The Doll Princess

(Paperback)

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Description

The arrival of an assured and exhilarating new voice in literary crime fiction. It's Manchester, July 1996, the month after the IRA bomb, and the Evening News is carrying reports of two murders. On the front page is a glamorous Egyptian woman, a socialite and heiress to an oil fortune, whose partially clothed body has been found in a basement. In the back pages there is a fifty-word piece on the murder of a young prostitute found dumped on a roadside. For Henry Bane, fixer, loanshark and legman for one of Manchester's established ganglords, it's the second piece of news that hits hardest. Determined to find out what happened to his childhood sweetheart he searches his bombed city for answers, finding that these two stories belong on the same page, and that Bane's world belongs to others - those willing to profit from guns, human trafficking and a Manchester in decay.

Reviews

Tom Benn, Stockport born and bred, is that rare thing. A startlingly new, ridiculously stylish, home-grown voice. Despite more than a casual nod to a rain-sodden Hulme dialect, Benn's debut is so full of energy and sharp one-liners, it will travel far and wide -- Henry Sutton * Daily Mirror *
I've never wanted to listen to the soundtrack to a book so much. Another element that stands out in the madly bloody but sometimes brilliant book is how the characters speak. Accents are notoriously tricky on the page, but Benn captures the south Manchester patter impressively -- Rebecca Armstrong * Independent *
Tom Benn is set to be one of the distinctive crime writers of his generation. In Henry Bane he has created a sharp, sarcastic anti-hero with his own warped sense of honour and a narrative voice that is truly distinctive -- Adam Colclough * Shots *
A new name in the crime fiction section, is about to give us another hero of the genre -- Sarah Walters * Manchester Evening News *
A grisly thriller catches the feel and fear of Manchester on the slide -- Christopher Bray * World Magazine *

Author Bio

Tom Benn was born in 1987, and grew up in Stockport. He is a graduate of the UEA Creative Writing MA and was the recipient of the 2009 Malcolm Bradbury bursary.