Hit and Run

The story

What it’s about

Ray Holder handed back the badge years ago. He was never going to hand back the instincts.

A housing activist named Fiona Miles is killed on Icknield Port Road, and Birmingham does what Birmingham does with an inconvenient death — files it, mourns it briefly, and moves on. The police call it a hit-and-run. The council issues a statement. The developers express their sympathies.

Ray works a depot now. Pallets, manifests, tea that goes cold before he drinks it. But Broadfield’s name keeps turning up where it has no business being: on cargo paperwork, in charity records, on the eviction notices landing on his friend’s doormat. And in a dead woman’s notebook, one word is circled in blue ink.

Fiona wasn’t just protesting the city’s future. She was documenting it — carefully, deliberately, building a record meant to be found by whoever came after her. Ray came after her.

As he traces the paper trail through shell charities, fast-tracked approvals and a councillor’s rehearsed smile, the city starts pushing back. His flat is searched. His files are wiped. Sources stop returning calls. His friends begin paying for his questions in jobs, homes and safety.

He can let Fiona become a headline that fades by the weekend. Or he can find out what she found — and what it was worth killing her over.

Hit and Run is the third Ray Holder investigation — lean, slow-burn Birmingham noir for readers of Ian Rankin, Denise Mina and Mick Herron’s dry institutional menace. Short chapters, clipped dialogue, no padding — a serious crime novel that respects your time. It reads as a complete story on its own.