The Dark Arts
England, 1974. A boxer refuses to throw a fight, and Tommy Reilly has him killed on his wedding night. The boxer’s two sons, eight and five, wake up orphans. Tommy takes them in.
England, 1995. The Premier League has just sold itself to television for hundreds of millions of pounds, Oasis are on every radio, and a country that spent the eighties being told there was no such thing as society has decided there is, and it looks like a football match on a Saturday afternoon. The money is new. The violence is ancient. And Tommy Reilly has been waiting for both.
In the tradition of Mario Puzo, The Dark Arts is a multi-generational crime saga set at the birth of the Premier League and the end of the analogue era. A novel about what it costs to be made by a powerful man, and what it takes to unmake yourself.
Aisha Thompson
Hired by the Football Association to review broadcasting frameworks. Not hired to follow a trail of dead bookmakers toward the truth. The only Black woman at Lancaster Gate, in an institution where powerful men have spent careers ensuring that certain questions never get asked twice.
Connor Murphy
Twenty-nine, running Tommy’s legitimate future from a Gibraltar office. He has spent his whole life believing Tommy Reilly saved him. He is weeks away from learning that Tommy didn’t save him. Tommy made him, carefully, over two decades, out of the grief of a boy who had no one else to turn to.
Ronnie Gallagher
The most corrupt referee in English football, and the only person who understands it from the inside. His career ended at seventeen with a knee injury nobody treated in time. The brown envelopes followed. Now Tommy wants more than bent penalties. He wants Ronnie to fix an entire season.
Sarah Turner
Reads her husband’s moods from the sound of his footsteps on the stairs. Rick arrived in Tommy’s orbit already broken, and the walls between their flat above the pub and everything below are thin enough that her ten-year-old son has learned to go quiet and listen. The exits are fewer than they were.
Tommy Reilly
Silver-haired, soft-spoken, photographed with cabinet ministers at charity dinners. He has built an empire on fixed matches and shallow graves. He raised the boys he orphaned. He remembers every favour and forgives nothing.
Frank Sullivan
Behind the bar for twenty years. Plays the Sky Sports theme on an out-of-tune piano every Tuesday night while a pub full of damaged, ordinary people sing along. He knows what Tommy is. He has always known. He is finally running out of reasons to stay silent.