UPDATED 14:54 04/12/09 Because of the situation with Borders Book shops Julian's book signing has been cancelled. Further signings are being planned, with one due to take place at the chapel of York Cemetery – which some of the novel is set – on January 31, as part of Residents’ First Weekend.

IT BEGINS with a murder, as crime novels often do. And a pretty gruesome one too. “The body lay at the bottom of the stairs,” begins Chapter Two of York journalist Julian Cole’s new novel, Felicity’s Gate.

“The head was twisted cruelly and the back of the skull had been lethally indented by unkind application of a heavy object. The likely instrument of injury had not survived the assault and lay in pieces around the corpse, glittering in the pooled blood. From the fragments that remained, the murder weapon appeared to have been a heavy glass juicer.”

The body in question belongs to artist Jane Wragge. Her boyfriend, Moses Mundy – a mysterious man with a murky past – has gone on the run.

For Chief Inspector Sam Rounder, Moses is the main suspect. But there is a twist. Sam’s brother Rick, an ex-copper turned private eye, has been hired by Moses to find the ‘real’ killer. But who is the real killer? And, if it isn’t Moses, why has he felt the need to do a runner?

Welcome to the second in Julian’s series of Rounder Brothers thrillers.

The Amateur Historian, the first novel, was published two years ago by York-based Quick Brown Fox Publications, and is now due to be published in America next year.

In Julian’s debut novel, the brothers – overweight, worldly Sam and globetrotting younger brother Rick – were caught up in the hunt for a twisted lover of history who kidnapped and imprisoned a young girl in the mistaken belief that he was righting an ancient wrong.

The plot of The Amateur Historian was partly inspired by the pioneering Rowntree report into social welfare, Poverty – A Study of Town Life, by Seebohm Rowntree. The story slips between the York of 1901, in which a young girl from a poverty-stricken family in the Hungate slums is brutalised and exploited by a drunken waste of a father, to present-day York 100 years later.

There is a similar time-slip device in this new novel. Sam Rounder finds in the murdered woman’s attic studio a diary she began keeping in 1987. It records the time she met Moses Mundy, when both were working as volunteers at York Cemetery, which at the time was being rescued from years of neglect.

The story unfolds in double time – the ongoing hunt for Jane’s killer interspersed with diary extracts chronicling her growing love for Moses.

“The murder is the end of everything for Jane, obviously” says Julian, long-time Press columnist and deputy chief sub (features). “But because of the diaries, it is the starting point for us getting to know her.”

Just as with The Amateur Historian, one of the main characters in the story isn’t a person at all: it is the city of York.

In the earlier book, York comes across as a dark, almost Dickensian city, in which the shadows of the Hungate slums still loom.

There is an element of that in this book, too. But much of the novel is set in and around York Cemetery – where there really is a blocked-up gate known as Felicity’s Gate – and there is a lushness and tenderness to the descriptions that complements the darkness.

“Moses Mundy could not have picked a finer day for his life to fall apart,” begins Chapter One. “All the good years came to an end under a clear blue November sky. As he stood in the cemetery he could hear the leaves falling from the copper beech tree… Moses stood before the gravestone and his fingers traced the familiar inscription as if he were reading Braille. He smiled at the name and heard her speaking it in everyday moments, asking him if he wanted tea, or to go for a drink…”

Alongside the murder, there is a story of adultery that provides work for private eye Rick, an act of marital betrayal that is woven into the main story.

Julian, a 53-year-old married father-of-three who moved to York from London 21 years ago to work at The Press, admits that he loves York Cemetery.

“It is a beautiful, hidden corner of York that a lot of York people don’t really know much about,” he says. “And it is full of stories because of the people whose lives are recorded there.”

The plot of Felicity’s Gate isn’t directly inspired by any of those stories, although the name of one of the characters is. But the feel of the book – tense and tangled and shot through with flashes of sudden beauty – most certainly is.

York Cemetery is going to be well and truly on the map after this.

• Felicity’s Gate is published by Quick Brown Fox Publications, priced £7.99, and is available at Borders, in Davygate, York, and online. Julian Cole will be at Borders in York next Saturday, December 5, from 11am to sign copies of the book.

• The Amateur Historian is being published in the United States in the spring, by Thomas Dunne Books, with Felicity’s Gate due to follow in 2011.