Roger P., a convicted double killer, escapes from custody, leaving a manuscript in his cell recounting fragments of his life and the events which result in his trial for murder. Entirely narrated by his inner voice, the document charts his rise and fall as star reporter of ‘The Daily Hack’, a scurrilous popular tabloid.

As the ‘Hack’s’ Investigations Editor, P. uncovers celebrity and political scandals, all the while promoting the anti-immigrant, anti-social benefits agenda of his owners and their bent politician cronies. Happy at first in this scabrous life exposing sex criminals and financial fraud, rubbing shoulders – and often sharing beds – with actresses, secretaries and various informants, P. is increasingly troubled by an incessant, critical voice in his mind telling him that he’s a liar, worthless, shallow, a swindler, and that he should face up to it. Interrogating P. insistently about the charade of this tabloid life, his inner voice – who likes to be called The Spectator – begins to mock and abuse him, calling him an ignoramus, a philistine and a cheat who must change before it’s too late to be saved and his life falls apart.

The scene is set for this contemporary social novel about the poisoning of a nation’s psyche by tabloid media and the existential torments of one man struggling to escape his fate as both one of its villains and its victims.

ISBN 978-1-935830-76-4 (print)
ISBN 978-1-935830-77-1 (ebook)
Publication Date: February 1, 2024

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in 1954 in London of mixed Scottish and English parentage, Timothy Balding grew up and was educated on a British military base in Germany. He left school and his family at the age of sixteen to return alone to the United Kingdom, where he was hired as a reporter on local newspapers in Reading in the county of Berkshire. For the ensuing decade, he worked on local and regional titles and then at Press Association, the national news agency, covering politics in Westminster, the British Parliament. He exiled himself to Paris, France, in 1980, and spent the next thirty years working for international, non-governmental organizations. For twenty-five of these, he was Chief Executive Officer of the World Association of Newspapers, the representative global group of media publishers and editors, established after World War II to defend the freedom and independence of the press worldwide. A Knight (First Class) in the Order of the White Rose of Finland — an honour accorded him by Nobel Peace laureate Martti Ahtisaari, former Finnish President — Timothy Balding currently lives in the Basque region of France and devotes himself to writing. The Spectator is his fourth novel.