Blood Kin

BLOOD KIN

Some lies destroy a life. Some brothers won't let that stand.

When Rory McAllister is convicted of a rape he did not commit, the system that was supposed to protect him has already moved on. The jury has spoken. The sentence has been handed down. Eight years in a Scottish High Court - built on a lie, sustained by cowardice, and sealed by the quiet failures of people who knew better and chose not to look.

Rory will endure it. That is what he does.

His brother Kane will not.

A decorated veteran with skills the army trained him for and a conscience the army could not touch, Kane McAllister sits at his mother's kitchen table in the dark and makes a list. Six names. Six people who looked at an innocent man and made their choices. The complainer who lied. The boyfriend who confirmed it. The best friend who wept real tears for a fiction she had told herself so completely it had become the truth. The detective who let the evidence disappear. The fiscal who prosecuted anyway. The judge who tilted the scales.

Six names.

Kane is very patient. Kane is very careful. And Kane has already decided.

As the bodies begin to surface, Detective Inspector Fiona Cairns finds herself pursuing a case that is unlike anything in sixteen years of homicide work. She knows who is responsible. She cannot prove it. And the deeper she reads into the prosecution that started everything, the more she begins to understand that the man she is hunting may not be the only one in this story who has been failed by the law.

Blood Kin is a thriller about justice and its absence. About what a wrongful conviction costs - not just the man who carries it, but everyone who loves him. About the machinery of the legal system and the human wreckage it leaves when it gets things wrong. And about the question that sits at the heart of it, the one that has no clean answer:

When the law fails completely and finally, what is left?