Frances di Plino's Blog, page 6

Review of The Tenth Chamber

The Tenth Chamber by Glenn Cooper will be enjoyed by those who enjoy their thrillers interwoven with centuries-old secrets, hidden manuscripts, mysterious events echoing through the ages and such like, rather than a straightforward who dunnit and why. Not that there isn’t plenty of death in this book – quite the opposite as the characters are dropping like flies in some sections.
The story centres on the finding of a hidden cave in France containing secrets known only to the local villagers and (not a plot spoiler, I promise) also to the French government. A rare and beautifully illustrated manuscript is discoveredafter a fire in a monastery. The abbot calls in Hugo, a restorer of ancient books, to repair water damage sustained when the fire was put out.

It transpires that book was written centuries earlier by a previous occupant of the abbey, Barthomieu, who claims to be more than two hundred years old. Considering the book was written in code to hide the secrets uncovered during his lifetime, it rather strangely contains a map giving directions to the cave where most of the events take place. Hmm. A bit of a plot device, methinks.
The restorer, in turn, calls on his archaeologist friend, Luc, to help him discover the cave illustrated in the manuscript. As already mentioned, much of the book is written in code, so they send it away to an expert to be deciphered and we are drip-fed sections throughout the novel to coincide with present day happenings.
After following the map and finding the cave, Hugo and Luc persuade the department of culture to fund a research project. It is at this point the bodies start to pile up.
Much of the detail is held back deliberately on the author’s part to build suspense, but unfortunately I found the premise to be a bit contrived. I didn’t fully believe in the storyline of the past, or the events of the present day, but despite that, The Tenth Chamber makes for an entertaining read.
I’m not sure I’d rush out to grab another of his books, but neither did I fling this one across the room in disgust, as I have with other novels of this nature.

Ten facts about … Oliver Tidy

When did you first realise you wanted to be a writer?The seed was planted about ten years ago. It took a while to germinate. Living in the UK, with all my responsibilities there, I could rarely find the time to sit down and have a go. On the few occasions I did, I remember feeling guilty about wasting my time on a fancy when there was work to do. Moving to Turkey five years ago and finding myself suddenly responsibility free gave me the freedom to have a bash.
How long does it take you to write a book?Typically, three months to finish the first draft and have it printed off for the red pen. But I wrote one book in two months and one of those was February. Go me.
What is your work schedule like when you're writing?I work full-time and have a three year old son who makes Forest Gump look like a couch potato. (Did I say I’m now responsibility free?) So, I do most of my writing between nine and midnight.
How many crime novels have you written?All of my books have crime in them. I currently have seven novels self-published and one first draft finished. I’m no mathematician but I make that eight.
Which is your favourite and why?A Dog’s Life (R&M#4). I had so much fun writing it. I laughed a lot. I still do.
Where do you get your ideas?I got the idea for Rope Enough (R&M#1) from a Hitchcock film. Nuff said. As for the other books, I once commented to a friend, rather pompously, that ‘I think through my finger tips’. You mean you make it up as you go along, he said. He was right. [See my review of Rope Enough here.]
Who is your favourite character from your own work and why?DI Romney. He is not the character I like the most but he is my favourite for the opportunities he gives me as a writer. None of my other characters gives me the chance to make them look so bad, so cynical, so misanthropic, so shallow, so funny (without meaning to be). But he’s basically a good copper. And he collects first editions, just like me.
Which character from the work of others do you wish you’d invented and why?Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin from the Patrick O’Brian novels. (I know that’s two but, a bit like Morecombe & Wise, The Two Ronnies, and that other famous comic double act Clegg & Cameron you can’t have one without the other.) If I could invent characters like them I’d know I was a brilliant writer.
If you could have been someone from history involved in crime (good or bad) who would that be and why?Simon Cowell. Some of the things that have come out of his stable have been truly criminal and he seems to have done all right out of it. And they say crime doesn’t pay.
What are you working on now?I’m editing the third in my Acer Sansom series, which looks like being called Smoke & Mirrors, and writing the second in my Booker & Cash series, which I might call, He Made Me. Then again, I might not. Things change.
BioI left teaching in the UK for Istanbul, Turkey in 2009 looking for change. And then I started writing. I can’t seem to stop.
I currently teach English as a foreign language to young Turkish learners. It’s not a hard life and it’s not a bad one. The weather is generally better, too.
I blog at: http://olivertidy.wordpress.com/I tweet at: https://twitter.com/olivertidy
Amazon Author Page
The Romney and Marsh Files#1 Rope Enough#2 Making a Killing#3 Joint Enterprise#4 A Dog’s Life
Acer Sansom Novels#1 Dirty Business#2 Loose Ends#3 Smoke and Mirrors (nearly there)
Booker & Cash Stories#1 Bad Sons

