November 2016

KILL THE FATHER … The big reveal

GOING … GOING … GONE!

Off came the wrapper of Kill The Father to reveal a compelling minimalist cover design in an ominous black, with just enough crimson to remind us that blood will be shed. It’s not a slim volume, either, as it runs to nearly 500 pages in what looks to these aging eyes like a very small font.

The important stuff. It’s not out until February 2017, but you will be able to read the Fully Booked review early in the New Year. The story? It’s set in Rome, and the titular ‘Father’ is a masked kidnapper who has been active and at large for many years. Two men make it their business to bring down The Father, by fair means or foul. For Deputy Captain Colomba Caselli it’s both his job and much, much more than just a job, but for Dante Torre, a man who spent his childhood trapped inside a concrete silo, it’s personal, because his captor and jailer for all those excruciating years was – The Father himself.

For folks who can read Italian, author Sandrone Dazieri has his own website, or you can read a little more about him on his Wikipedia page

November 19, 2016 0

ON MY SHELF … 18th November 2016

At What Cost by James L’Etoile
No-one can accuse the author of a lack of experience of the darker paths taken by men and women when they cross the line which separates citizenship from criminality. L’Etoile has worked as prison warden, parole director, hostage negotiator and probation officer. Whatever is foul and dreadful in this world, he has probably seen it at first hand.

Now he has turned to fiction, and his debut novel tells the grim tale of a Sacramento detective – John Penley – who is working on the impossible balancing act between a demanding police career, and being father to a very sick young boy who urgently needs a new kidney. When his latest case involves a killer who eviscerates his victims, that is bad enough. But when the psychopath offers to provide Penley’s son with a new kidney – at a price – the cop is faced with a terrible dilemma. Crooked Lane Books – 13th December

Dead End by Daniel Pascoe
Pascoe is a retired oncologist, and he attracted good reviews of his first novel, The London Sniper, which came out in 2015. He is back in print with the saga of Matthew Crawford, and his traumatic attempt to find a daughter he never knew. Crawford fathered the child when he was still a teenager, but has gone on to lead a relatively normal family life. We pick up his story when he is about to make the traditional father’s speech at the wedding of his other daughter, Annabel. He speaks of his loves and loss, the personal tragedy of the death of his wife, Rachel, and some other family stories of joy, interspersed with the usual jokes

The long-absent Sophie is never far from his mind, however, and as he runs through the expected clichés, he decides to search for his missing child. That decision brings not only danger and disruption to him, but drags his long-lost child into a deadly war between drug dealers and corrupt politicians.
Book Guild Publishing – out now

Purged by Peter Laws
Laws is a member of a very exclusive club – that of Baptist ministers writing crime fiction with a touch of the supernatural. If he has fellow members who are reading this, please get in touch! We meet Matt Hunter, a cleric who has abandoned the certainties of religious doctrine for the far fluffier world of sociology.

Hardened CriFi buffs will know that there are few places on God’s Earth (other deities are available) more sinister and receptive to the powers of evil than an apparently tranquil English village. So it is that Hunter and his family take what turns to be an ill-advised holiday in the Oxfordshire village of Hobbs Hill. Hidden within the warm Cotswold stone, the thatch and the dreamy, drowsy torpor of rural England, there are several distinctly malevolent entities at work. A local girl disappears without trace, followed by another. Hunter is certain that something much darker than common criminality is at work and, despite police scepticism, he becomes involved in an investigation that will come to threaten his own sanity and the safety of his family. If you are a fan of John Connolly’s Charlie Parker, or Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins, this may well be your first ‘must-have’ of 2017. Allison & Busby – 16th February 2017

Rendezvous With Death by Gil Hogg
Gil Hogg, although living in the West London district of Fulham, is a New Zealander. His novel Rendezvous With Death is far from a debut, as Hogg’s first novel A Smell of Fraud was published as long ago as 1976. He returns with a story which begins in the explosive atmosphere of present day Pakistan.

Nick Dyson has abandoned his career as a barrister in London to act as personal assistant to a British diplomat – Robert Laidlow – in Islamabad. What seemed like a smart career move goes dramatically wrong when the diplomat is kidnapped. While the authorities are busy blaming the usual suspects – Islamic extremists – it dawns on Dyson that the criminals may in fact be working for a powerful European businessman with an implacable grudge against Laidlow and his family, and that his own head may be the next to roll.

