Book of the Week - Stuart Neville, The Twelve

Stuart Neville is a Northern Ireland based crime writer, and The Twelve is his first novel. He has been a musician, a composer, a teacher, a salesman, a film extra, a baker and a hand double for a well known Irish comedian, but is currently a partner in a successful multimedia design business in the wilds of Northern Ireland. He has previously published short stories in Thuglit, Electric Spec and Every Day Fiction. The Twelve has a number of very positive advance reviews and will be published in the UK and Commonwealth by Harvill Secker on July 2nd. It will also be published in the USA (as THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST by Soho Press, New York,) and by Random House Kodansha in Japan. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, although I hope to pick a copy up later this week. Looks very promising, so highly recommended.

PS - there may be a hardcover limited edition of only 50 copies - contact No Alibis bookshop in Belfast for further information.

"Former paramilitary killer Gerry Fegan is haunted by his victims, twelve souls who shadow his every waking day and scream through every drunken night. Just as he reaches the edge of sanity they reveal their desire: vengeance on those who engineered their deaths. From the greedy politicians to the corrupt security forces, the street thugs to the complacent bystanders who let it happen, all must pay the price. When Fegan's vendetta threatens to derail Northern Ireland's peace process and destabilise its fledgling government, old comrades and enemies alike want him gone. David Campbell, a double agent lost between the forces of law and terror, takes the job. But he has his own reasons for eliminating Fegan; the secrets of a dirty war should stay buried, even if its ghosts do not. Set against the backdrop of a post-conflict Northern Ireland struggling with its past, THE TWELVE takes the reader from the back streets of the city, where violence and politics go hand-in-hand, to the country's darkest heart. Often brutal, sometimes tender, the journey will see one man find his humanity while the other loses his."