Police Procedural

INNOCENT GUILT . . . Between the covers

The book begins with one of those ‘impossible’ events beloved of crime writers since the 19th century. It is a mystery involving not a locked room but a locked mind. A woman, later identified as Fiona Garvey, presents herself at a London police station covered in blood. Carrying a baseball bat. She is catatonic. Silent. Somewhere else altogether. Then, a body is found, battered to death in a London Park. It appears to be the mortal remains of Alistair Cowan, Fiona Garvey’s employer.

Investigating detective Leah Hutch has problems of her own. The woman who brought her up, Margaretta, has just died. Margaretta solicitor reveals to Leah that her actual father, who she neither knew nor ever met, was Eli Carson, Margaretta’s son and a former police officer. And Eli is serving two life terms for murdering his wife and the man he suspected was cuckolding him. The author then deepens the mystery with two further revelations. First, the blood on the baseball bat isn’t that of Alistair Cowan, but that on Garvey’s hands and body is. Just to set our minds spinning yet more feverishly, DNA tests on the body in the park do not match that of Alistair Cowan. But hang on … Chapter Four is a description of Alistair Cowan, lying somewhere, grievously injured, fighting for life so, as some people say, “what the actual ….?”

As if things were not complicated enough for DI Hutch, we have Odie Reid muddying the waters. She is – or was – an top investigative journalist for a tabloid newspaper. As print newspaper sales plummet, Odie’s career takes a parallel course. She knows Leah Hutch, as they were once both aspiring news hounds. Now, Leah bats for the opposition, and Odie needs to create the story that will save her career. The man police assumed was Alistair Cowan is identified, Cowan is found – just about – alive and after the forensic evidence leads the police to accuse Fiona Garvey of his murder she is remanded in custody.

Then, a third man, Jake Munro is attacked, this time fatally. He was a successful businessman who had bought up several firms, with consequent redundancies, so was he killed by a vengeful former employee? One such man, Eddie Adeola, had committed suicide after failing to get another job, and his wife – a strange and violent woman called Temi, after attacking police sent to interview her, has gone into hiding. Leah Hutch discovers a strange link between Temi and Fiona Garvey, and it is their attendance at events put on by a man called Brendan Klee. When Hutch and her sergeant Ben Randle interview him they are unsure if he is a fraud, a mentalist, a lifestyle guru, a shaman – or a blend of all four.

The denouement reflects a phenomenon which runs through the book like a spine, albeit one warped by scoliosis; this phenomenon is the endless – and almost unsolvable – mystery of what causes apparently decent people to commit acts of terrible evil, and whether or not those acts can be excused (or at least explained) by horrors inflicted on the perpetrators when they were much younger. Leah Hutch is a flawed – but credible heroine – with a past as steeped in horror as the worst of the crimes she has to investigate. Remi Kone is a British Nigerian Emmy-nominated producer; she has worked on a number of well-known television dramas, such as Killing Eve, Spooks and Lewis. She lives in London, and this is her first novel. Innocent Guilt is published by Quercus and will be on the shelves on 15th May.

May 13, 2025 0

DEATH ON WOLF FELL . . . Between the covers

This is the next instalment of the career of Lancashire DS Jessica Raker, to whom we were introduced in “Death at Dead Man’s Stake”. Jess resumes her head-to-head battle with gang boss Maggie Horsefield, a ruthless and vindictive woman who is at the apex of the criminal fraternity, but someone who swims in the toxic waste in terms of human decency. It complicates matters that Jess’s daughter Lily and Maggie’s offspring Caitlin are BFFs at school.

It’s fair to say that Jessica Raker has something of a turbulent past. Born and bred in the district she now polices, she gravitated to London, where her career in the Metropolitan Police concluded dramatically with her shooting dead a feckless younger member of a serious crime gang. When a retaliatory contract was taken out on her life, she was relocated to Clitheroe. She has two children, but her relationship with husband Josh is, to say the least, threadbare, although they are still together.

This story starts with Lance Drake, a petty crook somewhere near the bottom of Maggie Horsefield’s barrel of criminal employees, facing his worst nightmare. He is being released on license from HMP Preston, where he has been quite happily spending the last few months, safe from the inevitable retribution which has awaited him since he shot his mouth off to the police, thus losing his boss tens of thousands of pounds in a drug shipment.

