Orla McLeod knows too much about violence for her own good. She knows about pain and how to inflict it, she knows about guilt and she knows about survival. And because she was barely a teenager when she learnt all this, she know what these things can do to a child. So when she and a nine-year-old boy are the only ones left alive in a freezing Glasgow tenement after a Special Branch undercover operation she was spearheading has gone disastrously wrong, there's no way Orla McLeod's going to hand Jamie Buchanan over to social services. Not when Jamie's the sole witness to Tord Svensen committing an act of savagery of the type that's rapidly turning him into one of the most feared criminals in Europe. Especially since Svensen knows a lot about survival too.

Author Biography

Manda Scott is a veterinary surgeon, writer and climber, not necessarily in that order. Born and educated in Scotland, she trained at the Glasgow Vet School and now lives and works in Suffolk, sharing her life with a lurcher and other assorted wildlife. Her first novel, HEN'S TEETH, hailed by Fay Weldon as 'a new voice for a new world', won widespread critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the 1997 Orange Prize.