Time's Scars - Colin Grigg

Times's Scars is a literary thriller. Though the plot is essential, this is also a strong character driven psychological narrative.

Harry Ashby is a middle-aged structural engineer with a passion for his Norton motorbike and the restoration of old houses. In 2007 he was working on a semi-derelict country mansion in Oxfordshire. In the attic he discovers papers that include a photograph of someone he knows from his youth who is a successful businessman now. One afternoon the tortured body of a young man is uncovered in the overgrown grounds of the mansion, setting in train a murder enquiry.

Harry lives in a ground floor flat in North Oxford and is about to gain an upstairs tenant, Dr Bethany Davies, mathematics fellow at Corpus Christie College Oxford University. Soon after the body is discovered, Bethany is visited in one of the college libraries by an old friend, who is accompanied by Laurance Crane, a detective from the City of London Police. They reveal another body has been found spreadeagled on a Roman mosaic and she is able to identify him as none other than Harry Ashby.

Though the original victim died twenty years ago, the discovery triggers a sequence of violent events that result in Bethany narrowly escaping death in a burning house and two new murders. The investigation expands to involve Oxford, City of London, and anti-terrorist forces. Alongside the escalating dangers, a romance blossoms between the investigating officer DCI Charles Aestal and Bethany, two outsiders, despite her social awkwardness from being on the Asperger's spectrum.

The acts of callous violence are rooted in an historic IRA plot involving a notorious American gangster and a boat load of arms from Boston paid for by Colonel Gadhafi, bound for Ireland.

Bethany and Charles are in a deadly race to untangle these brutal murders that have been taken up by a new generation of ruthless of killers who are connected to multi-million-pound dealings in the City of London.