Inevitably, given that Horsefield has her employees embedded at every level of the criminal justice system, Drake is soon grabbed, and when the hood is taken from his head, he finds himself cable-tied to a chair sitting, ominously, on a large plastic sheet spread on the floor of a disused mill, with Horsefield sitting nearby, fondling a zombie knife. Jess Raker’s team have had their eyes on this mill for some time, rightly suspecting that is part of Horsefield’s drug distribution business and, happily for Lance Drake, they choose that moment for a raid.

Most of Horsefield’s goons get away, the mill plus an industrial quantity of ‘merchandise’ go up in flames, and the stage is set for a dramatic encounter as Horsefield and her lover, London gangster Tommy Moss, plan a multi-million pound raid on Wolf Fell Hall, an ancestral home which contains scores of priceless old master paintings. Along the way, we learn more about the team of officers around Jessica Raker. There is the intelligent and resourceful PCSO Samira Patel, who yearns to become a ‘proper’ copper. CID officer Dougie Doolan is one of Jessica’s mainstays, but she suspects he is hiding a grim secret. Her boss, Inspector Price, we strongly suspect may be a wrong ‘un, but is he actually feeding information to the dreadful Maggie Horsefield?

One thing you will not find in a Nick Oldham novel, thankfully, is the remotest trace of sympathetic hand-wringing for his villains. Yes they may come from awful families with dreadful parents but, like all of us, they have a choice. If they take the wrong road, then they have no-one to blame but themselves. For Oldham, once a working copper in hives of scum and villainy like Blackpool, they have made their choice and deserve everything they get. He has a direct, no-frills narrative style. The sheer readability of his novels is based on superb storytelling, and an unparalleled knowledge of English policing, woven together with a sense of place, location and topography designed to draw the reader into the narrative. Death on Wolf Fell will be published by Severn House on 6th May.

April 24, 2025 0

A FATAL ASSUMPTION . . . Between the covers

These Bristol based Meredith & Hodge cold-case-crime novels are rather special. Their latest case seems unsolvable. For starters it’s over a decade old. Christine Hawker was making breakfast for the children with husband Mike was upstairs getting them ready for school. The smoke alarm goes off. Mike discovered it has been triggered by a pan of burned porridge. But where was Christine? Puzzled, he took the kids to school, but then he disappears, too. The case baffled everyone, and gradually slid further and further back down the “To Do” list.

Now, the case has been reopened, because Mike Hawker’s remains have been inadvertently exposed by the bucket of a digger preparing the ground for a new supermarket. Meredith & Hodge? DCI Meredith and his wife, fellow officer Patsy Hodge are the ideal husband and wife team. Except – at the moment – they’re not. Patsy is on extended sick leave after a case went horrifically awry and has fled to relatives in New Zealand. Meredith? He’s getting over jetlag in a budget Auckland hotel having flown in to try to save his marriage.

By any standard, this is a terrific police procedural novel. Yes, all the operational details are convincing and the plotting is cleverly done. For me, however, it is the dialogue that sparkles. Marcia Turner enlivens her characters by what they say, and the idioms they use. For example, an elderly man says that he is a bit ‘mutton’. Younger readers might be baffled, but Turner knows that people of this character’s generation would recognise the rhyming slang. Mutt ‘n’ Jeff were comic book characters back in the day. Mutt ‘n’ Jeff became rhyming slang for ‘deaf’ and this later evolved into ‘mutton’ – a double play on words.

Meredith’s peacemaking overture in New Zealand is favourably received, and the pair return to the UK and face the mysteries of the Hawker case. The extended family dynamic is complex, and throws up a number of grievances. In no particular order. Christine’s father died of cancer when she was in her early teens, and she had become embittered that her mother remarried so quickly, suspecting that the relationship may have been blossoming while her father was on his bed of death. Mike’s father is cantankerous and an awkward customer, and his peace of mind was not improved a few months before his son’s disappearance when a young man met him and introduced himself as his long-lost son, conceived in a youthful fling decades earlier.

Meredith’s team clutch at what seem to be increasingly flimsy straws of evidence and imperfect recollections. What about the mysterious white van seen near the Hawker’s house on the day of the abduction? It is of no help at all that several of the potential suspects worked in trades where the proverbial ‘white van’ was ubiquitous. As is probably the case in real life criminal investigations, forensic questioning unearths all manner of ill-concealed grievances and grudges within the extended family of Mike and Christine Hawker.

