When Lieutenant Charles Acland is flown home from Iraq with serious head injuries, he faces not only permanent disfigurement but also an apparent change to his previously outgoing personality. He begins to display sporadic bouts of aggression, particularly against women, and especially his ex-fiancee. After his injuries prevent his return to the army, he cuts all ties with his former life and moves to London. Alone and unmonitored, he sinks into a private world of guilt and paranoid distrust until a customer annoys him in a Bermondsey pub...Out of control and only prevented from killing the man by the intervention of a 250-pound female weightlifter called Jackson, he attracts the attention of the police, who are investigating three 'gay' murders in the Bermondsey area. Acland is now forced to confront the real issues behind his isolation. How much control does he have over the dark side of his personality? Do his migraines contribute to his rage? Has he always been the duplicitous chameleon that his ex-fiancee claims he is? |