Darkhouse

Darkhouse
Alex Barclay

EVERYTHING YOU NEVER EXPECTED. Escaping New York for the beautiful Irish Isle seemed the best way to escape the past for NYPD detective Joe Lucchesi and his family. But following the death of a girl in the local village, Joe soon finds out that the killer is closer to his past than he would care to remember.From a broken childhood comes an unbreakable and deadly bond.In New York, when a routine investigation comes to a violent and tragic end, Detective Joe Lucchesi takes leave from the NYPD and moves with his wife and son to a quiet village on the south-east coast of Ireland. But their lives are torn apart when a young girl goes missing and the village closes ranks.Desperate to protect his family, Joe sets out to find the truth and uncovers a trail that leads back across the Atlantic to a Texan backwater, where decades earlier, a chilling pact bound two teenage boys forever in a dark and twisted loyalty.

ALEX BARCLAY

Darkhouse

Copyright (#ud45d8102-cbca-5e52-9590-4e0c940d7568)

This is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006

Copyright © Alex Barclay 2005

James Baldwin quote with the kind permission of

Gloria Smart for the Estate of James Baldwin

Cover design layout © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)

Alex Barclay asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008180874

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2010 ISBN: 9780007346875

Version 2016-05-17

Praise for Alex Barclay (#ud45d8102-cbca-5e52-9590-4e0c940d7568)

‘The rising star of the hard-boiled crime fiction world, combining wild characters, surprising plots and massive backdrops with a touch of dry humour’ Mirror

‘Tense, no-punches-pulled thriller that will have you on the edge of your deckchair’ Woman and Home

‘Explosive’ Company

‘Darkhouse is a terrific debut by an exciting new writer’ Independent on Sunday

‘Compelling’ Glamour

‘Excellent summer reading … Barclay has the confidence to move her story along slowly, and deftly explores the relationships between her characters’ Sunday Telegraph

‘The thriller of the summer’ Irish Independent

‘If you haven’t discovered Alex Barclay, it’s time to jump on the bandwagon’ Image Magazine

Dedication (#ud45d8102-cbca-5e52-9590-4e0c940d7568)

To Brian, my hero

And to my parents

‘The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.’

James Arthur Baldwin

Table of Contents

Cover (#u53131230-ae39-59ae-ad7f-80a7f09ae343)

Title Page (#u9d64dc15-a386-5699-ae71-17cee626101e)

Copyright (#u2e3ce42b-6cb9-5de2-ac22-1f68c9b1eb6d)

Praise for Alex Barclay (#ue74cd653-9d51-5ac3-9fa3-289e3b1b7d6a)

Dedication (#u3faa13b8-7af3-560e-a47d-42edf66f2294)

Epigraph (#u51860cf9-eb4c-58af-85a5-8eea48d0f544)

Prologue (#uc0a2638e-25d2-5a9d-8cd0-e73663d80b4e)

Chapter One (#uc9115a9f-c378-57c0-94cf-6d9064169660)

Chapter Two (#uccca5f7d-7251-53f5-aba4-241472937f98)

Chapter Three (#u9631fe6a-37b0-503f-be78-1cf21cdd06c5)

Chapter Four (#ua638f807-d7d7-58d8-a5eb-fa765a950abd)

Chapter Five (#u569983f1-b8ef-50f1-8ced-820850698877)

Chapter Six (#u46601a4f-a57e-50bc-b6e5-23959cefe457)