Exciting times for Bad Moon Rising

On Wednesday evening I’ll be attending a black tie dinner at the Worshipful Company of Stationers & Newspapers Makers, a fabulous guild building near St Paul’s Cathedral. The reason for being there is the fact that Bad Moon Rising , the first in the series to feature D.I. Paolo Storey, has made the final of the People’s Book Prize.
Voting is underway at the moment to decide on the top three places and I would (naturally) love Bad Moon Rising to take one of those coveted three spots.
If you would like to vote for Bad Moon Rising as your choice for the award, you can do so by clicking here, or by clicking on the People’s Book Prize icon situated on the left of this post.
Voting closes at 10 am on Wednesday morning, so please don’t leave it too long to head over there.

Review of Crimson Shore

I am an avid fan of Gillian Hamer’s cross-genre novels, so was a little concerned that I might not enjoy a standard police procedural as much as her earlier books. I needn’t have worried – Crimson Shore couldn’t be described as standard in any sense of the word. The storyline is intriguing and the characters come to life to such an extent that I wanted to slap one of them (Dara) on more than one occasion. The fact that I was so annoyed shows the power of Ms Hamer’s writing.
Crimson Shore is the first in The Gold Detectives series. Detective Inspector Amanda Gold being the eponymous Gold in the series’ title. She is pushed by her unpleasant superior, DCI Idris Parry, into allowing Detective Sergeant Dara Brennan to take over a murder investigation, with her providing back up.
We know from the outset that the killer is linked to a children’s home which closed under mysterious circumstances many years earlier. What we don’t know is who the killer might be, or why the murders are taking place now.
Dara is not emotionally equipped to deal with his new-found responsibility. His marriage is on the rocks, he’s drinking to excess and he is powerfully attracted to a colleague, all of which impact on his judgement. However, for all that, he is a very likeable character. My reasons for wanting to slap him were kindly ones. I wanted him to succeed and stop sabotaging his own efforts.
The story is set on the island of Anglesey and so well-crafted are the descriptions, it was easy to picture the scene. At times I could almost feel the wind coming off the sea.
Ms Hamer clearly knows her way around the forensic department, as she allows her characters to reveal key clues through dialogue over the dead bodies. As both bodies and clues mount, and Dara goes into meltdown, the story races to its fabulous conclusion. This is another winner from the pen of Gillian Hamer.

What fits a Crime shelf?

