Nightmare, with Angel

London: New English Library, 1992. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Peter Macdiarmid (author photograph). [6], 410 pages. Signed by the author on the title page. DJ has slight wear, soiling and small edge tears. DJ has an illustrated front. Stephen Gallagher (born 13 October 1954) is an English screenwriter and novelist. Gallagher has written novels and television scripts, including for the BBC television series Doctor Who — for which he wrote two serials, Warriors' Gate (1981) and Terminus (1983)—as well as for the series Rosemary & Thyme and Bugs, for two seasons of which he was script consultant along with Brian Clemens. He adapted his own novel Chimera as a 90 minute dramatized audio drama for BBC Radio 4 in 1985, and as a miniseries of the same name that was shown on ITV in 1991. He also directed the miniseries adaptation of Oktober, as well as writing the feature-length episode The Kingdom of Bones for the BBC series Murder Rooms. He created and wrote a science-based series for ITV, Eleventh Hour, starring Patrick Stewart as a government science investigator and advisor. The series aired on CBS and starred Rufus Sewell and Marley Shelton. . Gallagher was later lead writer and story supervisor on NBC's 13-part series Crusoe, screened in 2008/2009, and contributed two episodes to the US version of Eleventh Hour including Medea, the season finale. In 2009 he served as Co-Executive Producer on Bruckheimer's crime show The Forgotten, starring Christian Slater. Legacy, a two-part story for season 16 of the BBC's Silent Witness, was Best Drama winner in the 2013 European Science TV and New Media Awards. He later wrote episodes of Stan Lee's Lucky Man. "The finest British writer of best-selling popular fiction since le Carre." The Independent. Eleven-year-old Marianne Cadogan lives a lonely life with her stern, often absent father in a big house by the sea. When, one day, a stranger rescues Marianne from the rising tide, she believes she's found a friend at last. Then Marianne and her rescuer, Ryan O'Donnell, vanish. While Patrick Cadogan convinces the police his daughter has been kidnapped, Marianne and Ryan race to Germany in search of her missing mother and a secret that Marianne must never, never be allowed to discover. Derived from a Kirkus review: British TV writer Gallagher makes his US debut in this neo-gothic tale of an unhappy girl who is neglected by her often absent father, who is bent on returning to her highly unsuitable mother—and who runs away from home in the company of a child killer. It's not surprising that 11-year-old Marianne Cadogan, left for days with an unsympathetic housekeeper while her distant father Patrick is away on business, would turn for companionship to Ryan O'Donnell, the scavenger who rescued her and her dog from a sudden squall outside her isolated house. Despite Ryan's repeated truculent warnings, she keeps returning to him—and, when she's finally worn out with grief and loneliness, begs him to go with her to Germany in search of Patrick's estranged wife Annaliese. She doesn't know that Ryan's done serious prison time for murdering another young girl years ago, or that Patrick left Annaliese abruptly five years before because he found out she was into wholesale sexual humiliation with a white slaver. So we've got Marianne threatened by a companion who has a long history of homicidal mental disturbance, headed toward a mother whose friends would love to get their hands on her, and pursued by a father determined to kill her protector. Something's got to give, and it's Annaliese, whose violent death pushes Gallagher's tale over the edge into chop-chop action before the preordained uplifting fade-out. The title says it all. As in disaster movies, whatever may happen to the good guys, the bad guys are sure to be punished in this swift- moving, rofessional novel.