Despite the proverbial quote suggesting the opposite, it is inspiration rather than perspiration which finally lifts the veil for Meredith, and it comes by way of a pleasant couple of hours the detective spends with his baby grandchildren. The next day, he calls the investigative team together, and on the whiteboard writes one simple word. The culprit returns to the interview suite, confesses, and the cold case team can chalk up another success. What Marcia Turner does so well, in addition to the captivating dialogue, is to shine a light on the petty jealousies, perceived slights and debilitating grievances that plague so many families. She is spot on. We all know what she is writing about. Thankfully, it doesn’t make us all murderers, but – as they say – we have all been there. From 127 Publishing, this excellent police thriller is available now.

March 22, 2025 0

HER SISTER’S KILLER . . . Between the covers

All too often, opening pages of crime novels headed ‘Prologue’ are enigmatic flashbacks, and they leave the reader wondering what their relevance is to the emerging narrative. Not so here. It is short, brutal and and painfully obvious. A Tyneside detective has been called to a murder scene. The body is that of his teenage daughter. That was then.

Now. For some arcane reason, when police Sergeants are promoted to Inspector, they have to serve a term in uniform, away from their home station. So it is that Frances ‘Frankie’ Oliver – the younger sister of the girl whose murder is revealed in the prologue – is sent away from the city hub of Newcastle to the relative backwater of Berwick – England’s last outpost before the Scottish border. Her first major call-out is a serious RTA – with fatalities. In the back of a wrecked van, Frankie finds a seriously injured child, his wrist secured to a stanchion with cable ties.

Meanwhile, DCI David Stone – Frankie’s on-off romantic interest, acting on loose talk overheard at a police social function, has reopened the investigation into the unsolved murder of Joanna Oliver. Frankie’s secondment to Berwick takes on a life of its own as, amid the wreckage beside the A1, evidence emerges that an organised crime gang has been hard at work trafficking children.

Mari Hannah has penned a classic ‘two plot’, novel, in that DI Frankie Oliver is heading up a multi-agency investigation into a Bulgarian people smuggling gang, while DCI David Stone is in charge of a covert cold-case operation into the murder of Frankie’s sister. Why covert? Stone believes that a serving policeman was her killer and, the law being what it is, any involvement by Frankie Oliver would mean the case would be thrown out of court.

I have meta-tagged this book as a police procedural which, on one level, it is. There is so much more, however. Mari Hannah’s ability to create vividly authentic characters is here for all to see. In no particular order, we have retired copper Frank Oliver, father of Frances, the murdered Joanna and older sister Rae; his torment at being called to a murder scene, only to find that the victim is his own daughter is lifelong; Frankie herself is a brilliant police officer, fearless but vulnerable, intuitive but analytical; David Stone is a ruthless career policeman but, like Frank Stone, the scar on his heart from when his former lover, Jane, was shot dead by an insane gunman, has never healed; I was also particularly taken with rookie PC Indira Sharma who, apart from his boss (Detective Superintendent Bright) is Stone’s only confidante. She is new to the job, but incisive, courageous and has a gimlet eye for detail.

The best crime novels have an authentic sense of place and location and, as with her Kate Daniels novels, Mari Hannah’s heart is never far from England’s north east and the contrast between the bright lights of ‘big city’ Newcastle, and the windswept horizons of rural Northumbria. There is so much to admire about this novel but I suspect, like me, you will be left breathless by David Stone’s ruthless and remorseless interview room demolition of Joanna Oliver’s killer at the end of the book. I don’t do checklists, but if I did, I would be ticking the boxes for brilliant thriller, credible characters, narrative verve, great sense of place and bloody good read. Her Sister’s Killer is published by Orion and is available now.

March 11, 2025 0

THE MASKED BAND . . . Between the covers

Two things immediately endeared me to the the main character in the book (a.k.a. the author, I imagine) First, he is a fan of country music, and was quick to reference the divine trio of Emmylou, Dolly and Linda. Second, he is no fan of the more self indulgent excesses of modern jazz. But there’s a good story here, too.

