The White Room

Martyn Waites

Dec 2011 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

DIVA veteran returns from war to find a city torn apart by poverty and crime/div
DIVA year after the end of World War II, Jack Smeaton has returned to Newcastle, a nineteen-year-old with bone-white hair and a memory that cannot be cleansed. After the eye-opening experience of war, he sees his hometown for what it really is: a city so blighted by poverty that it’s hard to believe his was the victorious nation. A visit to a socialist meeting puts Smeaton under the sway of T. Dan Smith, a future city councilman whose dream is to rebuild Newcastle./divDIV /divDIVAs they spend the next decades working to improve the lot of the working man, something sinister bubbles underneath the surface of their new city. In the shadows of the towers Smith builds to house the city’s poor, a psychopath lurks, ready to christen the Newcastle of the future with the blood of the past./div

About the author

DIVMartyn Waites (b. 1963) is an English actor and author of hard-boiled fiction. Raised in Newcastle upon Tyne, he spent his post-university years selling leather coats, working in pubs, and doing stand-up comedy. After a stint in drama school, Waites pursued life on the stage, performing regionally in theaters across England. TV and commercial work followed, and he continued to act fulltime until the early 1990s, when he began writing his first novel, a noir mystery set in his hometown. Mary’s Prayer was published in 1997, and Waites followed it with three more novels starring the same character, an investigative journalist named Stephen Larkin./divDIV /divSince then Waites has divided his time between acting and writing. After concluding the Larkin series in 2003, he created another journalist protagonist, troubled reporter Joe Donovan, who made his first appearance in The Mercy Seat. Waites’s most recent novel is Speak No Evil. Along with his wife and children, he lives and works in Hertfordshire, a county north of London.