Almost Everyone I Loved: A Novel of Dangerous Desire

THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS AFTER THEY KILLED NICKY FORSTER, NEWCASTLE WANTS TO MAKE HIM IMMORTAL. In 1988, twenty-year-old Andrew Rigg is closeted, hungry and safer behind a camera than inside his own skin. One wet night carries him into Nicky Forster's orbit and through the door of a condemned Shieldfield house where queer men and women make their own country - full of music, sex, argument and the promise that nobody has to face the world alone. Nicky is beautiful, magnetic and impossible to refuse. He teaches Andrew that shame is borrowed hatred and pleasure is evidence. He also teaches everyone in the house to confuse being loved with being owned. Then Nicky is found dying in a multi-storey car park. The house gives police a story they can survive. Andrew's photographs turn Nicky into a martyr. For thirty-seven years, the lie holds. In 2026, an exhibition asks Andrew to open his archive just as a dead friend's cassette reveals twenty-three missing minutes, a vanished leather satchel and Andrew arriving before the ambulance. The celebrated witness has spent a lifetime deciding what belongs inside the frame. Now the last survivors want the truth - and Andrew must choose between the beautiful story that protected them and the terrible thing he did while Nicky was still alive. Almost Everyone I Loved is a dark, sexually charged gay crime novel about desire, power, chosen family and the lies that become history. No saints. No innocent witnesses. No clean way out.