Rendezvous With Death came out at in Kindle at the end of September and you can take a closer look plus a glimpse of Gil Hogg’s earlier books by visiting his author page. If you fancy a print version, then you can order one from the Troubador home page. Matador/Troubador – out now

Tokyo Nights by Jim Douglas
We are in present day Tokyo, and submerged in the frenetic noise, neon and night-time Nirvana of a city that rarely sleeps. The contrast between the brash and gaudy streets of the Japanese capital and the other-worldly, two-dimensional serenity of the country’s traditional image is probably lost on maverick ex-pat Charlie Davis. He takes a long term view of life – he lives for tomorrow rather than the next two hours, but when he becomes involved with Colin McCann, a reluctant PI hired to look into the death of a wealthy businessman’s daughter, his live-and-let-live philosophy comes under extreme pressure.

Jim Douglas is the pen name of a writing partnership between Jim Hickey and Douglas Forrester. Jim and Doug wrote together in their adopted city of Tokyo where Jim still lives. Doug returned home to Glasgow early in 2016 for medical treatment and to be with his family. He died in September 2016 shortly before the publication of this, his first novel, Hence the poignant dedication at the beginning of the book. Fledgling Press – just out now.

November 18, 2016 0

TRAUMA … Emma Kavanagh

Emma Kavanagh was born in Wales in 1978 and currently lives in South Wales with her husband and their one year old son. She trained as a psychologist and after leaving university, started her own business as a psychology consultant, specialising in human performance in extreme situations. For seven years she provided training and consultation for police forces and NATO and military personnel throughout the UK and Europe. The paperback version of her latest novel The Missing Hours, is out today, 17th November, and you can read the Fully Booked review by clicking the blue title link. Emma has written a piece for us on the complex subject of trauma.

A mentor of mine – a brilliant trauma psychologist – used to say to me that in every traumatic event, there is always that moment, that split second in which everything shifts from normal to terrifying. And that in that moment, everything we have ever known of ourselves is called into question.

I have always been fascinated by that moment, by what it does to us, and what follows on from it.

tmh In The Missing Hours, both Ed Cole and Beck Chambers have experienced their fair share of trauma. For Ed it was the experience of war and its physical effects. For Beck, a war and a hostage experience. Both men handle things very differently. One surviving, thriving even. The other turning to drugs and alcohol.

For me, my trauma was giving birth. When my son was born and my bleeding wouldn’t stop and suddenly doctors filled the room. I watched the colour drain from my husband’s face, heard the midwives voices climb in register and I believed that I was about to die.

That I didn’t die (obviously!) made little difference to my perception of the event. I was left with nightmares, anxiety, a trail of obsessive thoughts that began and ended in the delivery room. I did not have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I was, however, traumatised.

Terrifying events do not have to push us into mental illness to have an effect on us. The belief that one is about to die brings with it repercussions. As do car crashes and break ups and betrayals. In each of these events, our bodies sense danger. Our adrenal glands release adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol. They prepare us to fight or to flee. But when there is nothing to fight, nowhere to flee, these physiological reactions can lead us into longer term effects.

Following on from a traumatic event, things like a loss of appetite, diarrhoea, an increased startle reaction and mysterious aches and pains are common. For me it was sleep that suffered. I would lay awake nights reliving the pooling blood, the doctor saying “It’s not stopping.” The obsessive thoughts circled constantly, invading in each quiet moment. I became anxious and experienced a sadness that was a hair’s breadth from depression. Others may become angry, feel out of control, attempt to isolate themselves, or, as in Beck Chambers’ case, use drugs and alcohol to cope with their feelings.

Remember, that in any traumatic event, there comes that moment in which the entire world shifts off its axis and nothing is quite as it was before. That is a huge thing to cope with. We have to learn to process what has happened – the cancer diagnosis, the loss of a loved one, the attack that came from nowhere. We have to allow our brains to twist it and turn it, and create a new understanding of our world that now includes this dreadful thing.

Such things are not done in a day.

