Preserve the Dead/The Forgotten Ones

The third Lucy Black novel, Preserve the Dead, will be published on August 6th in the Uk and Ireland and August 11th in the US, under the title, The Forgotten Ones. The book is set during the City of Culture 2013 celebrations in Derry and concerns the recovery of an embalmed body from the River Foyle, the discovery of the remains of a homeless man in a dumpster and the subsequent investigations into the two cases.  

When I wrote Little Girl Lost, I deliberately wanted Lucy to be a member of the Public Protection Unit rather than CID. This way, her remit would involve cases concerning the vulnerable. In Both Little Girl Lost and Hurt, those cases involved children. For this book, I wanted to move away from that and instead consider the way in which other vulnerable individuals are exploited or ignored and the cost to someone like Lucy whose job is to help those that no one else will help.

The book also concerns the consequences of the recession. Many of the workers who arrived in Ireland, North and South, during the boom years, now find themselves out of work. Promised infrastructure improvements have failed to materialise with a cost to local workers. And, as town centres increasingly house empty shop units, a trend has developed for putting false frontages on buildings to give the impression of prosperity. From a distance everything looks great, but delve closer and things are never as they seem...