The Yeare's Midnight [Paperback]

'The writing is assured with first rate characterisation and narrative drive' - Susanna Yager, The Sunday Telegraph

In the poetry of John Donne lies a motive for murder; A female sports celebrity has been murdered - her face mutilated in a bizarre, ritualistic manner. What is the significance of the strange text the killer has left at the crime scene? Why did he surgically remove the victim's left eye? And can a Cambridge lecturer help the police reconstruct the killer's fantasy in time to save her own life? As Inspector John Underwood and his team frantically try to piece together the last hours of Olympic athlete Lucy Harrington, events take an unexpected turn. Harrington's murderer contacts English Literature lecturer Heather Stussmann and invites her to explain his actions to the police. And when another woman is murdered Stussman realises the key to understanding the killer's terrifying motive lies buried in the works of a poet who has been dead for nearly four hundred years...

Ed O'Connor is 30 years old and this is his first novel. After university he worked in London and New York as a merchant banker but left the city to concentrate on writing. Ed lives in Hertfordshire and is currently working on his second book.