When a reader goes to the Crime section of a bookstore, they might have very specific aims that they’re seeking for within the genre. They may be looking for detective fiction as in your own stories of D.I. Paolo Storey (Frances di Plino), or some of the other Crooked Cat Publishing hard-boiled police oriented novels like those about D.C.I. Marc Craig by Catriona King. However, they may prefer something with lighter undertones in a cosy armchair ‘whodunit’ – perhaps like David Robinson’s Crooked Cat STAC Mysteries. Some readers will only veer towards the dark thriller type of novel where the psychological and motivation aspects are prime elements of the crime plot. It may be the courtroom drama type they’re looking for in the post crime phase, or perhaps an international political thriller like Crooked Cat’s Deep Deception by James North, which has pivotal elements of conspiracy and assassination.
If a crime story only needs a crime to be committed then there are so many possibilities for the author. That means there are other stories out there which include criminal offences - but do they grace the crime shelves?
In Topaz Eyes - my dynasty based mystery/ thriller - the plot centres on a very complex mystery, but the unravelling of the story also involves a number of different criminal acts. Based on a family tree structure to many levels beyond the original matriarch, there’s a huge amount of distrust amongst third generation cousins. Under dubious conditions, the cousins are brought together to solve the mystery of a missing family jewellery collection, and another priceless mystery item - the mystery within the mystery. The incredible set of emerald jewels, once owned by a Mughal emperor, was last seen in 1910 and is believed to have been dished out to family members under shady circumstances. Like all deep mysteries, there are very few clues to begin with and initial deduction powers are brought into serious play. So is Topaz Eyes then a detective mystery?  It is, though the unearthing isn’t done by a team of police detectives. However, there is a lovely Amsterdam police detective involved in the later stages of the novel when international crimes are investigated. There are some grand thefts involved in the story; there’s a mystery stalker on the loose harassing the protagonists. Murder is not crossed off the list as the main characters move from city to city during their world-wide hunt. So, is it an international crime thriller based on grand theft? That could be a matter of debate, since there are fabulous city locations and lots of thrills along the way.
In addition, there’s also a romantic plot underpinning the story as Keira Drummond and Teun Zeger pair up during the hunt. Does that mean that Topaz Eyes should be on the romance shelves? No, because the relationship develops as part of the plot but it isn’t the central element.
So where does Topaz Eyes fit on the crime shelves? I wonder if you could tell me. I don’t think it matters though, if what you’re looking for is a fast-paced crime-laced mystery with thrills and spills along the way. An Amazon reviewer has this to say: “…This is a skilfully paced and plotted novel, in which the various story-lines only come together at the very end.” Topaz Eyes is a finalist for THE PEOPLE’S BOOK PRIZE 2014.
Nancy Jardine’s Amazon UK author page: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nancy-Jardine/e/B005IDBIYG/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0; and on Amazon.com http://amzn.to/RJZzZz
Topaz Eyes is available in paperback and ebook formats from: Amazon UK  http://amzn.to/UtLexa  Amazon UShttp://amzn.to/RhRWK1Crooked Cat Bookstorehttp://bit.ly/12NR4z5Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/261511  Barnes And Noble:http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/topaz-eyes-nancy-jardine/1114043380?ean=2940045141697Waterstones: http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/nancy+jardine/topaz+eyes/9528337/Youtube trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgPf5kTAyi4&feature=channel&list=UL
Bio: Nancy Jardine lives in Aberdeenshire, a great part of Scotland, where fantastic sites to visit -ancient and modern -are just a step away. She loves her extended family to be around her, though that can often be chaotic and noisy when get-togethers are arranged.
Her writing time is squeezed in between messy garden jobs to tidy up unruly foliage; child minding her fabulous grandchildren on a regular basis; reading for leisure and to review for other authors. She only occasionally cooks and almost never uses the iron so it’s just as well that her husband is sometimes a great cook. She regularly posts on her two blogs - for her own purposes; and to help with the promotions of other authors. Presently she’s trying to wean herself from too much Facebooking, but is not sure she’s successful.
You can find Nancy Jardine at her -Blog: http://nancyjardine.blogspot.com;  -Website: http://nancyjardineauthor.weebly.comFacebook: http://on.fb.me/1hLgWT7Twitter: @nansjar : Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/nanjar/  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=139824397&trk=nav_responsive_tab_profileGoodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5139590.Nancy_JardineGoogle+
Thank you for the opportunity to visit today, and I look forward to any questions or advice. J

