An elderly man dressed as Mr Punch crouches in a darkened room. Someone is coming up the stairs. A ghastly figure approaches . . .

Cut to Bayview, a care home with a difference. Increasingly haunted by memories, George Pemberton, the latest resident, is determined to return to his wife Judy. Not if the motley crew of Bayview inmates has anything to do with it. A prisoner of old age and the care home's staff, George has little choice but to bide his time vandalizing cars, enticing residents to sneeze their teeth out and performing exorcisms with ‘unholy water’. It is not until the tragic death of a resident that George seizes his chance of escape. Freedom, however, brings its own problems in the form of a busker with a grudge and a psychotic clown who pursue him as he heads for home and his old life with Judy.

In The Death of Mr Punch, Jonathan Carter’s alternately chilling, moving and comic debut novel, the reader is gripped in a vice as tight as Punch’s embrace.