A cold case heats up as a British police detective investigates the murder of a union activist—while MI5 puts the pressure on . . .
DCI Alex Fleming has returned to work after convalescent leave to find that the Assistant Chief Constable wants him to review an old cold case. William Stroud, a union activist, was shot dead five years ago after a strike at the Atomic Weapons Establishment organised by union leader Bill Kauffman. No one had ever been arrested for the crime.
When Fleming later finds out that MI5 have an interest in the case and in what’s going on at the AWE, he realises how deep he’s going to have to dig. After speaking to the officer who originally investigated the case, he learns that another activist was the main suspect. But as the body count rises and Fleming uncovers an extramarital affair, he suspects the answers may lie in a very different place . . .
Robert McNeil grew up in Hawick in the Scottish Borders. He worked briefly for Pringle of Scotland before joining the Royal Air Force, serving at home and in the Persian Gulf. He subsequently had brief spells working for a local authority and as a sales representative before embarking on a thirty-three-year career with the Home Office. The last sixteen years were spent in the Home Office headquarters Commercial Directorate in Westminster where he advised on procurement and the commercial aspects of business cases for multi-million-pound contracts. Robert had a lifelong ambition to write a novel and finally achieved this when he retired from the Home Office where he developed the idea for his debut book, The Janus File, a political, spy thriller available on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. He loves a good crime, whodunit novel and hopes that his debut crime novel, The Fifth Suspect, will be the first of many. When not writing, Robert spends his time gardening, reading, and playing golf. He is married and now lives in Shropshire.