YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR NAME….BUT YOU CAN’T OUTRUN YOUR PAST FOREVER… The truth does not set you free, not when it has been hidden for over thirty years, when every day presents no choice but to continue living behind a cloak of secrets and lies. There is no escape because to reveal the truth would be to open up Pandora’s Box and release a torrent of deadly evil. The impact would be catastrophic especially as it will hurt the innocent, not just punish the guilty.
The question at the heart of A Thousand Silent Cries is what happens when a secret eventually comes to light. Does the person uncovering it demand justice, or revenge, and what will they decide to do about it?
A violent act from the past perpetrated by an IRA activist, Rufus Tomlinson, tears apart the family of James Carrington QC who witnessed the murder of his parents but survived to be placed into a child witness protection programme with a new identity. He has concealed his past from everybody, including his wife, but his world is about to fall apart. Tomlinson has returned to England after living in Boston under cover for three decades, and he has now found Carrington. Thus begins their psychological game of cat and mouse.
Carrington is forced to reveal his past and confront the consequences of his actions, his life of lies and betrayal. His survival brought him fear, not only grief, and his cold behaviour to his wife especially over the loss of their young daughter, has caused her irretrievable harm and now they are both in danger.
My protagonist, Cydney Granger, a corporate forensics investigator and spiritual medium, is a close friend of Carrington’s wife and she is relentless in her demand for justice and accountability, against a backdrop of Tomlinson seeking revenge at any cost for what he sees as personal, and Carrington, as a barrister, wanting to ensure justice is meted out.
Cydney has always relied on facts, evidence and logic through all her investigations and understands the consequences of lies, especially as the army withheld the truth about her husband’s whereabouts when he was missing in action in Syria. Now she must follow the truth and decide when to speak out, whom to trust, and give the living the opportunity to make their own choices. It is never to deliver easy justice but determine what that looks like for her and for others.
The Cydney Granger series contains the same themes throughout; should the past be left alone? I know this from my own background as I never found out that my dad was a Germany refugee who arrived in England via the Kindertransport, until he passed away when I was twelve, maybe because the truth would have been too painful for him to reveal that all his family were killed by the Nazis in the Camps. The grief he must have felt is unimaginable and that takes courage.
My strong sense of justice is the reason I write about concealed identities and unresolved trauma, taken to the extreme, creating the elements of tension and emotional complexity at the heart of my novels.
A Thousand Silent Cries by Karen Millie-James is published by Vinci Books and is available to pre-order now
