The Trainer

Derided as England’s dreariest backwater, rural Cramptonshire has only damp woods, damp fields, and damp cows to attract visitors, so most visitors wait until nightfall and head straight for the sleazy clubs at Crampton’s rundown heart. Life is good in the town’s steamy underworld – for the club-owners and their clientele – but everything changes when the scandalizing death of one distinguished pervert sets alarm bells ringing in the corridors of power. Something must be done, and without delay, but who can be trusted? Who can resist Crampton’s salacious delights? Who would even want to? …By chance, one such man exists.

A man of honour, the county’s new Chief Constable is quietly optimistic that a swift return of common decency to Crampton’s streets will clear the way to his Monarch’s feet. He’s right, but while the red carpet is short, the road leading to it has more potholes than a well-trod minefield. His foes are many, but all will have to be swept aside if he is to keep his royal appointment, and keep it he must if he is ever to receive public recognition for thirty years of dedicated service. Resolute and inviolable, he sets about his brushwork with the enthusiasm of the zealot and the confidence of a knight-in-expectation. No door is too strong. No wall is too high. No enemy is too devious. No… no, nothing is that easy, as our hero discovers when he comes face-to-face with Cramptonshire’s darkest, most terrible secret – The Trainer.