Patrick's Alphabet

When a teenage couple are found murdered in their car, a boy called Adam Sligo is the only suspect. Sligo is missing, and a manhunt begins, but the letter A is found blazoned on the wall at the murder scene. When the other letters of the alphabet start appearing in sequence all over town, each immaculately painted in red, a seemingly random act of violence appears to be part of a bigger and more terrifying picture. For the town's inhabitants, it feels like the beginning of a new age of terror, with Adam Sligo still on the loose. What do the letters mean? Is he playing games with the police? Or putting a spell on the town? ne man, Perry Scholes, is mixed up in all this from the start- a man haunted by cars and death - and photographic images of both. He trawls the motorways and edgelands listening to police radio so that he can get to the car-crash or the crime scene before the police. Like his hero Weegee - the original ambulance-chaser photographer - he makes a living selling these shots to the papers. He always gets there first - he was the one to find the old BMW with its young corpses; he is the one who spots the painted letters, and begins to document their appearances. s