Publisher's Synopsis
Rural Ireland is in the grip of fear. Violent criminal gangs travel out from the cities to rob and beat-up country folk. Now one of these notorious gang leaders, a psychopath known as The Poison, has suddenly disappeared, and his last known location is a small quiet village. But nobody is talking. Aspiring reporter Janis Frost, who has a proclivity for chatting aloud to the dead poet Robert Frost (no relation), is sent to find out what is going on. She soon learns that close-knit communities have a language outsiders cannot hear, and that to be accepted inside, one has to learn to be quiet; to keep secrets. As she befriends Big Jim Power, a bachelor farmer famous locally for his short temper, she begins to suspect that he has something more than effluent in the tanks beneath his sheds. Despite her earnest efforts, she has no idea that she is being tested, or that there is a gang on their way to the village intent on revenge for the loss of a consignment of drugs. What the gang don't know, is that Power has a deadly ally in Sam Waits, a former elite member of the US Special Forces, who haunted by a tragedy from his childhood, lives alone in the woods outside the village. By the time Janis Frost joins the dots and figures out what is going on, she realises that she wants to be on the inside, that she wants to be part of the community. The only trouble is, she is about to die, and if she wants to live, she only needs to answer one simple question: can she keep a secret?
