New crime novel from a former Coronation Street writer released soon

Manchester learnt to sell itself a long time ago. Glass towers. Private money. Public ambition. A crane on every skyline and a sleeping bag in every doorway beneath it. Now one of its own is in Downing Street, the government is moving north, and the city’s best-connected and least scrupulous men are lining up to collect.

Someone else is about to pay.

For seventeen years, Martin Sterling was a member of the BAFTA-winning creative team of Coronation Street, Britain’s longest-running portrait of ordinary Manchester lives. In Death Through the Looking Glass, he turns the city’s glittering reinvention into a crime scene. It’s a thriller about power, desire and the price of keeping secrets in an age when nothing stays buried for long.

The perfect family. The perfect lie.

A celebrated footballer. His lifestyle-guru wife, with her podcast, her wellness brand and her carefully filtered serenity. And their estranged son with a story the family cannot afford to have told. For decades, the Hales have sold the nation a picture of enviable success: talent, wealth, charity and a gilded marriage, curated one post at a time. Now their son is talking to Nathan Grubb, a muckraking biographer, and no injunction, no NDA and no army of lawyers can stop the book.

Then Grubb is found murdered.

Follow the money. If you dare.

For DI Kate Stiles, the timing is hard to ignore. But behind the celebrity marriage lies something far bigger than a family scandal. Manchester’s most ruthless property empire, run by brothers David and Aaron Harrow, has friends deep inside the council, influence at the heart of national government and a fortune riding on the city’s future.

As Christmas approaches, Kate follows the Harrows’ dodgy money through a Manchester of penthouse views, discreet favours and dangerous loyalties. It’s a world of donor dinners and quiet planning decisions, where “affordable” means something else entirely and a contract is a gift between friends. The Harrows have spent decades learning how to manage a headline, bury an embarrassment and make a threat sound like good advice.

They also know her city. Perhaps better than she does.

A love that crosses an ocean.

And Manchester is no longer the only place with a claim on her. In New York, NYPD cop Jeff Romano offers a warmth and intimacy Kate has rarely known. Their relationship has survived danger. Now it must survive an ocean, two demanding careers and the unsettling possibility of a future together. For a woman who asks difficult questions for a living, what she wants may be the hardest question of all.

Britain in 2026, through the looking glass.

We binge the documentaries. We pick sides in family feuds that play out in memoirs and Instagram stories. We watch luxury towers go up that no nurse could afford to rent, and we hear “regeneration” promised by people whose friends always seem to do very well out of it. The third Kate Stiles novel catches the mood of a country that can’t look away from famous families falling apart and trusts less and less the people promising to build its future.

It imagines a Manchester that has risen to the centre of national power, and it asks who gets rich, and who gets hurt, when urban regeneration becomes a licence to murder.

Darkly funny, seductive and vicious, Death Through the Looking Glass is a rollercoaster of corruption, deception and murder, in which Kate Stiles must suspect the people she has trusted most of all.

Celebrity, corruption and murder collide in Death Through the Looking Glass, the explosive new Kate Stiles thriller from former Coronation Street writer Martin Sterling. Out on Amazon in ebook and paperback on 26 November 2026.