The Okay Boomers are a celebrity amateur rock band. In two ways. Confused? The five-piece outfit are actually media celebs themselves, but they wear masks on stage. Masks of Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Debbie Harry and David Bowie. They play a pub gig in the affluent London district of Barnes, and have an ‘after party’ at the mansion owned by one of the band members. When a body is discovered the next morning, dead as can be on the gravel underneath a balcony, DI Garibaldi hops on his bike (literally, as he doesn’t drive) and joins the investigators at the crime scene. The dead body is eventually revealed to be that of Frankie Dunne, an unremarkable young man who – apparently – was completely unknown to any of the Okay Boomers.

Bernard O’Keefe has some sly fun with a couple of the celebrities. There’s Larry Benton, a former footballer turned presenter who sees himself as the champion of middle class liberal sentiments, and Charlie Brougham, the handsome, floppy-haired toff whose boyish charm once graced many a British comedy drama. Hmm. Let me ponder. Who could he have been thinking of?

As you might expect, beneath the veneer of showbiz cameradie, the members of The Masked Band have, in private, little good to think or say about each other. In a rather neat bit of technical business Bernard O’Keeffe has five of the band masks go missing from the crime scene, with the only surviving mask – that of Mick Jagger – placed on the face of the defenestrated corpse, thus placing the latex Bowie, Dylan, Harry and McCartney faces out there in the community and ready to be used and abused.

We know from the brief and enigmatic prologue, that a young man who has drunk well rather than wisely heads of in search of his girlfriend and his missing ‘phone. He arrives at the house where he thinks both are and ….. end of prologue.

Were you to organise a convention of fictional Detective Inspectors you would need something larger than the average town hall. So how does DI Jim Garibaldi measure up? Italian heritage, obviously; lapsed Roman Catholic, parents died together in a road accident – hence his refusal to learn to drive; his marriage broke down, but he has a bond with his son, renewed every time they go to Loftus Road to watch QPR; he is widely read but wears his learning lightly.

Garibaldi is an engaging central character. Like all the best fictional DIs, he is prepared to think outside the box. The quirky copper resolving cases that baffle his senior officers is an oft repeated trope in police procedural novels, but it works well here. The identity of the person responsible for Frankie Dunne’s death does not exactly come out of the blue, but it is cleverly hidden until the final pages. This is a thoroughly engaging police procedural tale with just the right blend of mystery, dry humour and credible characters. The Masked Band is published by the Muswell Press and is out now.

February 24, 2025 0

BURIED IN THE PAST . . . Between the covers

Heather Peck’s Greg Geldard books are, as far as I am aware, unique in that they operate almost as serials, with at least one case continuing from the previous novel, alongside a new investigation. The previous novel Beyond Closed Doors (click for more details) dealt with the troubling case of two children going missing, after their mother was murdered by their father. The book ended with Kate and Jake Mirren being held captive by a reclusive woman in a perfectly ordinary village bungalow. She feeds them well, and looks after them, but they are not free to leave the room in which are confined. The case weighs heavily on Geldard’s mind, as his boss and other senior officers having metaphorically, at least, ticked the box marked ‘missing, presumed dead’.

One of the plotlines here is centred on the vexatious pursuit of hare coursing. Far from the open fields of East Anglia, it has a long history, and in some countries it is regulated and controlled by official bodies, and is regarded as a sport for the gentry. Here, it is very different. It has been illegal since 2004, and is, at least in my backyard, largely carried out by those who, in polite speech, are known as ‘The Travelling Community.’ As I write this, villages not far from me are still reeling from the havoc caused a few days ago by a convoy of twenty five four-by-four vehicles, driven by balaclava clad men, cutting a swathe of destruction across fields and property and leaving burnt out vehicles in their wake. In this novel, farmers who try to disrupt the activity become victims of violence and arson. When a farm worker dies from a blast caused by one of the arson attacks, this becomes a murder investigation.

While this carries on, hampered by Covid restrictions, Heather Peck focuses on the strange case of the Mirren children. We know they are still alive, but the mystery is why the woman who has, albeit benevolently, imprisoned them in the first place. The apparently inoffensive and ordinary bungalow becomes the scene of something much more dramatic towards the end of the book, when Heather Peck cleverly weaves in a story line which she introduced in the early pages, buy appeared to have no apparent connection with the events in East Anglia.