Trauma changes who we are. But that does not necessarily have to be a bad thing. In The Missing Hours, Ed has survived terrible injuries and yet has thrived in the face of them, building a family and a business. Beck, on the other hand, has struggled, beaten down by his experiences. So it is with the world – some will have their lives ruined by traumatic stress, others will show remarkable resilience in the face of it.

Much of this comes down to personality and to history. Risk factors for suffering from traumatic stress include already being under a heavy stress load or lack of social support. The experience of childhood trauma is perhaps one of the biggest risk factors – exposure to trauma in the early years re-shapes our brain, changing the way in which it operates, and making us more prone to react to later negative events.

ptsd

Then there are the resilience factors – the ones that help people to survive and even to thrive. A strong social support network is a big one – having the ability to talk through your feelings, finding others with similar experiences, receiving love and feeling validated, all of these things act as a buffer, protecting us from psychological harm. Many people who have thrived in the aftermath of traumatic events can point to a role model – a parent, a grandparent – whose behaviour gave them a blueprint of how to be strong. Having a generally positive view of yourself and confidence in your ability to solve problems also means that your are more likely to attempt to deal with your issues head on, rather than trying to deny they exist.

tmo-spine

Now I find myself asking – am I Ed or am I Beck? Did I thrive? Or was I crippled? In truth, for a while there, I was Beck (although without the substance abuse issues). Birth was supposed to be a joyous event. How could I possibly feel so scarred by it?

It took me many months to come to a point at which I could talk about the nightmares, about the obsessive thoughts. In fact, for months, I didn’t talk about my son’s birth at all. I just couldn’t. Then one day I sat down with my best friend and told her everything. Then I told her again, then again. Then I talked to my health visitor. Then my GP. Then a midwife. Turned out, birth trauma is a very real, very common thing.

The good thing about resilience, about learning to survive traumas, is that we can build it up. We can make ourselves resilient. And talking about it to people who will understand, that’s a great way of helping yourself recover. Another key thing is to use an active coping style – don’t let the trauma cut you off from people, don’t deny it or refuse to think about it. In active coping, you identify the problem (‘I’m haunted by my son’s birth’) and then you go about finding solutions (ie, talking to friends, experts, seek guidance). Accepting the emotional fall-out is important too. The world has shifted. It will take some time before everything settles down again.

emma-kavanagh-bio When you do experience a traumatic event, remind yourself that, at some point in the future, this will all be just a story that you will tell. My favourite mantra has become “This too shall pass.”

Psychologists have found that a powerful way of building up our own resiliency is by a process known as ‘Required Helpfulness’. It was discovered during World War 2 that those who cared for others after bombardments suffered less post traumatic stress than did those who were not care-giving. Channeling your energies into caring for others can help your self esteem and self-worth.

I recovered from that trauma. I even went onto have another child. My eldest son is now 5 years old and I’m doing fine.

Traumatic events are an intrinsic part of life. We cannot escape them. Fortunately we can learn to build up our own resiliency so that, when the worst does happen, we are in the best possible position to survive and even to thrive.

November 17, 2016 0

MISTERIOSO …Wrapped up in black

Publicists become cleverer and cleverer in their life mission to attract YOU to THAT particular novel. Today, concealed in an innocent white padded envelope, came a book completely sealed in a sinister black wrap. Twelve words – and a strange image of a figure glimpsed through, what? A fissure in the rock? A torn curtain? Maybe something more metaphorical, like a jagged rip in someone’s conscience?

I will post ‘the grand reveal’ a little later in the week. The featured image is just a little musical jest. Those who can sight read will not need to sew up their sides after uncontrollable mirth, but will at least get the joke!

November 16, 2016 0

MURDER IN CRAB MARSH

The town of Wisbech in Cambridgeshire prides itself on its connection with the Fens, the primeval flatlands of huge freshwater lakes, interspersed with reed beds and small settlements clinging to the occasional patches of high ground. The truth is, of course, that these Fens have been Fens in name only for two hundred years or more, since the great engineers and speculators of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries drained the meres to make it the finest farming land in Britain.

