INNATE

Innate is set in a mill town in the North of England. The story opens in the 1890s. A series of attacks on young women lead Detective Sergeant Rino Rossi into the sordid underbelly beneath late Victorian respectability. Fast forward to the 1970s and a university lecturer is leading a precarious existence in the town, which is now in steep decline. There is a link though between the present day and the events of eighty years ago. It is an hereditary evil which corrupts....

William Hartley is a writer whose first novel Clink is a satire set in a prison. Innate marks a change of direction, being part detective story, part tale of hereditary madness across two eras.