Stories from the Margins

He seems like a typical 16-year-old boy except that Mikey is walking the knife edge of crime. He’s tough and good with his fists, but when journalist Shane Dunphy is offered the chance to write his story, he discovers a lost, vulnerable child, in danger and desperate for help. Shane descends into the perilous underworld of organised crime and discovers that the glamour of gangland life is riven with brutality and murder. Far from providing a means of survival for boys from broken families, the price they pay is often with their life.

The house was like something out of a Jane Austen novel, but the truth of what lay in the shadows was more terrifying than any fictional imagining. Shane Dunphy recalls the experience of his darkest nightmares: a young girl describing missing children as playthings at house parties, but no one was listening; a malevolent, threatening presence looming in the residence they called the Bad Place, and Shane was forced to flee. And now, 20 years later, a mother pleads with him to find her son who vanished at age five.

Charlie works at St Patrick’s residential home, where the walls are so thick no one can hear you cry. He’s asking child protection expert Shane Dunphy for help, before someone gets murdered. Charlie tells him of mistreatment, brutality and random cruelty, and now Maisie, his girlfriend, a resident at the home, has gone missing. When Shane finds out what has happened to Maisie, he knows he’s uncovered a world of trouble. Shane works his connections and, together with the ingenuity of the care home residents, attempts to bring the guilty to justice.