Kath Middleton's Blog, page 4

New Book - on its way!

Well, blow me down. I seem to have written a Young Adult novel. That's odd, since I wrote it primarily for the entertainment of an Old Adult - myself!

I think that when three of the main characters are aged from twelve to sixteen throughout two thirds of the book, it necessarily takes on this genre. They need to be interested in the doings of, and speak in the voice of, people of that age. Their thoughts and speech must be age appropriate, which doesn't mean that you talk down to them. They sometimes surprise you with their concerns. 

Don't you think there's something almost mystical about trees? No? It's just me, then? They are the largest living things you will come aross in your daily life. What's going on in there?

As well as the three young people, Sylvie, her brother Gregor and their cousin Erik, trees are the main stars of the show in this book. I've very much enjoyed writing it. I'll tell you more soon, and maybe show you the cover.

Blog Tour - Disposal by David Evans

What's the book about?

August 1976 and it seems as though the long hot summer will never end. Early morning at Clacton on the north Essex coast, a light aircraft takes off from the airstrip but struggles for height and crashes into the sea. First on the scene, Sergeant Cyril Claydon pulls the pilot’s body from the wreckage. But something else catches his eye. A bulky package wrapped in black plastic is on the passenger seat. Returning to investigate, he makes a grim discovery – another body. And so begins a series of events that puts him and others in danger as he is drawn into the investigation, having to work alongside DI ‘Dick’ Barton, a man with totally alien attitudes. Can they work together?

My review - 

Police Sergeant Cyril Claydon sees a small plane crash into the sea. When it’s investigated, there’s a suspicious package next to the pilot – a plastic-wrapped body. It seems someone had been using this method to get rid of the bodies of murdered people. The local DI, John ‘Dick’ Barton is a man down after his detective sergeant had an accident, so Cyril is seconded into the group – with a horribly abrasive new boss in DI Barton.
 
I very much enjoyed the relationship between Barton and Cyril Claydon, especially the way it developed over the course of the book. For me, it was more interesting than the crime mystery, as I found that with such a large number of characters, some only briefly encountered, I kept losing track and mixing people up. I like to get to know each character, good and bad, and feel I have a grip on who is who. Some of them slipped passed as I blinked. Nevertheless, the story is well written and many of the relationships as they unfolded, bode well for the future. It's a jolly good read.

About the Author
David Evans is a Scots-born writer who found his true love as well as his inspiration for his detective series, set primarily in Wakefield. Having written all his life, in 2012 he decided to go for it – successfully as the next year, in 2013, he was shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger Award.
The Wakefield Series became an International Bestseller in June 2017 with success in Canada and Australia as well as the UK. But now, whilst the Wakefield Series awaits the next instalment, David Evans has written Disposal, the first in the Tendring Series, a completely new detective series set in north Essex in the 1970s.

Disposal is available here in the UK and here in the US.

​David's website is here.

The Village Nativity

​For years, vicar’s wife Helen had wanted to have a ‘live’ Nativity in church. Real people, maybe even a sheep – okay, camels were out – but something to make the villagers think that this had happened to ordinary folk like themselves. Had she been a vicar in her own right it would have happened, but Michael had been hard to persuade. Now, approaching their second Christmas in a Yorkshire farming village, she thought the idea worth resurrecting.
 
With a ‘not that again’ look, Michael shrugged. “Don’t bring me into it, but if you want to try for it at the carol service, give it a go. I’ll run it as a service of lessons and carols as usual but if you want real people instead of crib figures, that’s up to you.” That was as near as she was going to get to enthusiasm, so she supplied extra of her own.
 
Young Liz Morton had just had a baby boy, and little Tom was so good. She eagerly agreed to be Mary and to bring Tom along as Baby Jesus. Her husband wasn’t a church-goer so they’d found another chap to stand in as Joseph. At rehearsals, Helen asked them to take their places during the hymn Away in a Manger.
 
The Burns family at Oak Tree Farm had a pet lamb, imaginatively known as Lammie, and this massive, spoilt creature, accompanied by the older Burns boy, Jack, would approach and settle by the crib during While Shepherds Watched. Old George from the other end of the village usually brought Sally, his donkey, for Easter services. He said he’d accompany Little Donkey down the church aisle, though preferably not with Liz and baby Tom on her back. They might have to stray from the script a little in places.
 
