and twentieth Centuries. Many large businesses developed in the area, ships docked for loading and unloading and their crews from far flung places such as China and Russia mixed with a local Belfast population of ship’s captains, chandlers, seamen and their families.
Sailortown was a lively area where churches and bars fought for the souls and attendance of the residents and where many languages were spoken each day. The basement of the Rotterdam Bar, at the bottom of Clarendon Dock, acted as the overnight lock-up to prisoners being deported to the Antipodes on boats the next morning, and the stocks which held the prisoners could still be seen until the nineteen-nineties.
During the years of World War Two the area was the most bombed area of the UK outside Central London, as the Germans tried to destroy Belfast’s ship building capacity. Sadly the area fell into disrepair in the nineteen-seventies and eighties when the motorway extension led to compulsory purchases of many homes and businesses, and decimated the Sailortown community. The rebuilding of the community has now begun, with new families moving into starter homes and professionals into expensive dockside flats.
The Pathology Labs (fictitious): The labs, set on Belfast’s Sain
tfield Road as part of a large Science Park, are where Dr John Winter, Northern Ireland’s Head of Pathology, and his co-worker, Dr Des Marsham, Head of Forensic Science, carry out the post-mortem and forensic examinations that help Craig’s team solve their cases.
St Mary’s Healthcare Trust (fictitious): St Mary’s is one of the largest hospital trusts in the UK. It is spread over several hospital sites across Belfast, including the main Royal St Mary’s Hospital site and the Maternity, Paediatric and Endocrine (M.P.E.) unit, a stand- alone site on Belfast’s Lisburn Road, in the University sector of the city.
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