Pain of Death

A woman is discovered beneath the London streets, barely alive. Soon after, DC Josie Chancellor finds an abandoned, newborn baby close to Leadengate station. DI Will Wagstaffe puts woman and baby together. The woman is Kerry Degg, a burlesque singer, as well as a rotten wife and mother. Kerry has bad friends, a dodgy husband and no idea about what it takes to build a family. As Kerry clings to life, Staffe hears only discord: from a well- connected West London gangster and a forgotten politician; from a maligned sister and an unborn population to whom someone, somewhere, is determined to give voice. Staffe ventures from Whitehall's clubland to Soho's fleshpots trying to make his way through a labyrinth of trails that leads above and below ground to another woman, seemingly forced - like Kerry Degg - to bear her child in captivity. In Pain of Death, DI Will Wagstaffe discovers that the simplest thing in all the world - to bear a child - lies beneath the actions of the powerful and the desperate. And will he manage to rescue both mother and child in time?

Adam Creed was born in Salford and read PPE at Balliol College Oxford. He abandoned a career in the City to study writing at Sheffield Hallam University, following which he wrote in Andalucia then returned to England to work with writers in prison. He is now Head of Writing at Liverpool John Moores University and Project Leader of Free to Write. Death in the Sun is the fourth novel in the D. I. Staffe series, which also includes Suffer the Children, Willing Flesh and Pain of Death.