The Sugar Bullet

“The lower-floor windows were barred and some had been bricked in. Soot and grease blackened the network of pipes and air vents. She thought how quickly you could step away from the city’s polished performance, like going backstage. Whenever she walked through here with Bertram he would say the same thing: This is near where poor Bill Terriss was murdered...” When celebrated playwright Bertram Hunter dies, his daughter, Ros, wonders why he never wrote a successful follow-up to his 1961 hit, The Sugar Bullet, and why this play, even when compared to John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, has become so notorious. Interest in the Hunter archive propels her into the seedier corners of London’s West End. Before long, fact poses as fiction as she has to decide between safe-guarding her father’s reputation or claiming her own spot in the limelight. With a comic cast of literary personalities and a disastrous love affair, this novel scrutinizes the links between a writer’s material and make-believe and keeps you guessing until the final pages. Can Ros discover the shocking truth behind the most successful work of her father's career?