Hark the Herald would see a couple of the children from the village school approach the crib, armed with tinsel crowns and stars on sticks. She was stuck for three kings until she remembered Dora King from Main Street who would no doubt be delighted to stand in for a trio of Magi. This was starting to come together.
 
The evening before the service, Helen was busy clearing space on the sanctuary, pushing the Christmas tree to the back, setting up chairs for Mary and Joseph and the wooden crib they usually used for the doll ‘Baby Jesus’. Michael was rehearsing his readers, trying, like the ex-teacher he was, to get them to put expression into old-fashioned wording and phrases they would never use in real life.
 
The Saturday evening before Christmas arrived, the church looked splendid decked in greenery and lit by candles, and to the processional hymn Once in Royal David’s City, the choir (three children and an elderly lady) came in, followed by Michael the vicar. He welcomed the unusually large congregation, many of whom only came here once a year to sing carols, and they began.
 
After the first reading, they sang O Little Town of Bethlehem and some of the children from the school brought in their painted backdrops of the city, fastening the pictures to the altar frontal to set the scene. Liz and the sleeping baby Tom took their places, with ‘Joseph’ whose usual connection to the place was that he cut the grass in the churchyard. Liz understandably continued holding her baby, rather than setting him down in the dusty straw in the crib.
 
The angels swept in managing to look both proud and embarrassed and wielding their stars a little threateningly for Helen’s liking, but soon settled down, holding them high in the imaginary firmament. Jack Burns dragged in the enormous Lammie with a dog’s collar and lead, letting her off by the cradle. Sally, the Little Donkey, clattered up the centre aisle and took her place to the right of the stable scene, distractedly nicking wisps of the hay which should have cradled the Holy Child. Mrs King came up part way through her carol, as she’d been trying vainly to get her son, Joel, to join her as a second king, but with that sullen half-sneer which teens the world over have perfected, he shook her off. Helen suspected he didn’t even want to be here.
 
Everything went so smoothly and every now and again, when an angel nudged and whispered to her companion, or baby Tom burped, a great ‘Aww!’ went up from the entranced congregation. Helen beamed from her seat at the end of the front pew.
 
Then she looked, horrified, at Lammie. Those were not spilt raisins on the floor behind her! As the big creature relieved herself, she snuffled in the face of the baby who awoke, startled, at the sight of what was demonstrably not a cute little baa-lamb sneezing at him. His cries were only stilled by Liz fumbling him under her Mary’s Blue Encompassing Gown for a feed as nature intended.
 
The choir broke into On Christmas Night all Christians Sing while Helen crept behind the increasingly chaotic scene with a dustpan and brush to remove the evidence of Lammie’s moment of crisis. Then, as the soaring notes of the last line, ‘Now and forever more, Amen!’ swept up into the rafters, an angel voice cried, “Euww! It’s doing a wee-wee!” and the rising steam showed Sally the donkey to have reached the end of her tether, so to speak.
 
Michael walked like a condemned man up the pulpit steps, thanked the giggling congregation for joining them and intoned the times of the Christmas services. He invited people to stay for cups of tea and coffee, hot mince pies and sweets for the children. As candles were snuffed and the lights went up, he put his elbows on the lectern and his head in his hands. Helen, dashing up with a mop and bucket, didn’t fail to notice.
 
George, deciding that Sally had outstayed her welcome, nodded a brief apology to Helen and dragged his charge by her bridle to the South Door, where they exited to begin the half-mile trot down Main Street to her home paddock. Seeing this movement of a fellow creature as permission to flee, Lammie stumped her way through the crowds, causing more than one cup of scalding tea to hit the ancient terracotta tiles of the aisle floor. Michael managed to grab her and Jack put the collar back on before more damage was done.
 
A surprisingly good-humoured crowd gathered at the back of the church as some of the ladies of the congregation continued handing out refreshments. They could hardly hear themselves above the animated chatter of a crowd who usually couldn’t wait to get home to their televisions. Helen had removed the weaponised stars from the angels but they began pushing one another in the queue for sweets, so their mothers, with a professional combination of threats and bribery, swept them apart. Then there was a loud cry.
 
Almost giving herself whiplash, Helen turned to see where the anguished voice had come from. She suspected Lammie of running amok again and was about to yell for Jack. This time, Lammie was innocent! Jane, the heavily pregnant half of the couple who ran the post office was leaning back in her pew, holding her distended belly. “It’s coming!” she shouted. Helen and a couple of other ladies rushed to her aid, but were elbowed aside by Dr Gordon, still so called though he’d retired several years back.
 
