1893. Wigan is in the grip of a devastating national miners' strike and a harsh winter. Arthur Morris, a wealthy colliery owner whose intransigence on miners' pay is the main cause of the strike, is found brutally murdered in Scholes, a rough working-class district where he is universally hated and blamed for the grinding hardship the strike is causing. Detective Sergeant Brennan is tasked with finding the murderer and when a mysterious stranger is found bludgeoned to death, Brennan starts to unravel a twisted thread of interwoven clues that will lead to the murderer.



A. J. Wright has been shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger Award and won the Dundee International Fiction Prize for Act of Murder. Striking Murder has been longlisted for the CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger. He lives in Croston in Lancashire.