Locals – and geologists – will quickly set you right on the fact that Wisbech sits on the very northern edge of the old Fenland. To the north of the town was Marshland, which was still wet, flat and featureless, but with the crucial difference that the water was salt water, and the reclaimed land was very different from the fertile peat of the Fens.

Wisbech sits on the River Nene, which rises on a lonely hill in Northamptonshire, and flows into The Wash some ten miles north of Wisbech. In medieval times, the outflow of the Nene was a treacherous delta of ever-changing creeks and channels, and it is part of folklore that King John’s baggage train was swept to its doom when local guides took a chance with a capricious incoming tide. By the mid nineteenth century, however, a succession of engineers had imposed their will over nature, and the river from Wisbech to the sea was safely confined between high banks.

In the autumn of 1885, a man murdered his wife by the banks of the river. Listen to the podcast to hear the full story. Be warned – the story ends in a grisly and gruesome manner.

MURDER IN CRAB MARSH

November 15, 2016 0

COMPETITION … Truth Will Out

If you want a lovely hardback copy of AD Garrett’s latest novel Truth Will Out, then enter our prize draw. If you’re a fan of the Nick Fennimore series, you will know the answer anyway, but if not, just check our review of the novel here. Then, answer the simple question:

At which British university is Nick Fennimore a professor?

With your answer in the subject line, just email Fully Booked at the address below.

fullybooked2016@yahoo.com

There’s no need to put any further details. There will be a draw of all the correct answers, and the winner will notified in the usual way. This time, the competition is worldwide, so we will post to the USA, Australiasia or wherever. The competition closes at 10.00pm GMT on Sunday 20th November.

RULES

Competition closes 10.00pm London time on Sunday 20th November 2016.
One entry per competitor.
All correct entries will be put in the proverbial hat, and one winner drawn.
The winner will be notified by email, and a postal address requested

November 12, 2016 0

THE GREAT WAR AND CRIME FICTION … part 2

PREVIOUSLY …
The Great War and Crime Fiction … Introduction
The Great War and Crime Fiction … Part 1

Robert Goddard and his ex-RAFC/RAF pilot and family black sheep James ‘Max’ Maxted start the ball rolling in our continuing look at crime fiction set in, or influenced by The Great War. Goddard introduced Maxted in 2013 with the first part of a trilogy, The Ways of the World. It is Spring 1919. The Great War is over. but a new war is beginning – a war of words and promises, both kept and broken and a war fought in the splendid hotels and conference halls of Paris. The victorious powers – Britain, France, the US, Italy and Japan – have sent their politicians and diplomats to the French capital to pick over the carcass of the old Europe. Amid the great and the good stands a young Englishman, James ‘Max’ Maxted. The ex-Royal Flying Corps pilot has come to Paris to investigate the mysterious death of his father, minor diplomat Sir Henry Maxted.

Max Trilogy

Max is used, first by an American wheeler-dealer called Ireton, then by the British Secret Service and other more shadowy organisations, to try to smoke out a German renegade called Lemmer. The story continues in The Corners of the Globe (2014). Max has still to uncover the truth about his father’s demise, and in addition to the Germans who will not accept defeat, there are some equally villainous Japanese thrown into the mix. The series concluded in 2015 with The Ends of the Earth, and it finds Max still battling the elusive Lemmer, but also locking horns with an evil Japanese aristocrat, Count Tamura. In some ways this is old-fashioned stuff, but there are hours of entertainment here for those who like their history spiced with danger and a couple of alluring femmes fatales. Max is an engaging character; a little old-school perhaps, with a nostalgic touch of Biggles and Bulldog Drummond, but equally brave and resourceful.

Robert Ryan, also known as Tom Neale, is an English author, journalist and screenwriter. He has written a host of successful adventure novels and thrillers, but our microscope focuses on his Dr Watson novels. He is not the first writer to exploit the potential of Sherlockiana, nor will he be the last. M J Trow wrote an entertaining series of books featuring the much-maligned Inspector Lestrade, so the earnest, brave, but slightly dim companion to the great Consulting Detective must surely be worth a series of his own. Ryan takes our beloved physician and puts him down amid the carnage of The Great War. Too old to fight, Watson’s medical expertise is still valuable. In Dead Man’s Land (2013) Watson investigates a murder in the trenches which is due, not to a German bullet or shell, but to something much more sinister, and much closer to home.

