The Dying Place

Travel Guide

Liverpool as you have never seen it before –

Written by somebody with a love for his city, and a knowledge of the good and the bad in and around the city centre. The outskirts and suburbs of a city often hold the most character and this is certainly true here.

The nuances of the city come thick and fast –

“Five minutes away from Goodison Park, which the blue half of the city calls home….”

“The area had suffered from an influx of professionals. They didn’t like to be reminded that they were living on what was essentially a tarted up housing estate.”

This is the city where ‘ The Farm’s exists – where  a gang of men kidnap boys and take them out to a building in the middle of nowhere – this is the dying place where they understand their fate and where there are scenes of torture and pain. This is where Dean spent much of his time before ending up dead. The fate of the others is clear.

To find a body on the steps of a church is particularly chilling and grotesque. Dean was a troubled boy and lived on a council estate. this environment and the background of the characters comes to gritty life. How do you deal with yobs or the youth of your city going off the rails and how best to deal with them? some sort of ‘programme‘ administered by shadowy figures?

“Murphy stood in the gravel entrance to St Mary’s Church in West Derby, Crozteth Park off in the distance…” “…On the steps leading into the church lay what they’d been called for. A young, white boy, maybe a man.”

The scary premise is that something like this could be happening in a normal city like Liverpool or where you live. For those living in and around Liverpool, imagine the raw emotions! The action of the novel more than spills out in to the streets of the city for the city is a major character itself.