“Why didn’t you say anything earlier?” he asked. “You’ve been in labour for some time.”
 
“What? And miss a show like this?” She began to stand but was wracked with another contraction.
 
“Can we get her next door? Then ring an ambulance,” the doctor suggested, referring to the vicarage as a place they could take Jane, and even maybe deliver the baby if the ambulance didn’t get a wriggle on.
 
“Looks like we could have had a real live birth in the stable,” Helen said, helping Jane and Dr Gordon through the milling crowd and out to her home just a few yards along the path. When she returned, three quarters of an hour later, she was surprised to see that most of the congregation were still there, sitting in the pews, brewing more tea and coffee and chatting. Lammie was making a decent living hoovering up fallen bits of mince pie and intimidating some of the more sensitive children into dropping sweets.
 
“Well?” asked Vera, the organist.
 
“It’s a girl!”
 
“No use for a Baby Jesus, then.” Vera looked personally insulted by the news.
 
Helen, sitting back on a pew, exhausted, accepted a cup of tea from one of the helpers. “Blimey,” she said, then looked around, not sure, even after all these years as a vicar’s wife, if it was an acceptable thing to say in church. “I don’t remember an evening like it. And all these people!”
 
The place was alive. The carol service wasn’t like their usual, sparsely attended services. People came this one night of the year just because they loved to sing the old carols, songs they’d sung in their own, innocent childhoods. Yet people who’d come here this evening as virtual strangers left in chatting groups, like old friends. Her tired smile carried over the crowds to her husband.
 
“We did well tonight, didn’t we?” he said. “Eventually!”
 
“We did.”
 
As she finished her tea, Josh King slapped her enthusiastically on the back. “Hey, Missus! That was well sick!”
 
“I’m sorry?”
 
“He means it was very good indeed,” his mother pronounced, mock-slapping him on the head as they passed.
 
“Yeah,” he said, ducking another swipe from his mother’s hand. “I reckon it’d be a crime if you din’t do it again next year!”

Blog Tour - Tall Chimneys by Allie Cresswell

What's the book about?

Considered a troublesome burden, Evelyn Talbot is banished by her family to their remote country house. Tall Chimneys is hidden in a damp and gloomy hollow. It is outmoded and inconvenient but Evelyn is determined to save it from the fate of so many stately homes at the time - abandonment or demolition. 
Occasional echoes of tumult in the wider world reach their sequestered backwater - the strident cries of political extremists, a furore of royal scandal, rumblings of the European war machine. But their isolated spot seems largely untouched. At times life is hard - little more than survival. At times it feels enchanted, almost outside of time itself. The woman and the house shore each other up - until love comes calling, threatening to pull them asunder. 
Her desertion will spell its demise, but saving Tall Chimneys could mean sacrificing her hope for happiness, even sacrificing herself. 
A century later, a distant relative crosses the globe to find the house of his ancestors. What he finds in the strange depression of the moor could change the course of his life forever. 
One woman, one house, one hundred years.


My review - 

Tall Chimneys is the name of a big country house in Yorkshire. Our tale is narrated by Evelyn, youngest child of the family, born in the early part of the 20th century. She loses both parents when young and is brought up by an older sister for the most part. She then returns to the family home and ends up effectively as housekeeper and caretaker. She’s reluctant to leave and go out into the world, partly because she has no skills other than those of looking after a crumbling mansion, and partly because her irregular relationship and illegitimate child cause her to feel ashamed to face the wider world.
 
This is a tour de force of a novel. It’s an epic which brings in a great deal of the history of the last century. The story arc sweeps from the first world war, though the second and into present times, meeting with many a historic figure on the way, the King and Mrs Simpson, Mosely, Diana Mitford and others. There are some hugely sympathetic figures, one particular monstrous character, and we see all of it through the eyes of one woman. Some of what she sees, she misinterprets, which enriches the story, for me. This was a gripping read which I heartily recommend.