Like many readers, I always want my crime stories to have a definite and developed sense of place, and Heather Peck definitely doesn’t let us down. In my case, it helps that Greg Geldof’s stamping ground is not too far away from where I live, and I can appreciate the depth of knowledge and fondness for the fields and waterways of Norfolk and Suffolk which are embedded in the story. Buried In The Past is as enthralling and addictive a police thriller as you could wish to read. It is published by Ormesby Publishing, and is available now. Incidentally, the book ends, as all good serials should, by leaving us in suspense after Geldard suffers a harrowing few days, but I have blacked out the final words to avoid a spoiler!

February 4, 2025 0

BYE BYE BABY . . . Between the covers

DI Jack Hawksworth is a rising star in the Metropolitan Police. He is clever, charismatic, and very good looking. His life has not been without tragedy. His parents died in a dreadful road accident, but thanks to a family bequest, he is able to live in an otherwise unaffordable apartment in London’s much sought-after Hampstead. When a man in Lincolnshire is found dead with his hands apparently clutching the remains of his genitals – and his lips – local police soon realise that this is too big for them to handle, and Hawksworth and his team are called in.

The killing is soon repeated in almost identical circumstances, but in Sussex, and it becomes obvious that there is a serial killer at work. The two dead men are linked by where they went to school – an unremarkable High School near Brighton, but what happened back in the day that someone should want to enact such terrible vengeance? Meanwhile, Hawksworth has become romantically involved with a young woman called Sophie who lives in the apartment above his. She suffers from a wasting disease and is mostly wheelchair bound, but she is funny, intelligent, vivacious – and very attractive.

One of Hawksworth’s team, DS Kate Carter is – despite being engaged to an IT expert called Dan – becoming increasingly smitten with her boss, but is trying (and mostly failing) to keep things as professional as possible. Fiona McIntosh invites readers to fall into the same traps as her investigating coppers, and those traps involve us making assumptions, which she delights in overturning. The plot is labyrinthine in its twists and turns, and McIntosh achieves the difficult task of making both the police officers – and us readers – have more than a sneaking sympathy for the killer.

As good as this novel is, in publishing terms it is unusual, in that it was first published in Australia in 2007. It is mildly frustrating that it ends enigmatically, at least in terms of Hawksworth and the serial killer. The follow up novel was Beautiful Death, which is, according to Amazon UK, a steal at just under £60, due to the strange price protocols of the world of publishing! Presumably, Australian readers know what happened next. The author was born in England, but seems to spend much of her time in the beautiful city of Adelaide. I can only say that Bye Bye Baby is a complex and sometimes gruesome read, but a brilliant police thriller. As I mentioned earlier, this is the first in an established series, but UK publishing rights are now with No Exit Press, and this edition is available now.

January 26, 2025 0

GONE . . . Between the covers

Bristol DCI John Meredith is not at peace with the world. His wife and fellow police officer Patsy Hodge was seriously injured when she came face to face with a serial killer. Her physical injuries are, albeit slowly, healing. Mentally, however, she is shattered. Her relationship with Meredith is now fraught, riven with anxiety and tension.

At work, Meredith is saddled with an exasperating pair of cold case crimes. Decades ago, two young women, unknown to each other and years apart, caught trains from Bristol to London. Neither reached their destination, and their bodies were eventually discovered in separate locations in farmland near Reading. What links the two cases is that the forensics indicate that the two young women were not killed when they first disappeared. It seems that they lived for years before being killed. But where? And with whom? Doing what,? The timeline suggests that the first girl, Jasmine was killed in 2008/9, while Louise disappeared in 2010. Could Louise have been Jasmine’s successor, a replacement of some kind? Jasmine Jones was given up by her mother, put in care and then fostered. She married a man called Carl, but the relationship disintegrated when he had a fling with another woman. Louise Marshall was another woman anxious for a fresh start and a new job, but she found only violence and an unmarked grave.

As is often the way in crime fiction, we know the answer to the puzzle facing the investigators long before they do. In this case, there is a decidedly weird and disfunctional farming family who have a disconcerting habit of employing women as a sinister mix of housekeeper and bed-mate – and then killing them.

As involving as this is, the real beating heart of the book is John Meredith’s personal life. The scene where he meets up with his first true love (after Patsy ups sticks and goes to stay with relations in New Zealand) is brilliantly written, and so, so poignant. They wine and dine, make it back to her hotel and …. I am not going to spoil it for you, but it is the most emotionally intuitive piece of writing I have read for a long time.

