“However much you want want to forgive and forget, sometimes you just can’t.” – Steve Priestly
The baggage from failed relationships can be heavy, but things are magnified even more when a relationship fails in the public eye. That’s what happened to the members of the band New Holland. A hugely successful band in the early 90s, lead singer Greg Tasker’s drug use and personal indulgences eventually caused the band to implode. And though he pissed off a lot of people along the way, no one was more bitter about it than bandmate Steve Priestly.
Nearly twenty years on from their spectacular burnout, however, the band members are coaxed by their former manager, Kane Major, to reform for a reunion tour. Everyone could use the money and, more importantly to Greg and Kane, Greg has some demos for a new album he’d like to launch on the back of New Holland’s reunion and the resulting press coverage. Kane’s even arranged for a handpicked music journalist, Julia Gowans, to shadow the band from rehearsal to tour. And that’s where Joe Geraghty comes in.
Kane wants Julia close, but not too close, so he’s employed private investigator Geraghty to act as a sort of buffer between her and the band. Kane knows things may not exactly run smoothly, especially in the beginning, and he’d rather the journalist not experience any of the bumps on the comeback road. Little could Kane or Geraghty have known exactly how bumpy things were going to get. (more…)
Private Investigator Joe Geraghty is the undoubted star of my two published novels, Broken Dreams and The Late Greats, but it’s also a fact that he was the consequence of failure. A police procedural, Black and White, featuring Detective Sergeant Coleman, a minor character in the Geraghty books, pre-dates them. Looking back, the novel has obvious flaws. I didn’t know the police culture or live it. It was hard to effectively toss a year’s work in the bin, but it was clear to me that I had to step away and start over.
The past year seems to have been a bonanza for short story collections, and editor Luca Veste proves that last is certainly not least with his collection Off the Record, which was released at the end of November. 