The Dead Can Wait followed in 2014, and our man has returned from the trenches, mentally shattered by his experience. He has little time to recuperate however, as he is called to investigate what appears to be a mass killing – in a top secret research facility set up to develop a weapon that will be decisive in ending the war.

Robnew

2015 brought A Study In Murder, and Watson has mismanaged his life to the extent that he is now in a wintry prisoner of war camp, far behind German lines. It is 1917, and the outcome of the war hangs in the balance. Murder, however, is no respecter of history, and when some poor fellow inmate is murdered, ostensibly for his Red Cross food parcel, Watson smells a sizeable and malodorous rat. January 2016 brought The Sign of Fear. The rather clumsy amalgam of two canonical Sherlock Holmes stories finds the indefatigable Watson once more at home, but a home at the mercy of a new terror – bombing raids from German aircraft. Our man is forced to untangle a mystery involving kidnap and a floating ambulance sunk by a German torpedo.

Maisie Dobbs is both the title of a novel by Jacqueline Winspear, and the name of the central character in a series which has now run to twelve novels. In the first of the series we learn that Maisie has seen the worst of The Western Front during her time as a nurse, but now she has returned to an England which is definitely not a land for heroes. She uses her acquaintance with a distinguished French investigator to set up her own agency. Although the series takes Maisie through the years between the wars, right up to the rise of Nazism, the shadow of the dreadful years of The Great War is cast over many of Maisie’s cases. The author herself says:

“The war and its aftermath provide fertile ground for a mystery. Such great social upheaval allows for the strange and unusual to emerge and a time of intense emotions can, to the writer of fiction, provide ample fodder for a compelling story, especially one concerning criminal acts and issues of guilt and innocence. After all, a generation is said to have lost its innocence in The Great War. The mystery genre provides a wonderful vehicle for exploring such a time,”

Dr Jonathan Hicks is a Welsh academic with an abiding interest in The Great War, and he has written a graphic and superbly researched history of a battle which was both one of his countrymen’s finest hours, but in terms of loss of life, arguably their darkest. A detailed look at The Welsh at Mametz Wood, The Somme 1916 is outside of our remit here, but its scholarship and interpretation of history is clearly reflected in what was his first fictional Great War novel, The Dead of Mametz (2011). His central character is Captain Thomas Oscendale of the Military Foot Police, and he has a problem to solve. An attractive French widow has been found raped and murdered in a nearby town. In her clenched fingers is a button from a British army tunic. A Welsh NCO, reputedly her lover, has just turned his Lee Enfield rifle on himself after apparently killing two of his colleagues. A mysterious British officer attends the crime scene, but then disappears. As Oscendale tries to unravel the tangle of clues, he finds a map purporting to show a site in the middle of Mametz Wood where a fortune is buried. Blind-sided by German spies and a conspiracy way above his rank, Oscendale must apply his police training to combat corrupt officials, military incompetence and the disdain – bordering on hatred – felt by front-line soldiers for ‘Red Caps’.

Oscendale returned in Demons Walk Among Us (2013) and he falls for a beautiful war widow in the process. When he finds that his most likely witness to corruption in high military places has been invalided home with neurasthenia, he has to resort to drastic measures that threaten his own life and sanity. The action takes us from the dust, heat, flies and bloated corpses of 1915 Gallipoli, through the bleak and devastated flatlands of Flanders, to small-town Wales, with its shattered and impoverished war widows, deserters at their wits’ end, and heroes who have been crippled both physically and mentally. One of the strengths of the Oscendale novels is that Hicks combines the horror of The Front Line with less dramatic but equally menacing events back home in Wales.

History. Crime Fiction. Railways. It’s as if Andrew Martin has written a series of books specifically tailored to three of my abiding interests, but within his Jim Stringer, Steam Detective series there is even more icing on the cake – a pair of novels set in The Great War. Jim Stringer is a railwayman through and through, and we first met him as a young man in an intriguing account of The Necropolis Railway, where he investigated shenanigans connected with the funeral trains that used to run from near Waterloo Station out to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey.

