Nightmare, with Angel

Imagine this.

You've got a nine year old girl who lives alone with her father in a big old house by the sea. Every day she looks more like her mother, and her mother was a tramp. Because of this her father all but ignores her, the woman who keeps house in the daytime also keeps her distance, and the child has to face a solitary life with only a scavenged photograph for comfort and a wishful image of what it might be like to be loved again.

Her father isn't a hard man; but he's a mess, he's losing his grip, and he doesn't seem to see how he's losing his daughter as well. When he notices her, he's impossibly strict. But most of the time he's absorbed by his own bitterness, and he hardly notices her at all.

Her days are long, and as bleak and empty as the coastal landscape around the house where she roams. With her father seemingly lost to her, Marianne needs a father-figure to take his place; and on the day that she gets stranded by an incoming tide and has to be rescued by a stranger, she thinks that she's found one.

His name is Ryan. He lives in a rented shack by the railway line and makes a living however he can; odd jobs, casual work, fixing up abandonedappliances, cleaning out aluminum cans and bagging them for scrap.

He gets her to safety at some risk to himself. Then he takes her home and, without waiting for thanks, he walks away.

But it isn't going to be so easy.

"A novel about the fatal entanglement of innocence and evil, horror and salvation, Nightmare, with Angel is a triumph of psychological suspense at its most shockingly original."

"Gallagher's most powerful novel to date... a damn fine read" Booklist

"A moving, shocking, compelling drama with a mesmerizing plot... impossible to put down and, once read, impossible to forget" Mystery Scene

"A fast, smart, emotionally involving and authentically new thriller whcih confirms Stephen Gallagher's particular fictional talent" John Williams, The Independent