Snared

Lennox 'Nox' Ritchie wakes up the day before his fifteenth birthday to find six ten pound notes and a farewell letter in an envelope taped to his bedroom door. Underage, under financed, and alone on the notorious Dubhbrae estate, Nox's chances don't look good. But, unlike his mother, Nox has a plan: Pass his exams this summer. Get into college. Get into university. Never look back. But his mother has absconded on her debts and it's not long before Nox finds himself trying to avoid the estate's loansharks and drug dealers. His neighbour, and best friend, Kenzie, introduces him as a computer genius to Cal, her gang-leader boyfriend. Against his will, Nox finds himself attempting to please Cal who, in turn, keeps the loansharks away, and supplies endless pizza. Dragged further and further into Cal's increasingly dark schemes, both on the Darknet and in the real world, Nox reaches out for help. But everybody he encounters has their own agendas. If he wants to survive the crazed, drug-fuelled and increasing violent world of Cal and the other youths on the Dubhbrae estate, he's going to need less of a plan and more of a miracle. And just when he thinks he has a way out, the shadow of his mother turns up once again, in the most unexpected and unhelpful of ways. Nox has to face the realisation that not everyone gets out of Dubhbrae Estate alive, and that might include him.

Caroline Dunford is best known for writing historical crime and spy thrillers. However, driven by indignation against the 'alternative truth' culture, she recently wrote a young adult novel, 'Fake News'. It was funny and zany, and people seemed to like it. This time she's written a much darker YA. Immersed in her studies of forensic psychology, she became fascinated by how the lives of young people can be determined by their environment. Out of this came 'Snared' a hard hitting, gritty story about a bright young man trying to escape from a life on one of the most deprived and dangerous estates in Scotland. She's a psychologist, a latent psychotherapist, a teaching fellow, playwright, author and chronic overachiever. In her spare time she reads endlessly, plays board games with her partner and two sons (one of whom is currently a teenager himself).