By 1916, however, Stringer has several years of crime detection under his belt, but he is sent to France where he survives the carnage of 1^st July, and is picked out to supervise the running of ammunition trains carrying vital supplies up to the front line. The Somme Stations (2012) is both a chilling account of everyday life on The Western Front, but also an excellent murder mystery, with Stringer investigating a criminal death – as opposed to one of the scores of men killed daily by bullets and shells.

1917 sees Stringer invalided away from the trenches, but sent out to Mesopotamia to investigate apparent treachery within the British military establishment. In The Baghdad Railway Club (2012) Lieutenant-Colonel Shepherd is said to have accepted a bribe from the fleeing Turks.

Stringer goes undercover as a railway advisor to investigate, but his contact Captain Boyd is discovered murdered in an abandoned station. No further help will be sent, so Stringer is on his own catching the murderer, and preventing a giant betrayal of the British effort. He has to do so whilst navigating an unfamiliar landscape, avoiding getting caught up in an Arab uprising, fighting off a case of malaria during a sweltering Baghdad summer, and treading a careful path as he investigates members of the officer class.

We will finish with the Inspector Hardcastle novels by Graham Ison. In one sense they are well-crafted – but otherwise unremarkable – police procedurals with a period setting, but Ison has created a sequence in the series where criminal events in London are set against successive years of the war. Hardcastle is a bluff, tough, pipe-and-slippers kind of copper, but the novels have a subtle sub-plot which reflects how the war is being fought on the home front, with the inevitable shortage of manpower in the police service, and the ruthless advantage taken by those who live outside of the law. The books have a cosy tinge to them, but are none the worse for that. Ison doesn’t flinch in his portrayal of the effect of a brutal war on hard-pressed families as well as those who are financially more comfortable. For those who like a good London novel, you will find no current writer who is better than Ison at period detail and the creation of an authentic atmosphere.

Hardcastle

November 11, 2016 0

TRUTH WILL OUT … Between the covers

Nick Fennimore is a forensic psychologist, and a Professor at the University of Aberdeen. His past gives him a painful and heartfelt stake in the hunt for a serial killer, as his own wife and child were snatched. Both are now lost to him; wife Rachel, because her body was found shortly after the abduction., and daughter Suzie – well, she is just lost. Neither sight nor sound of her has been sensed in the intervening years, but Fennimore clutches at the straw of her still being alive, and he feverishly scans his own personal CCTV footage of the Paris streets and boulevards in the hope of catching a glimpse of her.

Fennimore has an uneasy relationship with DI Kate Simms, a senior police officer now working in Manchester. They too have a past, but Kate is unhappily married to Keiron, an ambitious schoolteacher who seems more concerned with his own professional advancement than keeping their marriage alive. Keiron may have a justifiable grievance, as Kate has only just returned from a high profile secondment to America, while he has been left to keep the home fires burning, and their two children fed and watered.

Julia Myers and her six year-old daughter Lauren have been taken, perhaps by the same killer who inflicted such trauma on Fennimore. Just as in the Fennimore abduction, the mother – Julia – turns up dead, but where is the daughter? We have the occasional chapter narrated in Lauren’s voice, and Garrett captures her intensity, bafflement and frustration perfectly.

Fennimore has been pursued by a persistent Essex reporter, Carl Lazko, who wants to make a headline-grabbing story out of the wreckage of Fennimore’s personal life, in addition to mounting a campaign to prove that a man called Graham Mitchell is innocent of a murder which has no connection with Fennimore but has all the hallmarks of the academic’s family tragedy.

Josh Brown is a research assistant to Fennimore and as part of his campaign to get the academic on-side, Lazko reveals that Josh is on a witness protection programme and is a member of a notorious Essex crime family. Josh has turned Queen’s Evidence, thus indicting several close family members, hence his new life and new identity. When they appear, in the later part of the book, Josh’s family – his brothers, no less – are chillingly depicted as murderous and callous hooligans. As a Briton, I do sometimes ask the question, “What is it about Essex?” That I fully expected the vindictive brothers to be thoroughly odious probably tells its own story. As I write, I can tell you that there is currently a pressure group working hard to force the removal of the term ‘Essex Girl’ from a popular and inclusive dictionary.

