Judith Alexander
A bus drives 5 young couples to an old castle in an unknown location. They have responded to an advert looking for people to take part in a 30-day medical trial. The company running the experiment, led by the co-ordinator, explains there will be no contact with the outside world. The group are free to leave at any time, but if they do, they will forfeit their fee: £20,000 per couple. Mysterious, unexplained events occur around the castle and strange noises are heard in the middle of the night. At first the group are skeptical – they think the company is creating the illusion of a “haunting” to test their reactions, until it is revealed there is something more sinister involved.
For decades the criminal underworlds of the North and South bumped along begrudgingly. Like the Cold War, territories were respected out of the necessity to avoid apocalypse, with each side keeping tabs on the other’s capability. Such a precarious false harmony could not last forever. Now someone has crossed the line, and there’s no going back. An illicit love affair smolders, breaking taboo and threatening catastrophe at the smallest mistake. It is a romance of purest, unadulterated love, yet so forbidden that its discovery would wreak total carnage. The story is told through vignettes of strikingly original characters, with intertwining subplots that echo the complexity of life in the dog-eat-dog criminal underworld.