CAGED is a sequence of interconnected crime
novels set in Tiger Bay, Cardiff.
Each stands alone, following a different protagonist through the same criminal landscape, where organised crime, institutions, families and ordinary lives collide.
Every choice reshapes someone else's fate.
CAGED
Kathy Saxondale
Welsh crime novelist writing contemporary noir.
EVERY CAGE STARTS AS
A SOLUTION.
Books
CAGED Series
LANA – Manuscript complete.
BERNIE – Currently in development.
LANA
Book One
Sent to kill two Serbian gangsters and take over their cocaine operation, trafficked Ukrainian Lana finds them already dead. Claiming the credit is her only chance to save her brother and buy them both their freedom.
The lie works. Lana is given the Cardiff operation she was promised. For the first time, the future she believes she owes her brother is within reach.
Then her first cocaine shipment disappears.
She has one night to recover it before the Albanian cartel murders everyone she loves.
Set in Tiger Bay, Cardiff, LANA is a crime thriller about survival, identity and the stories we tell ourselves to get through the night.
BERNIE
Book Two
Three years after the crash that killed her detective father and ended her police career, Bernie O'Rourke is rebuilding her life with her nine-year-old daughter and fighting to be trusted again.
When she finds a young woman bleeding to death outside Cardiff's biggest awards ceremony, Bernie runs for help. By the time the police arrive, the woman has vanished. So has the scene around her. All that's left is a small pool of blood.
Bernie knows what she saw.
Unfortunately, her former colleagues already have reason to believe she can't trust her own mind. Worse, her ex-husband, the head of the city's drugs squad, is fighting her for custody of their daughter.
With a woman's life potentially at stake, Bernie begins investigating a crime nobody is sure happened. But every step she takes to find the missing woman gives her ex more ammunition to use against her.
To save one woman, Bernie may have to risk losing her own daughter.
Set in Tiger Bay, Cardiff, BERNIE is a crime thriller about credibility, judgement and the stories other people tell about us to make their lives work.
Sooner or later
every cage breaks.
about the author
Kathy Saxondale is a Welsh crime novelist from Cardiff, Wales, UK.
Before retiring to write fiction full-time, she spent more than thirty years working alongside people whose lives were shaped by trauma, addiction and exploitation.
Those experiences inform her interest in what people do under pressure: the compromises they make, the stories they tell themselves and each other, and how the solutions we reach for when choices narrow can become the next cage.
LANA is her debut novel and the first book in the CAGED series.
