Tainted Beauty

It's 1992 and the “second summer of love” has hit Britain in full force, as New Age travellers and early '90s ravers converge around the legendary first ever Castlemorton Common festival. On his voyage of free-spirit debauchery and naïve search for love, Nathan Hancock finds himself infatuated with the troubled and wayward Rosalind. Unfortunately for her, Rosalind's lust for the vices that defined the raving scene of the early '90s lands her in the company of the vicious Grivens brothers, and at the centre of a heartless attack that leaves her left for dead. In retaliation Nathan loses it, brutally murdering the man responsible. Still reeling from the bloody fallout of that initial Castlemorton Common Festival, Tainted Beauty picks up 23 years later as Nathan is released from prison. Attempting to pick up the pieces of the life that he left behind, Nathan roams Britain without a purpose. That is, until he discovers that Rosalind didn't actually die in the attack of '92. With a new lease in life, Nathan takes off in search of the woman he became obsessed with all of those years ago. However, it doesn't take long before he realises that when you have a past as dark as his, the world doesn't always let you wipe the slate clean. With Tainted Beauty, author A.C. Dyke offers a critical examination of the violent and oppressive underworld of Britain. Relationships, justice and morality are called into question in Dyke's hauntingly hard-hitting crime thriller, as the line between good and evil becomes blurred with every new revelation. Fuelled on drugs, poverty and senseless violence, Dyke casts an atmospherically bleak background against his mature tale of revenge and redemption.