A.D. Garrett is the pseudonym for prize-winning novelist Margaret Murphy (above left), working in consultation with policing and forensics expert, Helen Pepper (above right). I found their latest novel well-paced and accurately researched with intense scientific detail, as one would expect from a novel co-authored by a scientist. My only criticism is that the abduction case is eventually solved in a very dramatic fashion, and this was a master-class in how an author should bring a plot to a thrilling – and bloodstained – conclusion. But then, just as we – that’s you and me, the readers – are calming down after a thrilling denouement, the authors decided to wrap up Fennimore’s own personal obsession – the whereabouts of his daughter. This is done at 110 mph, in very few pages, and I felt that it could easily have been left to another day and another novel, to allow its dramatic potential to be fully exploited.

The two previous books in the series are Everyone Lies (2013) and Believe No One (2014). Truth Will Out will be available from 3^rd November in hardback and Kindle, with a paperback version promised for early 2017. The novels are published by Corsair, which is an imprint of the Little Brown Group.

November 11, 2016 0

TRANSWORLD 2017

At a gathering in The Charlotte Street Hotel on Wednesday evening, and against a backdrop of their impressive collection of recent best-sellers, Transworld showed that they are determined to hit the ground running in 2017. We were were introduced to five writers who will be making their debuts. Each read from their novel, and then took part in a question and answer session.

First up was Joseph Knox, with his Manchester based police thriller, Sirens. Unsurprisingly, in the short extract we heard, it was raining! Joseph spoke about his love of Noir – which he defined as “Beautiful Doom”, and told us about how he had been hooked into the world of Noir by a memorable sequence of movies starring Humphrey Bogart. His advice to aspiring writers was simple – make time for your writing, but don’t beat yourself up when it doesn’t go well. Sirens will be out on 12th January 2017.

Katie Khan took the stand with something very, very different. Hold Back The Stars, which will be published on 26th January is a love story, but with a difference. It is part sci fi, part fantasy and part romance, and is the story of a young couple who are forced to prove their love in order to stay together. Katie reminded us that it was only a few years ago that making friends – and finding lovers – on social media would have been unthinkable, but her book takes us forward to a time when such liaisons will be commonplace.

Australia 1939, and The Lucky Country is the setting for A Dangerous Crossing, the upcoming mystery thriller from Rachel Rhys. In a sense, this is a different kind of debut, as Rachel Rhys is the pen-name of an already- successful psychological suspense author. A Dangerous Crossing is her debut under this name and is inspired by a real life account of a voyage to Australia, during which two passengers die in mysterious circumstances, and war has been declared in Europe. Rachel reminded us that in a pre-digital age, a long ocean crossing was the perfect place for people to hide, and in her book everyone has a secret, or is running away from something. The novel will be published on 6th April.

Mahsuda Snaith provided us with a complete contrast of tone and subject matter. The Things We Thought We Knew is a minutely observed tale of a girl made prisoner by her surroundings – a mundane housing estate – and her own illness. Mahsuda said that the plot itself was not autobiographical, but the setting was a faithfully painted portrait of the world she herself grew up in. She is a very accomplished short story writer, and when questioned about the problems of going from the short form to the full length novel, she admitted that she has been writing this book since she was sixteen, and it has been revisited many times. The Things We Thought We Knew is out on 15th June.

05-t-a-coterell Bristol resident T A Cotterell was the final reader, with an extract from What Alice Knew. Cotterell read History of Art at Cambridge University and, significantly, the central character in his book is a portrait painter. He explained that the core theme of the book is family secrets, and told us of a real life instance when his mother name dropped someone of whom he had never heard, and when he asked who he was, he received the disconcerting reply, “Oh, he was my handler in MI6!”. The thought of his mother being a very successful intelligence operator in communist Hungary led him to explore the theme of how much we owe our children in terms of the truth. The novel asks many questions. How far would you go to protest someone you love? Would you lie to the police knowing your loved one is guilty as charged, or would you watch their life fall apart because of a terrible accident? What Alice Knew is out on 20th April.

Fully Booked will be reviewing each of these titles nearer to their date of publication, but if you wish to pre-order any of them, the details are already up Amazon pages.

November 10, 2016 0