Declan Hughes: All The Things He Is

Get out the red carpet. Declan Hughes - award-winning playwright, creator of the brilliant Ed Loy private eye series and 2014’s International Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin - returns to the crime writing fray early next year with ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE (Severn House), a standalone thriller set in Madison, Wisconsin. To wit:

Danny Brogan burned his future wife’s family to death when he was eleven years old ...
  Knocking on forty, with her youthful dreams of being an actress in dust, there’s no doubt in her mind suburban wife and mother of two Clare Taylor has settled. A wild week in Chicago may have shaken things up a bit, but as she turns her key in her Madison, Wisconsin home on the eve of Halloween, she knows that what happened with her ex-boyfriend was nothing more than a distraction, that this is where her life is.
  Except it’s all gone. The furniture gone, the house stripped, her husband Danny, her daughters, all gone; no message, no note, nothing. Outside in the dark, searching for a sign, she steps in one: the eviscerated body of the family dog.
  By dawn the next morning, her (as far as she knew, mortgage-free) home has been foreclosed against, one of Danny’s childhood friends lies dead in her backyard, and Clare is caught up in a nightmare that began with her husband on Halloween night, 1976, and that reaches its terrifying climax thirty five years later.
  ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE explores the dark paradox at the heart of the American Dream: that you can change, and become whoever you decide to be – but that your past is always out there, waiting. No matter how far you run, you can’t escape it – but if things work out, and love abides, maybe you don’t need to. Maybe, at last, you can become who you always were, who you’d always dreamed you’d be.

  ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE will be published in February.