host of homemade explosives — including five unexploded or semi-exploded improvised devices, what was left of an exploded pipe bomb and an expended smoke grenade” in a stockpile Johnston hid in the desert.

Like every story about male inadequacy, Johnston tried to justify his illicit actions and criminal behavior by saying that a woman once embarrassed him:

When officers spoke to Johnston that day, he said he pretended to be an ICE agent “because his ex-wife had insulted him in front of his daughter and told his daughter that he had done nothing with his life.” He decided to concoct the ICE story “to show everyone that he was ‘somebody’ and had done something with his life,” he said, according to court records.

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Now poor Matthew Johnston will never realize hisDavid Young

David Young is a graduate of the City University MA Crime Writing course and was the recent winner of the PFD-sponsored course prize. He was born in Hull and educated in York and Bristol. Before becoming a full-time author he was a local news reporter and then an editor in the BBC World TV and radio newsrooms.

His debut novel, Stasi Child, a labyrinthine Cold War-era thriller and the first in a trilogy, was published in October 2015, by Twenty7 Books (Bonnier).

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East Germany, 1975. Karin Müller, sidelined from the murder squad in Berlin, jumps at the chance to be sent south to Halle-Neustadt, where a pair of infant twins have gone missing.

But Müller soon finds her problems have followed her. Halle-Neustadt is a new town –