New Year's Eve, London, 1979...The sour taste in my mouth is all that is left of 1979. I had seen out the night, the year and the decade in a blaze of luminous cocktails that were still throbbing somewhere at the back of my skull. I'd spent the night in a fashionable London nightclub. Someone had fainted. At least, that's what I assumed. But now the phone rings. I answer it. A friend's voice screams at me: "He's dead! And they think I killed him!" It looked like it was going to be one of those days...
The hunt is on for a murderer. There is no motive and far too many suspects. But there is one deadly clue - a bottle of mascara. Find the mascara and you find the murderer!
This is not just fiction. It's how the '80s really were!Huw Collingbourne knows what he is writing about, because he was there. As a music journalist in the 1980s, he interviewed stars ranging from Boy George and Duran Duran to Spandau Ballet and Depeche Mode. He knows exactly what the '80s music and club scene was really like. He was in the music studio when Depeche Mode recorded 'Just Can't Get Enough', he went surfing with Haircut 100, he interviewed Motorhead's Lemmy over a breakfast of vodka and orange, he shared fashion tips with David Sylvian of Japan and he revealed to an astonished world that Robert Smith of The Cure dresses up as his mother when he cooks curries.
Huw knows the people and the places. He went to Steve Strange's Blitz Club, rubbed shoulders with Spandau Ballet at The Camden Palace and had lunch with Adam Ant at a trendy restaurant in Primrose Hill. He interviewed stars ranging from The B52s and The Weather Girls to Judas Priest and Buster Bloodvessel. He wrote for the cult magazine, 'Flexipop!' as well as 'Number 1', 'Jackie', 'Kicks' and a range of other eighties pop music mags. He was responsible for writing a Flexipop! photo-story about cannibalism, featuring psychobilly band, The Meteors, which caused the magazine to be seized by the police and banned from sale.
Never mind '80s-themed TV series such as Stranger Things and Ashes To Ashes, this book is the real deal. If you want to know what the fashion-pack world of 1980s Britain was really like, look no further. The 1980s Murder Mysteries series faithfully recreates that world, with a few murders along the way. If you enjoy murder mysteries with a dash of humour, Killers In Mascara is for you.
1980s London - the music, the nightclubs, the glitz, the glamour! Whoever would have thought murder could be so much fun!"This novel is completely original. The atmosphere generated gives a feeling of actually being there and involved in the scene. I would recommend this to anyone."
Chris Bostock (of the '80s band, JoBoxers)