Review of Rope Enough

Oliver Tidy’s books appear on the first page of the Amazon.com “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” lists of all three of my D.I. Paolo Storey novels, so I thought I’d take a look at one of his books, which I suppose shows that form of Amazon advertising works! Anyway, I like to start with the first in a series, so downloaded Rope Enough, which is the first of the Romney and Marsh Files.
I’ve read a fair amount of self-published fiction recently – most of it really dire and deleted from my kindle long before the end. In many of the novels, not only do I not care who dunnit, but I don’t care who they dunnit to or why. The writing is often turgid, the plots transparent and the characters so wooden they should be broken down into pulp for paper.
What a pleasure it was, therefore, to start reading Rope Enough and find I wanted to read on. The plot is sufficiently intriguing. The characters are true enough to life that you can care about them and the overall effect was to make me want to read the next in the series.
This is not to say the book was perfect in every respect – Mr Tidy makes the point at the end that he is constantly learning. Given how much I enjoyed this offering, I can only say that he is going to be a name to reckon with if he improves on what is already a considerable talent.
Give his books a try. I think you’ll be glad you did.Oliver Tidy Amazon UKOliver Tidy Amazon Worldwide

Ten facts about ... Gunnar Angel Lawrence

When did you first realise you wanted to be a writer?I’ve been writing since I was in elementary school and wanted to be a writer from junior high on. I enjoyed writing science fiction, mystery and fantasy type books. I’ve been reading since I was 18 months old, yeah, not exaggerating there. I read everything I could get my hands on and when I was out of stuff to read, I wrote stories. I used it as an escape from a rather tragic, dull existence and still prefer my world of make believe.
How long does it take you to write a book?That depends on the book; it took a year and a half to write Fair Play and two years to write The Perfect Day . There was a lot more research to that one as it is based in a lot of fact. The follow up book is entitled The Consortium and I haven’t even begun a tenth of the research I need to do on that one.
What is your work schedule like when you're writing?I spend 8 to 12 hours a day when in full blown writing mode. My day job allows me a few hours here and there and I do what I can when I can. But in getting ready for a deadline, I’ll write like a madman.
How many crime novels have you written?I spent a few years as a ghost-writer. So the only crime novels I can claim are the ones I did with my own name on them. That would be two. Fair Play and The Perfect Day . There are other books with my name on them in a variety of genres, but I am trying to focus more on the crime-thriller genre books.
Which is your favourite and why?My favourite is always the latest one. I am especially proud of the work that went into The Perfect Day  as it is more than double the word count and size as Fair Play and there is action from page one to the end. The Perfect Day is about a terrorist attack-plan that was discovered during the invasion of Iraq. It is an actual plot where embedded terrorist cells in America rise up on one day and perform horrendous attacks on soft targets. One of the thoughts that drove this book is what would happen if ONE of those targets was my home city of Orlando, Florida.
Where do you get your ideas?I get my ideas from current events, the news. Fair Play was born out of the whole Casey Anthony trial and asks the question: How does an attorney live with themselves when their job is to free a guilty person. How is justice served when criminals are allowed to be released on to the general population to kill or rape again?
Who is your favourite character from your own work and why?I love all my characters, even the villains. My favourite character though has to be Monica Quinn who is a Certified Fraud Examiner. She gets into the picture by tracing the accounting that financed the terrorist attacks. She is a single mom of an autistic son and has the same struggles that a lot of single parents do.
Which character from the work of others do you wish you’d invented and why?I’d have to say Hannibal Lecter, but only because that series of books is one of my favourites. He is a perfect villain, and I would have loved to hear the inner voices that were speaking when he was created.
If you could have been someone from history involved in crime (good or bad) who would that be and why?I would have liked to have been the first person to ever use a computer to hack into a bank and steal all the money without ever needing to ‘rob’ anyone. Move to a country with no extradition treaty and spend all my remaining years on a beach sipping bright fruity drinks.