​About the author

Allie Cresswell was born in Stockport, UK and began writing fiction as soon as she could hold a pencil.
Allie recalls: 'I was about 8 years old. Our teacher asked us to write about a family occasion and I launched into a detailed, harrowing and entirely fictional account of my grandfather's funeral. I think he died very soon after I was born; certainly I have no memory of him and definitely did not attend his funeral, but I got right into the details, making them up as I went along (I decided he had been a Vicar, which I spelled 'Vice'). My teacher obviously considered this outpouring very good bereavement therapy so she allowed me to continue with the story on several subsequent days, and I got out of maths and PE on a few occasions before I was rumbled.'
She went on to do a BA in English Literature at Birmingham University and an MA at Queen Mary College, London.
She has been a print-buyer, a pub landlady, a book-keeper, run a B & B and a group of boutique holiday cottages. Nowadays Allie writes full time having retired from teaching literature to lifelong learners.
She has two grown-up children, one granddaughter and two grandsons, is married to Tim and divides her time between Cheshire and Cumbria.

You can buy Tall Chimeys from here in the UK or here in the US.

Blog Tour - You're Next by Michael Fowler

The Blurb - what's it about?

It is the opening day of Detective Sergeant Scarlett Macey’s biggest case of her life – ‘The Lycra Rapist’ is standing trial for a series of brutal rapes.
But things don’t go according to plan – the trial collapses – and James Green is freed.
Scarlett is determined his freedom will not last long and immediately begins planning his downfall.
Meanwhile James Green has his own plans for revenge, and driven by feelings of hatred begins to pick out those who brought about his downfall – priming them for the kill. 
Scarlett has faced many villains in the past, but never one quite as terrifying as James Green…


My review - 

Scarlett Macey is a detective sergeant with a mission. A rapist has been freed and his victims denied justice because they were afraid to testify. Scarlett wants to catch him and put him away. Colleagues of hers are having a hard time of it at the moment and the team are pulled apart in different ways. She feels she’s being stalked but her superior denies there’s evidence. It’s going to be an up-hill struggle for her but she’s determined. But then, so is he.
 
I found this an instant draw. We can all imagine what it’s like to know someone is guilty and not just fail to get a conviction, but to see him flaunting your lack of success. This is one of those books you have to keep reading. The characters were interesting and interacted well. I wished them the best, though it didn’t always happen. It’s gritty stuff but a darned good read.

The author
​
Following retirement, after thirty-two years as a police officer, working mainly as a detective, Michael returned to the deadly business of murder, as a writer. His past work brought him very close to some nasty characters, including psychopaths, and gruesome cases, and he draws on that experience to craft his novels: There is nothing gentle about Michael’s stories.

His landmark novel Heart of the Demon, published in 2012, introduced Detective Sergeant Hunter Kerr. Michael has since written five novels and a novella featuring Kerr.  He also released the first DS Scarlett Macey book in 2016. Michael is also the author of a stand-alone crime novella and a true crime thriller.

Michael Fowler has another side to his life – a passion for art, and has found considerable success as an artist, receiving numerous artistic accolades. Currently, his oil paintings can be found in the galleries of Spencer Coleman Fine Arts.  

He is a member of the Crime Writers Association and International Thriller Writers.

Social Media Links:
Website: www.mjfowler.co.uk
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MichaelFowler1

You can buy your copy here or in the US, here.

Blog Tour - No Bodies by Robert Crouch

What's the book all about? Here's the product description.

Why would environmental health officer, Kent Fisher, show any interest in finding Daphne Witherington, the missing wife of a longstanding family friend? The police believe she ran off with Colin Miller, a rather dubious caterer, and Kent has problems of his own when a young girl who visits his animal sanctuary is rushed to hospital.

When enquiries into Colin Miller reveal a second missing wife, Kent picks up a trail that went cold over a year ago. But he’s struggling to find a connection between the women, even when he discovers a third missing wife.

Is there a killer on the loose in Downland?

With no motive, no connection and no bodies, Kent may never uncover the truth.

​You can buy it here.

Here's my review - and a bit about the author, Robert Crouch.

​Kent Fisher, is once again on the trail of a murderer. The problem is, there are missing women, but no bodies. Colonel Witherington, a local bigwig, has charged Kent with finding his missing wife Daphne, or bringing her murderer to justice. As the investigation progresses, Kent discovers links between the missing women and sets off to find justice. Meanwhile, he himself, or at least, his animal sanctuary, may be implicated in another tragedy. He gets in deeper, and doesn’t help himself by his attitude to his boss.
 
