Noble Cause (The Grace den Herder Trilogy) (Volume 1) - Softcover

Peter Ritchie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1497386403 ISBN 13: 9781497386402

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014

Synopsis

Grace den Herder leaves an unhappy childhood and a promising career as a lawyer behind and decides to take on the toughest of challenges: joining the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which is still involved in the fight against terrorist organisations in Northern Ireland, where her performance and dedication leads to a spectacular rise through the ranks of Special Branch. Her work brings professional success but difficulty in forming relationships outside the world of counter-terrorist operations. She runs an informant whose information leads to an operation that goes badly wrong, with a death in police custody and the subsequent murder of the informant, who is uncovered and killed by his organisation. In the aftermath, den Herder makes a decision to give evidence against a colleague and is abandoned by her force and her married lover as a result. She leaves Northern Ireland and rebuilds her career as a detective in the newly formed Major Crime Team in Lothian and Borders. The team finds initial success investigating a brutal home invasion gang who have killed during a robbery. At the same time, brutal attacks on street prostitutes escalate into a series of murders and one of the main suspects is a high profile Edinburgh lawyer. He is eventually arrested and convicted, although den Herder is uneasy about the result. When another prostitute is murdered most believe it to be a copycat crime, but Den Herder decides to reinvestigate. The revelations and subsequent chaos that result tear the Major Crime Team apart. Noble Cause is the first in the trilogy about Grace den Herder. The second story, The Shortest Days of the Year and will be published in the spring. The third story, ‘Red Sky in the Morning’, will be published later in 2014.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter followed his forefathers and started his working life at 15 as a deep sea fisherman. He eventually joined the police service moving through the ranks of CID/Murder Squad/Regional Crime Squad in Scotland. He then went on to manage the Organised Crime Unit in the National Criminal Intelligence Service in London where he ran a multi agency team drawn from various branches of the law enforcement and the security services. This was a unique concept at the time and Peter travelled to many parts of the world in this role. He was subsequently appointed as the UK Liaison Officer to Europol in The Hague where he spent five years. He returned to Lothian and Borders heading the Major Crime Team before taking on an advisory role for a project in Croatia. Following his retiral he worked on a number of private investigations before spending the next few years as part of the public inquiry team looking into the murder of the LVF leader Billy Wright in the Maze Prison. He also worked on a public inquiry into the death of eighteen patients in the Vale of Leven Hospital from a hospital acquired infection. Although the story of Grace den Herder is fiction Peter draws on his wide experience as an investigator to try and draw an authentic picture of how detectives, criminals and their victims think and feel. Follow Peter on his blog: http://gracedenherdertrilogy.blogspot.co.uk/

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1497386403
• ISBN 13: 9781497386402
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 476