In Guilty Night — Alison G. Taylor

On a freezing November night, 14-year-old Arwel Thomas, turns up dead in a railway tunnel outside Bangor, an apparent victim of sexual abuse and a runaway from the local children's home.

DCI Michael McKenna and his colleagues are slowly drawn in to the web of relationships and power struggles surrounding Arwel and his peers in the claustrophobic world of childcare institution, where nothing and no one can be taken at face value and ethical structures bow to expediency and greed. A world in which they find Elias ab Elis and his wife, blessed with worldly wealth, lurking in the shadows, cursed and impoverished by their own dark tragedies.

In this dark world McKenna finds families existing in a twilight of ignorance and stupidity and children consigned to the scrap-heap of life. Forced to confront his own frailties through his investigations, McKenna must probe the underbelly of this seamy culture in order to get at the truth, however destructive it may be.