This is the second Kent Fisher mystery and follows directly on from the first, No Accident. I think you really need to read the first, as this would be confusing as a stand-alone. A little more explanation of who people are when they first appear in the book would help new readers. Having said that, this is equally refreshing, set as it is around the investigations of an environmental health officer, rather than a police officer. Kent Fisher is a warm, stubborn and occasionally hopeless character whom I couldn’t fail to warm to. The author handles his writing deftly and the story is very funny, witty and full of sharp observations. I really enjoy this series and look forward to more.

​The author - 

Inspired by Miss Marple, Inspector Morse and Columbo, Robert Crouch wanted to write entertaining crime fiction the whole family could enjoy.
At their heart is Kent Fisher, an environmental health officer with more baggage than an airport carousel. Passionate about the environment, justice and fair play, he's soon embroiled in murder.
Drawing on his experiences as an environmental health officer, Robert has created a new kind of detective who brings a unique and fresh twist to the traditional murder mystery. With complex plots, topical issues and a liberal dash of irreverent humour, the Kent Fisher mysteries offer an alternative to the standard police procedural.
Robert now writes full time and lives on the South Coast of England with his wife and their West Highland White Terrier, Harvey, who appears in the novels as Kent’s sidekick, Columbo.

​Robert's website is here and this is where you can find his author page on Amazon.

Author Chat - Will Macmillan Jones

Today I'm chatting to the Welsh wordsmith Will Macmillan Jones, author of many books in a wide variety of genres. He's just published a new horror book. Timely!

Tell me, Will, have you always been interested in horror as a genre? Did you read it in your younger days?
 
When I was just teenage, I discovered Dennis Wheatley. I wasn’t supposed to, of that I am sure; but the books were in my Grandfather’s library and my parents did not really monitor what I read. So I devoured those, and enjoyed the vibe that they created. A little later came Lovecraft, which was of course much harder going, then Poe and Stoker, Le Fanu, Shelley… so yes, I suppose. I read very widely, across a lot of genres though and so my bookcases are full of not just horror and fantasy, but humour, philosophy, detective novels, thrillers, espionage, humour, historical, adventure, real life adventure… I could go on but won’t.

 I was a Wheatley fan myself back in my teens. I've occasionally wondered, is the Mr Jones in your horror series really you? He’s not a ghost or demon hunter but evil things seem to accrete around him. Do bad things happen to you?
 
No, he isn’t me. Or at least, he wasn’t ever planned to be. He is himself: someone with a Karmic burden to work off. An unlikely, middle-aged unheroic hero, as one reviewer called him. The latest book, Demon’s Reach, reveals a little about his family’s past that explains why Darkness seems to gather so easily around him. The final book in his collection will resolve this for him, one way or another.  I haven’t decided if he will survive the final confrontation yet, or pass on to a less stressful incarnation.
 
I started out in The Showing with Mister Jones actually being a secondary character. The main character was, of course, the House itself and its non-corporeal inhabitant. Mister Jones was the foil for the House. It is the same in Portrait of a Girl. The eponymous Girl is the focus of the book, and her choice of Mister Jones as her life enhancing victim was a coincidence. Of course it was always more than that.
 
As for me? Well, I am rather hoping that the arrival two years ago of my new partner has been a turning point that shows I have worked off loads of my bad karma. There’s been enough of it to go at, it would seem.  And as I have openly said, the house in The Showing actually is my Grandfather’s house, and there is an extent to which that book was the direct result of my trying to find an explanation for the events I experienced there in my childhood. With a couple of added killings that I don’t recall myself. But then, childhood memories are notoriously incomplete.
 
Do you have any belief in an after -life? It seems necessary to believe in the persistence of the human soul after death if you’re going to get hauntings, doesn’t it?
 
As a Buddhist, I’m actually a firm believer in reincarnation, so that’s a ‘No’ to the afterlife in the Western Philosophical sense. But that does not preclude the idea of life-force persisting after death or returning in other forms. Many writers argue that after death, the atman (soul is the closest Western equivalent) exists for forty days in a form of limbo before rebirth. This in itself opens possibilities, and I see no reason why in certain circumstances this limbo state should not persist a little longer… Then  Buddhism itself is full of many wonderful and esoteric demons, gods and beings with different natures to us humans you know! But as a writer, I am working not just with my own beliefs but with the cultural references of the society I’m living in. Revenants, ghosts, tormented souls trapped within places and/or objects – all these are ideas that my imagination can work with and reference points that I can use to trigger an anticipated range of responses from the readers.
 
