Pan Macmillan

THIS is the fifth of nine synopses of books eligible for the Citizen Book Prize.

The winner will be determined by readers’ votes. To help get your favourite manuscript published, vote and make your mark (see the voting box below the synopsis).

Voting for each synopsis will be open for the week following its publication in CitiVibe. If you miss that, you will be able to reread and vote for all nine synopses online from November 5 – 11.

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This is the only book prize for unpublished authors chosen by the reading public.

The Citizen Book Prize synopsis five

Bad Blood

by Amanda Coetzee

TO find a missing child, a detective must return to the past that he is running from. The police know the date and they know the victim, but can they find him in time?

An eight-year-old boy abandoned by his mother at a fairground is raised by a clan of Irish travellers as one of their own. Given the name Harry, as in “any Tom, Dick or Harry”, he carves out a reputation as a formidable bare-knuckle boxer.

Fists always at the ready, matched by an unremitting refusal to back down, he is given the clan name “Badger”.

Eight years on, Badger is angry, dangerous and ready to make his own way in the world.

He is convinced that he is of “bad blood” – he doesn’t know who or where his birth parents are and cannot imagine why his mother abandoned him.

He secretly believes there is something wrong with him that explains his having been abandoned by her.

Severing all ties with his clan, Badger wanders for several years before, in a final act of rebellion, he applies and is surprisingly accepted to the London Metropolitan Police Force.

He soon finds his niche as an undercover police operative, slowly losing himself in each new role, blending in everywhere, yet belonging nowhere. In spite of his abrasiveness and reclusive nature, Harry is promoted to Detective Inspector of the Drug Squad at New Scotland Yard. He is respected for his loyalty and tenacity, though his unconventional methods make him an unlikely candidate for further promotion. He begins to believe that he has left Badger behind forever, until a traveller child is snatched from an informal settlement in Bedford.

Suspicious of all authority, the local clan refuses to co-operate with the police, taking matters into their own hands. Now desperate to establish a connection with the traveller community and with time running out, Harry is unwillingly sent by his superiors straight back to his past.

Troubled and disoriented, Harry tries to honour his role as a police officer, but in order for the community to accept him, he is forced to shed much of his new persona. In order to keep working the investigation from within the community, he strikes up a tentative partnership with an idealistic social services liaison officer, Emily Meadows.

Together they find themselves distrusted by both the police and the clan. While conducting their own investigation, Emily uncovers a series of startlingly similar child abductions and horrific murders stretching back to August 1985.

Each child is taken precisely eight years apart; they are all eight years old and bear an uncanny physical resemblance to one another. Mikey, the missing boy, is the fourth child in the string of abductions.

Harry and Emily quickly realise that they have less than 24 hours to find him before he too is brutally murdered.

Together, Harry and Emily race to save the missing boy, uncovering a trail that leads right back to the day Harry was abandoned at Brighton Fairground and a final shocking family secret that threatens to destroy them all.

Vote for Bad Blood by Amanda Coetzee

Citizen Book Prize Shortlist: Bad Blood by Amanda Coetzee(survey software)