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The novel All the Dead Men Lie is a thriller set during the 1984 Miners’ Strike.
In the aftermath of a particularly violent picket, a miner is found battered to death.
With hundreds of pickets armed with bricks and baseball bats and hundreds of police armed with batons, the investigation of the murder quickly becomes the focus of claims and counter-claims by those supporting the hard line of the Thatcher government and those on the side of the striking mine-workers.
For DCI Peter Kalus, the fact that there are no witnesses to the death is scarcely believable. That the dead miner appears to have no past beyond his arrival at the colliery is disturbing, as is the fact that soon after there appears evidence that the dead man was more than he appears. That he carried a number of secrets, each of which would be reason for others wanting his death.
Plagued by his own personal demons from a previous case and worries about his dying father, Kalus finds himself pulled deeper and deeper into a world of bloody deception. It is a world turned upside down where nothing can be relied upon and no-one is as they seem. He heads an investigation meshed in a deadly conspiracy, a conspiracy whose discovery threatens to bring down not only Thatcher and her government but to destroy the lives of Kalus and all those around him.
