Dance With the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller. James Nally

       Prologue

      Let’s get one thing straight – I’m not a ‘psychic cop’. I can’t predict the future. God knows if I could, I wouldn’t be in the mess I’m in right now.

      Nor do I possess some macabre ability to contact the dead, and I feel nothing but contempt for those chancers who claim that they can. You know who you are … psychics, mediums, men of the cloth.

      But something’s not right. Every time I get close to the body of a murder victim, they appear to me in the middle of the night. I’d like to say they turn up in my dreams. That would neatly explain it away. But they don’t. They appear when I’m awake, and engage with me. At first, it scared me half to death. Until I realised they were trying to tell me something.

      They’re always trying to tell me something.

      It’s got to be my subconscious mind, right? Presenting clues to me in a novel fashion? To a devout sceptic like me, anything else is unthinkable.

      I told three people about my ‘visits’ from the other side. My brother thought I’d ‘lost it’. My shrink almost destroyed my fledgling cop career. My ex-girlfriend tried to kill me.

      So I’m not telling anyone else. If this cursed ‘gift’ helps me crack more murder cases, then I’ll reap that benefit in secret.

      No one else needs to know about my occasional Dance with the Dead.