I never forget that the point of these novels is to entertain, after all: so any and every cultural reference is available to me. The Curse of Clyffe House introduces a monster from an ancient world, as portrayed in The Mabinogion. A rich vein of material for any paranormal enthusiast.
 
Tell us about the other genres you write in.
 
If I am known at all, which is entirely unlikely, it is probably for my comic fantasy collection The Banned Underground. This collection deals with the adventures of a fantasy rhythm and blues band, and the witches, wizards, elves, dwarfs and assorted magical beings that they meet on the road. This lets me tell lots and lots of gags and thoroughly enjoy myself caricaturing many of the musician friends and acquaintances I have and hang around with. The more recent books have all had a somewhat deeper point to them, too, which may or may not have been apparent to the casual reader.
 
In addition, I am a performing poet and oral storyteller working around the Valleys and coast of South Wales, and some of that work seems – almost by osmosis- into my books.
 
I also have a couple of fantasy books for young children out, with the firm intention of writing a few more of these. But I have to say that writing for that age group is much harder than anything else that I have done!

What are you working on at the moment?
 
I have some Sci fi novels in the final stages of preparation, the eighth book in The Banned Underground comic fantasy collection is coming along very nicely, and a further paranormal story – not involving poor Mister Jones – is also half written. In addition I have outlines for a further three books, one of which is quite heavily fleshed out! And I use that term with careful consideration. And that’s all the teaser you are going to get right now about that one. Hehehehehe.
 
In my Dreams
I wander the wide lands of Death
Hoping
That my return ticket is still valid.
 
(Write what you know, they say. Do you think that I might be in trouble?)
​
I hope not! Otherwise a lot of authors will be in there with you!

Thanks for answering all those questions, Will.

You can find Will's Amazon page here and his new book, Demon's Reach is available here.
And here's the cover and blurb.
​
​All families have secrets or skeletons in the cupboard, hidden away from view. Most of those secrets are better left undisturbed, for very good reasons. When Mister Jones agrees to deal with the Estate of a recently deceased cousin, he finds that the secrets hidden by his family are very dark indeed, and that the skeletons in this cupboard are very real – and not yet entirely dead.

Drawn once more by Fate into a world where magic and myth are all too real and danger lurks at every turn, Mister Jones confronts a past that seeks again to become the present, and to plunge his future into a rising Darkness.

Can he escape the Demon’s Reach?

The making of The Novice's Demon

I don't know for sure how other writers work but I usually get an idea, start writing the story, and only when it's well along do I begin to think about a cover. The Novice's Demon was written the other way round. 

We'd been on holiday in May and I'd been snapping views to send to friends and family as 'ecards' -  emails with a photo attached. A coach tour brought us to the Somerset village of Dunster, where I photographed a grotesque head decorating an archway at Dunster Priory.



My clever friend Jonathan Hill emailed back to say 'Book Cover'! As he designs my covers, I gave this a lot of thought. I wanted to base the story around the image, and what that might convey to a medieval mind. I grabbed the word demonic and ran with it. It was obviously only going to be a short story as I was basing it around one event.

I wanted to explore the differences between superstition and science as ways of looking at the world. I have my characters trying to explain what was happening to a young girl living an ascetic life, at the age when she might be most susceptible to suggestion and/or hysteria. The reader, of course, has modern science to interpret things - but it isn't always able to do so. We still can't explain some supernatural events to everybody's satisfaction. I leave it to the reader. What happened? 
​ Details on Amazon

Blog Tour - The Fallen Agent by Oliver Tidy

The book - 
​ Jess Albion has recently started a new life on the other side of the world with a new identity. She used to be MI5. Then a job went bad, someone died and she was made an example of in the British courts. But MI5 look after their own. Or they did until rumours of a planned Al Qaeda biological terror attack on London started circulating. Now someone in the British security services is giving agents up in return for information. No price, it seems, is too high to save London from the ultimate threat.
When Jess’s fresh start is compromised she has a choice to make: run and hide and spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder or go looking for the threat and snuff it out. On her own, she’d run, but she has Nick on her side.
The Fallen Agent is a story of love and hate, of loyalty and betrayal, of revenge and all that goes with it.
​
You can buy it here in the UK or here in the US.
​ The Author -
​
Crime writing author Oliver Tidy has had a life-long love affair with books. He dreams of one day writing something that he could find in a beautifully-jacketed hard-cover or paperback copy on a shelf in a book shop. He’d even be happy with something taking up space in the remainder bin, on a pavement, in the rain, outside The Works.
He found the time and opportunity to finally indulge his writing ambition after moving abroad to teach English as a foreign language to young learners eight years ago.  
Impatient for success and an income that would enable him to stay at home all day in his pyjamas he discovered self-publishing. He gave it go. By and large readers have been kind to him. Very kind. Kind enough that two years ago he was able to give up the day job and write full-time. Mostly in his pyjamas.
Oliver Tidy has fourteen books in three series, a couple of stand-alone novels and a couple of short story collections. All available through Amazon. Among his books are The Romney and Marsh Files (British police procedurals set in Dover) and the Booker & Cash novels, a series of private detective tales set in the south of England and published by Bloodhound Books.
Oliver is back living on Romney Marsh in the UK. His home. He still wakes in the night from time to time shouting about seeing his books on a shelf in Waterstones.

