Pearse Furlong and May-Belle Mulholland are two normal eleven year-olds meeting one summer in small town Antrim, Northern Ireland, in the early 1980s. They have little in common except a shared experience of violent, abusive parents. They form an unlikely alliance and as their games and shared fantasies spin out of control their friendship becomes something much darker, with theft, arson, sickening brutality - and eventually murder - all lying ahead. Janice Forsyth, presenter of BBC Radio Scotland's The Culture Studio

Neil Mackay is a multi-award winning investigative journalist, newspaper executive, non-fiction author, radio broadcaster, film-maker and playwright. He has won around two dozen national and international awards for his newspaper journalism. Mackay was a launch editor of the Sunday Herald newspaper, and has subsequently been the paper's Crime Editor, Investigations Editor and Head of News. His last film, an investigation into the rise of the far right in Europe and America, was nominated for a BAFTA. His book, The War on Truth, which investigated the roots of the invasion of Iraq, was published in the UK and USA, and has been commissioned as a stage play by the National Theatre of Scotland. He has written for the Sunday Herald, The Observer, Scotland on Sunday, Ireland's Sunday Tribune, Australia's The Age and most newspapers in Northern Ireland.