2015年CWA新人匕首獎得主（獎勵未出版作品）
SOHO DEAD is a gritty and tight crime debut set in London’s most legendary neighbourhood.
Debt-collector Kenny Gabriel’s Soho stamping ground is being developed to death. Peep shows and shady drinking establishments are turning into frozen yoghurt outlets and loft-style apartments by the week. Broke and clientless, it seems as though things can’t get much worse for Kenny. And then he is summoned to the office of media magnate, Frank Parr. Kenny worked for Frank when Frank had a porn empire and owned the Galaxy Club in Frith Street. Back then he turned a blind eye to Frank’s business methods until he witnessed the brutal torture of a barman. Now he refuses to look for his ex-boss’s missing daughter... right up to the point that ten grand is laid on the boardroom table. The search for Harry Parr results in Kenny being asphyxiated in Mayfair, arrested in Euston and held at gunpoint in Shoreditch. Only when death seems certain does he realise the truth. He may be done with the past but the past isn’t done with him. The sequel, Soho Ghosts, will be delivered in 2017.
SOHO DEAD is a heart-felt love letter to Soho’s heyday in the form of a fast-paced and juicy whodunit. In order to uncover the mysterious circumstances of Harry Parr’s death, Kenny explores the district’s darkest recesses. He makes acquaintance with a dangerous Tracy-Enimescque art doyenne, and delves in the past of the victim’s own father, a charismatic and shady publisher of porn mags in 1970’s who turned ‘legit’ and became a media tycoon with the boom of advertisement in the 1980s, and later with the advent of digital revolution. The climatic trajectory of Frank Parry’s career in Soho echoes the transformations that gentrification and upward mobility injected into the social geography of the neighbourhood: peep shows are replaced by PR agencies, brothels by bistros, and drinking dens by frozen yogurt bars. Straddling the district now and the district then, Soho Dead exudes nostalgia for that vibrant panorama of transgression, creativity and bohemia, which has smoothed over its rough edges and is now more of a chapter of the past.
