The story behind DI Andy Horton Mystery THE BOATHOUSE MURDERS

THE BOATHOUSE MURDERS, no. 11 in the Detective Inspector Andy Horton Solent Murder Mystery series (16),  sees the enigmatic Harley Davidson riding, sailing Portsmouth based detective embark on a new murder mystery.  THE BOATHOUSE MURDERS examines the corrosive nature of secrets and how keeping them can lead to danger and even death.

How far would you go to protect a secret? Would you risk your job for it, your friends your family? Would you kill for it?

This mystery plunges Andy Horton into a complex murder investigation in which he is forced to withhold vital information of his secret quest to discover the truth behind his mother's disappearance over thirty years ago when he was a child.

For Horton, his mother’s disappearance has always been a source of shame. For years he’d been told she’d run off with another man, that she hadn’t loved him enough to care for him. Raised in children’s homes and with foster parents Horton’s been consumed by despair, shame, hatred and anger at her desertion and left with a desperate need to belong yet always finds himself on the outside because of his inability to trust.

During an earlier investigatione, THE HORSEA MARINA MURDERS (3) he discovers that what he’s been told about his mother is a lie.  His ongoing investigations have revealed a web of deceit around her disappearance that go back to the 1960s of student protests, the Cold War, and spies. And he believes one man knows the truth, Lord Richard Ames, and that Ames will do anything to prevent that secret from ever being exposed.

In THE BOATHOUSE MURDERS there are many secrets. Why does private investigator Jasper Kenton keep so much of his private life from his business partner, Eunice Swallows?

What are the secrets between ophthalmic consultant, Brett Veerman and his lonely wife, Thelma, which trap them in a cold and hostile marriage?

Why is someone forced to kill in order to keep those secrets?

Along with secrets come lies, and where there are secrets and lies there will be exploitation. It is this exploitation that ultimately leads to murder in THE BOATHOUSE MURDERS.

Withholding a secret can hurt, so can revealing it. For Horton revealing his quest to uncover the truth of his mother’s disappearance means exposing his emotions, something he’s learned the hard way never to do because it would make him vulnerable and vulnerability is there to be exploited by others.

Secrets can be kept for years, as they have been by those involved in the murder investigation in THE BOATHOUSE MURDERS but it is one person’s determination to expose a secret and exploit it for his own gain that rips apart the fabric of many lives. And once a secret is exposed nothing is ever the same again.