About the Book

Death in Dartmouth is set in the small Devon town of Dartmouth in the UK and the surrounding area; the year is 2016.  Ryan Scott is an ex commercial diver who had suffered an injury while working under saturation conditions in the North Sea.  Because of this incident Scott was unable to continue diving offshore because of some niggling, ongoing, medical issues; therefore, he found himself in his mid-thirties out of a job with no prospects or ideas of which direction to take.  After taking several wrong turns he chances upon being a Private Investigator; having grown up in and around Dartmouth he finds he can call upon a great number of friends and acquaintances who seem more than happy to help him with his investigations.

At the beginning of ‘Death in Dartmouth’ Scott finds himself unknowingly caught between two feuding criminal families from London; the Gambols and Downeys.

Ray Downey, the boss of the Downey family in the mid-eighties, had been caught red-handed carrying out an armed robbery of a bank.  It had been generally accepted that Ray had been set-up by Randolph Gambol as very shortly after Downey was arrested Gambol managed to take over a large part of Downey’s patch; this set the Gambols on a path to replace the Downey’s as the dominant crime family in East London.

In 2016 finding himself banished by his Father following the latest in a long line of mistakes in London, Neil Downey the youngest of the family is looking to find a way to bring himself back into his domineering father’s good books.  He comes up with a fiendish plan to frame their old foe the Gambol family in a botched drugs shipment.

Neil gathers his crew consisting of Chris Bond, his long-standing henchman and their respective girlfriends Collette Stone and Nina Trent.  Together the four of them travel from London setting themselves up near Dartmouth where they finalise and instigate his plan.  The plan outlined by Downey is simple but unfortunately does not go smoothly.

As a result of this, on a brightly moonlit June night a young woman is bludgeoned to death on one of the pontoons in the local yachting marina.  The initial discovery of her body is made by a young lad, Sean Spall, who works with his Father in the chandlers and dive shop at the marina.  On the morning of the body’s discovery Scott finds himself at the marina, where he attempts resuscitation though ultimately this proves unsuccessful.

Scott finds himself teaming up with local police; DI Hoyle and DS Hack.  These officers already know of Scott and recognise the value of working with him, allowing them to make use of his extensive local network of contacts.

Although initially the circumstances of her death are of course unknown to Scott, he finds one of his contacts leads him to identify possible perpetrators and to begin to piece together the events that lead to her murder.

Over the coming days Scott and the police follow various leads; each one sending them down different paths leading in diverse directions.  With fingerprints and DNA seemingly to be pointing the finger only to have this undermined. They have to look elsewhere.  There follows many twists and turns until eventually the true perpetrators are identified and brought to justice.