Six Steps to Murder by John Dean

He came to fight the fire. Someone made sure he died in it.

A wildfire is tearing across the North Pennines when a burning man staggers out of the flames. Detective Chief Inspector Jack Harris races to help him. He’s too late.

The dead man is firefighter Barry Mayhew. But beneath his burns, the pathologist discovers two shotgun wounds. One in each leg.

Someone wanted him alive when the flames reached him.

A former soldier, Harris has seen punishment shootings before. This was meant to end in death.

Yet the man everyone knew as Barry Mayhew proves remarkably difficult to trace. At the classic-car garage where he worked, he claimed he was visiting his sick mother — but this woman doesn’t exist. The trail leads instead to a hospital children’s ward, a desperately ill baby — and a woman terrified of anyone coming through the door.

She knew Barry by a different name.

With the raging fire threatening the hillside cottage he shares with his two rescue dogs, Harris must uncover what the firefighter was hiding.

Then he hears of another dead mechanic. He too was shot in the legs.

They say just six handshakes connect any two people. Harris needs to trace the connections between a dead man’s different lives.

Every hand the dead man shook leads Harris to another victim.

One of them leads to his killer.

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