John Meredith is an engaging and complex man. Realising that Patsy is mentally damaged, he is bowed beneath her slights, physical indifference, and emotional instability, but he never buckles. He hopes (rather than believes) that somewhere ahead are the sunlit uplands of the days before Patsy was so badly wounded. He wants to believe what Philip Larkin once wrote. “What will survive of us is love.” It is, at the end of the day, all he has to offer.

The dark secrets of Brandon farm are eventually exposed to sunlight and justice – after a fashion – is served. What will remain with me about this book, however, is the wonderfully observed account of Meredith’s personal life. Yes, we know that most fictional police Inspectors have tangled lives away from the job. I could start with Tom Thorne, Alan Banks and John Rebus, but CriFi buffs do not need me to continue the list, as it would be a long one. My last words of praise for this excellent novel are to say that the dialogue, copper to copper and Meredith to acquaintances and family, absolutely sparkles. Gone is published by 127 Publishing and is available now.

January 16, 2025 0

MURDER FOR BUSY PEOPLE . . . Between the covers

The good news is that DS Max Wolfe is back, and the even better news is that, after a long absence, our man is in very good form. As a young uniformed copper, only days out of Hendon Police College, Wolfe was first on the scene at a safe heist in a palatial London villa. All he found was a gaping hole in the wall, two corpses – and a young woman called Emma Moon, a girlfriend of the mobsters who committed the heist. Wolfe put the cuffs on her, she was tried, convicted, and served a long jail term, during which her troubled son committed suicide. Never once, during the whole process, did she utter a word about those who profited from the robbery. Now, she is out, suffering with terminal cancer, but on a ice cold revenge mission to kill as many of her former associates as she can in the brief time she has left.

Old Max Wolfe hands will know that there is an autobiographical strand running through the novels. Parsons’ breakthrough book was Man and Boy, an account of a male single parent. Here, Wolfe brings up his daughter Scout, rather than a son. Both Wolfe and Parsons are lovers of a dog called Stan, and it was sad to see an RIP notice to the real Stan in the frontispiece of this novel. Max Wolfe lives within sight, sound and smell of the historic meat market known as Smithfield, for centuries the beating heart of a country that loves beef, pork and lamb. Parsons may not have known, when this book was signed off to the printers, that the death knell would be sounded on this historic site. It will, no doubt, be demolished and something trite and anodyne built in its place. This is a purely personal paragraph, as Parsons doesn’t preach, but I think London is gone for us now: pubs are closing at an alarming rate, institutions like the iconic chop house Simpsons of Cornhill lie empty, derelict and vandalised. Philip Larkin was right when he wrote, “And that will be England gone.”

Wolfe juggles several criminal – and personal – issues. He knows that a group of Jack-The-Lad firearms officers have a flat where they abuse young women, wrongly arrested when they flash their warrant cards. The murder of a young woman of the streets, Suzanne, seems unsolvable. On a personal level, he struggles to keep tabs on Scout, his twelve-year-old daughter. She is wilful, disobedient, but highly intelligent. Every single second while he is working, he is worried about where she is, and what she is doing. One by one, the foot soldiers of the heist succumb, each apparently, to natural causes. Wolfe does, in the end, unmask the killer, but more by accident that intention.

Apart from being a gripping read from the first page to the last, this novel is remarkably prescient. I believe that there are many months between the final edition of a book being sent to the printers, and its appearance on bookshop shelves. Parsons weaves two very recent issues into the warp and wedt of his novel. One is a subtle and reflective elegy on Smithfield and its sanguinary history. Just weeks ago, an enquiry released its findings into the killing of a London criminal at the hands of firearms officers. Parsons lets us know, in excruciating detail, the hell that descends on any officer who fires a fatal shot.

Max Wolfe is both convincing and endearing. He doesn’t always get things right. Here, his judgment of Sarah Moon veers from spot-on to plain-wrong (and back again) several times. For all that certain critics and reviewers turn up their noses at Tony Parsons because of his political views, and the newspapers he has written for, the last pages of this book reveal what I have known ever since I met the man at a publishers’ party. He is observant, fiercely honest, and a deeply sensitive writer. Max Wolfe may be only marginally autobiographical but, like his creator, he only dances to the tunes he hears in his own head, and not those streamed in from elsewhere. Murder For Busy People will be published by Century on 2nd January.