The Pension Pact

They made a pact to survive. Someone's using it to kill them.

Six retired Belfast dockworkers and their wives spent forty years hauling cargo for poverty wages. When automation took their jobs, their pensions weren't enough to live on. So they made a deal: when one of them dies, hide the body, forge the paperwork, keep collecting. Split the money between whoever's left. It worked for fifteen years.

Now the survivors are dying—and not from old age.DS Rose Gallagher investigates what begins as pension fraud and becomes serial murder.

Each death looks like an accident. Each victim is a criminal. And the killer has the perfect cover: every suspect has motive, every alibi is tainted by guilt, and none of the survivors can go to police without exposing themselves.

The pact's greatest protection has become its deadliest trap.

Someone inside the circle is picking them off, consolidating the money one death at a time. And the person everyone trusts most might be the monster they should fear.

Rose has worked cases where the victims weren't innocent. But in this one, everyone's guilty of something—including the person leaving her anonymous tips that are too accurate to ignore. Someone knows who's doing the killing. They just can't tell her how they know.

In Belfast, survival sometimes looks like crime. And justice doesn't always come for the deserving.

Turning Dawn: Dark Irish crime fiction series where desperation creates monsters—and trust is the deadliest weapon of all.