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The Hanging Ground Is Available Now
Robert A. Clark’s newest crime thriller is available now. Enter a Belfast investigation shaped by ritual murder, buried history, and a conspiracy determined to keep the past sealed.
The Hanging Ground is available now, opening the Cold Ground series with a murder staged to resemble an execution buried in Northern Ireland’s darkest history.
A body hangs from Belfast’s Lagan Bridge. The staging is precise, deliberate, and impossible to separate from the past. The victim carries a looping video recorded decades earlier, a piece of evidence that should not exist and a warning that someone has begun reconstructing old crimes in the present.
What begins as a ritualistic murder investigation becomes a wider confrontation with classified records, forgotten atrocities, and the people who still have reason to keep history under control.
The opening case
A murder designed to force the past back into public view
Detective Chief Inspector Aoife O’Kane is investigating a sequence of killings tied to classified files, old atrocities, and powerful people who believed those records would remain sealed.
The killer is not simply leaving bodies. Each scene is constructed with historical accuracy, forcing investigators to confront events that were officially resolved, privately buried, or deliberately forgotten.
The deeper O’Kane moves into the case, the more the investigation threatens people who have spent decades controlling what can be known, what can be proved, and what must remain buried.
The man who walked away
Eamon Fallon believed the secrets had died with the people who kept them
Retired detective Eamon Fallon has spent thirty years trying to put distance between himself and the Troubles. He lives alone on a remote sheep farm in the Mourne Mountains, separated from the institutions, decisions, and loyalties that shaped his earlier life.
That distance collapses when an anonymous message arrives: “We know you were there. We have the photograph.”
The past does not return as memory. It returns as evidence.
Fallon is forced back into a world he swore never to revisit. Every clue he interprets moves the investigation forward, but every answer also threatens to expose his own place inside a decades-old conspiracy.
Two investigators, one buried history
O’Kane needs Fallon’s knowledge. Fallon fears what that knowledge will reveal.
The investigation depends on two people approaching the same case from opposite directions. O’Kane is responsible for the evidence in front of her. Fallon is burdened by the history behind it.
Detective Chief Inspector Aoife O’Kane
The present investigation
O’Kane must connect ritualistic murders, classified files, and institutional obstruction before another body appears.
Retired detective Eamon Fallon
The history beneath the case
Fallon recognizes the meaning of the killings because he knows what happened, who was protected, and why the truth was buried.
Their uneasy connection gives the novel its central tension. O’Kane needs the truth. Fallon knows that telling it may destroy the life he built after leaving Belfast behind.
History under pressure
The murders are current. The motive was created decades earlier.
The Hanging Ground is built around the idea that history does not disappear when institutions stop discussing it. Records survive. Witnesses remember. Photographs remain. People carry the consequences forward even when the official version has moved on.
The killer understands that hidden history can still be used as leverage. Each crime turns a suppressed event into a public display, forcing the present to confront what the past was designed to conceal.
The result is a mystery in which the question is not only who is killing, but who created the conditions that made the killings inevitable.
The Cold Ground series begins
A new series built on crimes that institutions could not bury completely
The Hanging Ground launches the Cold Ground series, introducing a world shaped by political memory, procedural pressure, old loyalties, and investigations that threaten more than the person responsible for the immediate crime.
The series begins with Fallon and O’Kane confronting a case that sits between personal guilt and public history. The investigation is complete in its own right while opening a wider territory for future Cold Ground stories.
Readers can begin here without any previous knowledge of Robert A. Clark’s other books or series.
Available now
The past was buried. The evidence was not.
The Hanging Ground is available now. Explore the full book page for the complete description, available formats, and purchase options.
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