D.I. Staffe [1-5] by Adam Creed (ePUB+)

London. A city where no-one feels safe and one man's crime is another man's justice. A paedophile is brutally murdered in his own home, and to protect other known offenders the police must haul the families of their victims down to the station for questioning. It's just another day in the life of D. I. Will Wagstaffe; better known to friends and enemies alike as Staffe. In this case nothing is simple, least of all Staffe's personal life. There's heartache from Sylvie, his estranged lover, and the dark shadow of Jessop, his mentor. And as he digs for answers into the grime of the city he finds the boundaries between right and wrong have been blurred, but the main question remains: just how far would you go to protect your children?



Christmas is coming and DI Staffe is trying to make a go of it with his on-off girlfriend, Sylvie, when a murdered woman is discovered in a swanky City hotel room.Staffe becomes obsessed with Elena Danya, the dead, blonde and beguiling, high-end prostitute. When another, altogether more down-at-heel working girl, is killed and their mutual, aristocratic friend and bad-girl, Arrabella, goes missing, Staffe is drawn into the whole gamut of London's alien niches: brothels and gentleman's clubs; banks and tenement estates.The evidence begins to point to a coy sociopath and voyeuristic predator, Graham Blears, but Staffe is not convinced and is increasingly drawn away from the city and towards the roots of a tangled ménage of City banker, Russian oligarch, and Turkish playboy, forcing himself down into the higher echelons of the British establishment, whose barricades begin to stonewall the investigation.When his Chief, Pennington, cuts him loose, Staffe becomes the hunted instead of the hunter, with grave consequences for the women who are close to him.



A woman is discovered beneath the London streets, barely alive. Soon after, DC Josie Chancellor finds an abandoned, newborn baby close to Leadengate station. DI Will Wagstaffe puts woman and baby together. The woman is Kerry Degg, a burlesque singer, as well as a rotten wife and mother. Kerry has bad friends, a dodgy husband and no idea about what it takes to build a family. As Kerry clings to life, Staffe hears only discord: from a well- connected West London gangster and a forgotten politician; from a maligned sister and an unborn population to whom someone, somewhere, is determined to give voice. Staffe ventures from Whitehall's clubland to Soho's fleshpots trying to make his way through a labyrinth of trails that leads above and below ground to another woman, seemingly forced - like Kerry Degg - to bear her child in captivity. In "Pain of Death", DI Will Wagstaffe discovers that the simplest thing in all the world - to bear a child - lies beneath the actions of the powerful and the desperate. And will he manage to rescue both mother and child in time?



In Almagen, a small village in the Andalucian mountains, Staffe nurses himself back from the brink of death. His idyllic new life in Spain appeals and Staffe is becoming a part of the community. One day his friend, Manolo, takes Staffe to visit Almeria and tells him about a body that has been found buried in an old greenhouse by the Mediterranean. Staffe becomes inexorably drawn to the case and befriends a journalist, Raul, who presents the killing as a simple case of drug-trafficking gone wrong, but it soon emerges that this murder mirrors the methods of torture used during Spain's brutal civil war. When Raul plunges to his death in a drunken car crash, Almagen's own secret past slowly rises to the surface, bringing with it family feuds and an expatriate ménage of a famous British artist, a Vietnam war vet, and a beautiful German heiress. Between the sierra and the sea, everyone seems to want to bury the past - except Staffe, who's new life is threatened as he refuses to abandon his investigation. Once unearthed, the past refuses to go away and the closer the unseen enemy gets, the more Staffe's own past haunts him - torn and trapped by two so different worlds, and closer than ever to the man who murdered his parents.



A reformed Sicilian criminal, Carmelo Trapani, has been kidnapped and his search for the the aged Carmello leads Staffe all the way back to a terrible act at the Battle of Cable Street.

Meanwhile, Staffe's own loyal servant,, DS Pulford, is in Pentonville awaiting trial for the murder of Jadus Golding, the very man who attempted to murder Staffe, leaving wounds from which Staffe is still recovering and it suits some in the heirarchy to see Pulford go down. Can Staffe save Carmelo without leaving Pulford to the political vultures?

As he battles find the man who murdered his own assailant, pressures also mount from within and Staffe's heart falters - in every way. His job is on the line and when he least expects it, his own past puts a gun to his head.

Hailed as 'London's answer to The Wire,' Kill And Tell takes the Staffe series up a notch and into the very highest echelon of contemporary crime writing.