My review - 

​They say there’s honour among thieves but there doesn’t seem to be much in the world of the secret service. Someone high up in Vauxhall Cross is sacrificing agents to save his own job. Add in Al Qaeda, a rich Albanian, unfeasible amounts of money and the threat of a terrorist attack on London and you have the ingredients for an exciting thriller.
 
The characters are well-drawn, with good points and flaws to make them three-dimensional and believable. There are several high-octane points in the story which keep it bouncing along, making you wonder what can possibly happen next. The author vividly portrays the setting of the book – much of it in Albania. Altogether, this is a top notch spy thriller which I have no hesitation in recommending. 

​You can find Oliver's Amazon author page here and his Facebook page here.

Blog Tour - No Accident - Robert Crouch

The Book - No Accident

Nothing happens by accident, according to Kent Fisher, an environmental health officer with more baggage than an airport carousel. When he ignores a restraining order to investigate the death of Syd Collins in a work accident at Tombstone Adventure Park, he clashes with the owner, playboy millionaire, Miles Birchill, who has his own reasons to block the investigation.
Determined to uncover the truth, Kent casts aside procedure and defies suspension when he becomes convinced that Collins’ death is no accident.
But as Kent rushes to identify the killer and prevent more deaths, he faces even more unpleasant surprises when his professional and private worlds collide with devastating consequences.
Set in and around the beautiful South Downs of East Sussex, No Accident is the first novel in a new series that brings a fresh and irreverent twist to the traditional whodunit.


My review -

I do love a book that’s different, and this one is, in buckets! At one level, it’s a standard murder mystery, but at another, there are no police in sight. The man of the hour, Kent Fisher, is an Environmental Health Officer. He’s investigating a suspicious death in which a vital guard has been moved from a machine. He suspects it’s no accident and digs up a whole nest of hornets as he follows his instincts.
 
I enjoyed this hugely. Kent is an environmentalist, keeps a money-draining animal sanctuary and longs for a lady he can’t have. There’s lots going on in this book, plenty of characters and you need your wits about you. There’s also, considering the subject, a great deal of humour, sometimes witty, sometimes sarcastic and it acts like yeast in a bread mix. Lightens it and makes it wholesome. I have a new fictional hero! I very much enjoyed this story and look forward to the next.

The Author - Robert Crouch

​Inspired by Miss Marple, Inspector Morse and Columbo, Robert Crouch wanted to write entertaining crime fiction the whole family could enjoy.
At their heart is Kent Fisher, an environmental health officer. Passionate about the environment, justice and fair play, he's soon embroiled in murder.
Drawing on his own experiences as an environmental health officer, Robert has created a new kind of detective who brings a unique and fresh twist to the traditional murder mystery. With complex plots, topical issues and a liberal dash of irreverent humour, the Kent Fisher mysteries offer an alternative to the standard police procedural.
Robert now writes full time and lives on the South Coast of England with his wife and their West Highland White Terrier, Harvey, who appears in the novels as Kent’s sidekick, Columbo.


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I wondered how the author came up with the idea of using an environmental health officer as an investigator. Having worked in the field himself, Robert has plenty of experience to draw on, of course. He says, ‘During my many years working for a rural district council, I investigated at least seven fatal work accidents, which goes to show the countryside is anything but dull and uninteresting. It didn’t take much of a leap of the imagination to disguise a murder as a workplace accident, allowing an EHO to investigate.’

There's more to worry about than a dirty café, then!

​You can find the book on Amazon UK here 
or on Amazon.com here

Happy reading!