Blackthorn's First Case: The murderer who paid for his victims - Softcover

Braith, Manus

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798160373867

Publisher: Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

A missing young woman. A thousand pounds in cash. And a killer who insists he isn't stealing his victims — he's buying them.

At sixty, former Royal Military Police investigator William Blackthorn has traded military investigations for a quiet private detective agency in London. Perhaps a little too quiet. Business is slow, the modern world of digital surveillance doesn't particularly appeal to him, and his greatest professional challenge lately has been keeping up with his considerably more tech-savvy research associate, Niamh.

Then a worried mother walks into his office.

Her twenty-two-year-old daughter, Amy McLaughlin, has disappeared after sending one final, cryptic message:

Mum, I'm going down.

Then the first parcel arrives.

Inside is £1,000 and a message from someone calling himself Fafnir. He hasn't kidnapped Amy, he claims.

He has bought her.

What begins as a missing-person enquiry rapidly becomes a race against time as William is drawn into the hunt for a calculating predator whose obsession reaches from the streets of London to the quiet towns and lonely countryside of Suffolk. More women disappear. More parcels arrive. And behind them lies a carefully constructed game whose rules only the man calling himself Fafnir seems to understand.

Working alongside Niamh, Scotland Yard and an increasingly desperate team of investigators, William must rely on the old-fashioned instincts that have served him for decades — because somewhere among the false leads, hidden connections and seemingly unrelated clues is the one detail that can lead them to the missing women.

And time is running out.

Blackthorn's First Case: The Murderer Who Paid for His Victims is a British crime thriller combining a dark kidnapping mystery with dry humour, an old-school investigator, modern technology, and a touch of unexpected romance.

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798160373867
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 276