‘Dying Days’ by Les Hinton

Published by Whitefox Publishing Ltd,
6 November 2025.
ISBN: 978-1-917523-51-6 (PB)

A party at a historic country mansion for the good and the great of the newspaper world and politics and assorted other people with power and aspirations to it. A few days later, an awards event at a luxury hotel with a similar guest list on the other side of the Atlantic. Both are targeted by a bomb; both incidents result in casualties and major disruption. The obvious agenda is terrorism. But weeks later the police and investigating authorities in both England and the USA are no closer to identifying any suspects. In fact, they’re no wiser than they were when the incidents occurred.

Dan Brasher is a gate crasher at the party, which is the home of his erstwhile employer, Cressida Chatstone, owner and chair of Chatcorp, the media giant of which The Daily Courant forms part. He resigned – jumped before he was pushed – from his job of senior journalist, shortly before, and narrowly escapes serious injury when the bomb explodes. Jess Hunter is a junior reporter at The Courant, young and keen, and determined to prove her worth. She finds her way past the police blockade outside the house, and meets up with Dan.

After the second bomb, Dan heads for New York, and Jess follows him shortly afterwards. Jake Abrams, editor of the downmarket redtop New York World and a close friend of Dan’s, escaped the debacle and has gone into hiding; Dan is desperate to track him down – as are various other people, not least the FBI and, as it turns out, those responsible for the attack.

The two journalists pursue a convoluted and dangerous investigation of their own, littered with richly drawn locations and vibrant, larger than life characters. There’s Perry Ainsworth, columnist on The Courant, whose flamboyant mode of dress and speech disguise a sharp mind and unexpected courage. Francis Wyler, heir apparent to the chair of the American equivalent of Chatcorp, is as overweight as he is naive, and his ambition outstrips his ability by a considerable margin. Dan’s lifelong friend Siobhan Mac Stiofain is the best kind of FBI agent, efficient, ruthless, fiercely intelligent but warm hearted. Both Dan and Jess are unafraid of danger but find themselves plunged headlong into a situation that threatens to run out of control.

Les Hinton is a career journalist, now retired, highly experienced in and acutely observant of the industry he served for several decades. Dying Days is his first venture into fiction, and by the time the bombers are identified, the underbelly of both the newspaper industry and the wider media world have been well and truly exposed. Coupled with a newspaperman’s eye for a story and an adroit way with words that still lingers in some corners of that world, he has created a pacy thriller that lays bare the people, attitudes and reactions of the life he knows so well, all with a loud, clanging ring of truth.
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Les Hinton was born in Bootle, Merseyside, and grew up in Egypt, Eritrea, Libya, Germany, Singapore, and Australia. He has spent his career as a journalist and senior executive in a multinational media company. He lives in New York and London with his wife Kath. His memoir The Bootle Boy was published in 2018. Dying Days is his first novel. 

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.