The Deadline Killer

Outline: A reporter for a regional newspaper becomes dangerously involved in a story he is covering, involving a serial killer on the loose in a city that sits between a wild, beautiful (and sometimes threatening) moor and a raging (yet sometimes placid) sea.

The journalist protagonist finds objectivity blurring, his behaviour changing like the weather and haunted by the bleak cityscape in which he is investigating the story. He becomes more involved in the unfolding crime spree than friends and colleagues can possibly know…

Set in the early 1990s, in an era when the city’s two newspapers each face several deadlines a day, rival news desks compete to uncover the killer’s latest dastardly deed. The journalist protagonist is engaged in bitter rivalry with the female crime reporter on the other newspaper. A cast of colourful characters, getting up to all sorts, inhabit boisterous newsrooms.

Meanwhile the cops and city council are trying to suppress as much of the grim details as they can to try and preserve the holiday trade and not scare the city’s residents.

A story of peril with dark twists, ‘The Deadline Killer’ strays into ambiguous supernatural territory as the journalist protagonist’s grasp of reality disintegrates. With the line between what is real and what is imagined blurring, the protagonist finds himself never quite knowing who…or what to trust as he gets ever closer to unmasking the serial killer.