KIWI - The Martyr's Seat

The country chose a motive before the pathologist chose a cause of death.

When former cabinet minister Sir Malcolm Vale is found dead behind his Westminster home, Britain decides within the hour that he was murdered for his politics. A party leader calls him a martyr. A fleeing activist has the victim's blood on his jacket and a recorded confession on his laptop. The case looks closed before it is opened.

Professor Kieran Ives, the New Zealand psychologist everyone but himself calls Kiwi, has one inconvenient question: the killer's politics and the murder's purpose may not be the same thing.

What he uncovers is not a lone extremist but an architect: someone who turned true facts into the most persuasive lie in the country, and a victim who helped build the machine that killed him.

Someone commissioned this murder. Someone committed it. Someone merely profited. Telling them apart may be the only justice on offer.

A fair-play political mystery with Golden Age foundations and a darkly comic eye on modern news culture, for readers of Mick Herron, Robert Harris and Anthony Horowitz.

Book One in the KIWI series.