Pearl - Softcover

‘The build-up of menace is deft and convincing. Delaney’s fusillade of shocks, eroticism and sustained terror assails the reader from every direction. The elements of his novel are straightforward enough, but lifted by emotional power into something exceptional and utterly gripping.’
Daily Telegraph

‘Delaney has skilfully concocted a blend of adventure thriller and psychological mystery.’
The Times

‘A taut, fast-moving thriller with a neatly wrought ending as architect and soccer star find their fates interlinked in a mad dash across Europe.’
Irish Independent

The powerful new thriller from one of Britain’s most skilled and wide-ranging novelists and broadcasters, featuring Nicholas Newman, the hero of The Amethysts, the pscyhological thriller acclaimed by the Sunday Telegraph as ‘harrowing, absorbing ... unforgettable’.

Played out in the arena of football, Pearl is a compelling story in which the past rises to dominate the present and perhaps the future.

Nicholas Newman, affluent, successful, but emotionally unresolved, is a reluctant discoverer of events that took place during the Second World War. Placed under huge moral pressure by the terms of a dead friend’s bequest, he stumbles upon a secret that directs the violence on the football terraces of Europe.

One of his clients holds the key. Johan Pearl – ‘the Black Pearl’ – a Dutch international footballer, has commissioned Newman to design his house. With the plans comes extraordinary violence, and Nicholas Newman is once again at the centre of a psychological mystery that he can resolve only by examining his own life.