When police pay a visit to an elderly peeping tom, they unexpectedly stumble upon a loose thread that leads detective John Custer into a murky world of sex crimes and serial killings, of hidden graves and socially impeccable paedophiles. Ignoring the scepticism of his colleagues and superiors, Custer doggedly follows his intuition that there really is something very wrong that needs to be discovered, however cold the trail seems to have become.

Inspired by some of the many paedophile conspiracies that have been uncovered in recent years, and the cases of abused children, The Hobby is a psychological crime thriller, ranging from the fan club of a 1940s child star, through Istanbul and war-torn Burma and Cairo, to 1980s Britain. Custer and his assistant, Sergeant Jolly Campbell, seek to bring justice to the forgotten victims, while themselves going through their own quest for personal redemption.

"A spellbinding storyteller". -- The Listener

"The author has an enviable narrative gift, and there is something magical about her deployment of it." -- The Guardian

Lisa St Aubin de Teran is the prize-winning Anglo-Guyanese London- born author of 20 books, including novels, short stories and nonfiction. Much of her writing draws on her varied life experiences. And time warps, rural communities, isolation and grace under pressure are still the dominant themes in both her life and work. On the strength of her first novel, Keepers of the House (a new edition of which was published by Amaurea Press in 2024), she was chosen as a Best of British Young Novelist in 1982. After leaving the Andean hacienda, she lived as a perpetual traveller for the next twenty years. Then, in 2004, she settled in Mozambique, establishing the Teran Foundation to develop community tourism. She lived there until 2021, returning to London with a bag full of manuscripts, including her autobiography (Better Broken Than New, also published by Amaurea Press in 2024), and two new novels, The Hobby and Kafka Lodge.