Joe's been acting strangely lately. Causing serious trouble, messing up his friends' lives. But they can't tell anyone. Not even each other. You see, no one would believe them. Everyone looks up to Joe...Then Joe mysteriously disappears.

Distraught, his sister Debs pleads with his friends to look for him. Reluctantly, they head for the obvious place - the marsh where they used to play as kids. But they are not kids anymore, and without Joe they're leaderless. How will they even find him? And do they want to, after what he's done? In fact, they would be quite happy if Joe stayed missing for good...

Anthony Masters is the author of eleven works of adult fiction - notably, Conquering Heroes (1969), Red Ice (1986, with Nicholas Barker), The Men (1997), The Good and Faithful Servant (1999) and Lifers (2001) - and, prior to his death, was in the process of completing another, Dark Bridges, which he thought would be his best. Many of these works carry deep insights into social problems that he gained, over four decades, by helping the socially excluded, be it by running soup kitchens for drug addicts or by campaigning for the civic rights of gypsies and other ethnic minorities. Masters is also known for his eclectic range of non-fiction titles. It ranged from the biographies of such diverse personalities as Hannah Senesh (The Summer that Bled, 1972), Mikhail Bakunin (Bakunin: the Father of Anarchism, 1974), Nancy Astor (Nancy Astor: A Life, 1981) and the British secret service chief immortalized by Ian Fleming in his James Bond books (The Man Who Was M: the Life of Maxwell Knight, 1984), to a history of the notorious asylum Bedlam (Bedlam, 1977).