RUN FOR HOME.

RUN FOR HOME by SHEILA QUIGLEY.

1985: A man runs for his life - exhausted, wounded, mercilessly hunted by a woman assassin known only as The Head Hunter. At the end he has just enough energy to spit in her face.

2001: Sixteen-year-old Kerry Lumsdon runs across the same terrain. She runs to win and she runs to forget. When a headless body is found in the wastelands of the Seahills Estate, Detective Inspector Lorraine Hunt is called in to investigate.

Kerry and Lorraine, different ages and from different worlds, come together when Claire Lumsdon, Kerry's sister, is violently kidnapped - the fourth in a series of abductions of young girls.

Headstrong, wilful and convinced the police can't help, Kerry sets out on a frantic search of her own. But her hunt takes her to a world she never knew existed: a violent underworld; a sixteen year old murder; and finally, to secrets about her own past which her mother hoped she'd never have to face.

...... From the inner front cover.

FIRST SENTENCE: Jake was running.

MEMORABLE MOMENT: Kerry was running, her legs a blur as she pounded up Newbottle Street, pas the site of Houghton Pit which was now a reclaimed grassed-over area, and on towards Grasswell.

Not a bad debut novel - it certainly had me wanting to know the outcome. But why all the swearing? In a prologue just short of 4 pages, I counted no less than 29 expletives.

A book I would not normally have read but, having met the author who lives in the town where Husband dearest grew up and where we started married life, I felt the need to do so.

Strange to see in print actual places that I knew (see memorable moment) though I think a great disservice was done to the people of the town in that, without exception, each and every one of her characters swore profusely. That aside, many of the characters were quite likable and you certainly got to care what happened to them. The 'twist in the tale', however, was predictable and I figured it out a long time before the 'big' reveal.

All of the woman in Run For Home were flawed characters with cores of steel that made them strong and determined despite their many hardships. The men, on the other hand, were all real 'rough diamonds', likable rogues who, not beyond breaking the law, had their own moral code. Huge stereotypes of what it is to be a male/female living in the north east of England and I would not say reflective of the actual population.

The first book in the Seahills Estate (a fictional place based on a actual estate in Houghton-Le-Spring) series, there are another 4 (Bad Moon Rising, Living On A Prayer, Every Breath You Take, and, The Road To Hell) available in print with a 6th book  (Thorn In My Side) due for release in September.

Run For Home was a library book read.