What are you working on now?The Consortium is the follow up to The Perfect Day and addresses the very serious and real issue of human trafficking in the United States. As it turns out, Central Florida is a major hub of human trafficking crimes worldwide. I am hoping to have it released in 2015. 
BioAfter years of ghost-writing thrillers, conspiracy novels and mystery books, Gunnar Angel Lawrence has published his second thriller. He is the author of Fair Play and the sequel The Perfect Day . He is a native Floridian with a love for writing thrillers, mysteries and action stories with fast pacing and a unique twist. He lives in Saint Cloud, Florida with his dogs and is currently single. Most of his time is spent working on the sequel to The Perfect Day which is entitled, The Consortium.
Fair Play The Perfect Day
http://gunnarangellawrence.blogspot.com/https://www.facebook.com/gunnarangel.lawrencehttps://twitter.com/GunnarALawrenceAmazon author pagehttps://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6445679.Gunnar_Angel_Lawrence

Looking for Crime and/or Thriller Writers

Do you write crime (cosy or hard-boiled) and/or thrillers? Would you like to feature on this blog in an interview? As long as at least one of your novels has ten or more five star reviews on either Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com, I would love to host you on my Ten Facts About page.
It’s good exposure for you as an author and helps to promote your novels. I tweet the posts on a regular basis and also promote the interviews on Facebook.
What have you got to lose? Nothing. What have you got to gain? New followers, new readers and more sales.
What are you waiting for? Send an email with Ten Facts About in the subject line to: frances@lorrainemace.com

Review of The Gods of Guilt

Michael Connelly’s Gods of Guilt is another five-star read from an author at the top of his game. When a pimp is charged with the murder of one of his workers, he hires Mickey Haller because the dead woman, Gloria Dayton, had always said he was someone to be trusted. It turns out she was a client of Haller’s from many years in the past.
As always with Connelly’s books, nothing is quite what it seems and the plot is complex.
Mickey Haller, a criminal defence attorney who runs his legal practice from the back of a Lincoln car, is devastated when he learns of the identity of the dead prostitute because he thought he had rescued her and helped her to go straight.
As novel progresses Mickey realises he is being followed, but has no idea who is so interested in his movements. There are many possible suspects, both for the murder and the shadowy figure on Mickey’s tail. 
This is an excellent legal drama, but much of the action takes place outside the courtroom. The clues to whodunit and why are there, but you won’t realise they were clues until the novel reaches its brilliant conclusion.
Gods of Guilt is an entertaining read that certainly satisfied this Connelly fan.

Ten facts about ... Christina James

When did you first realise you wanted to be a writer?I’m not exactly sure, but certainly well before I left primary school.
How long does it take you to write a book?Each of the DI Yates novels has taken about a year to write from the development of the original idea to completing the final version.  As well as this, I still have a day-job and I work on all sorts of other writing projects at the same time, but I’m not sure that I’d be any quicker at completing the novels if this weren’t the case.  I think that the writing needs time to mature properly – and I’m a great believer in revision.  I revise each book several times before I’m satisfied with it.
What is your work schedule like when you're writing?I try to write 1,000 words a day.  Sometimes it is much more than this, but, on some days, despite my best intentions – and I’m an advocate of daily writing – I just don’t manage to do it.  I’m more interested in the quality of the output than the time that it takes.  I revise each day’s writing when it is completed, and I revise it again on the following day before I start the next stint.
How many crime novels have you written?I’m just finishing the third.  It’s called Sausage Hall.
Which is your favourite and why?That’s a tough question, because I think if you ask most writers they’re always completely absorbed in the book that they’re currently working on.  This certainly applies to me.  If you think about it, it makes sense; otherwise, you wouldn’t have the energy and self-confidence to carry it through.  So at the moment I’d say Sausage Hall.  However, I shall always have a soft spot for In the Family , the first of the DI Yates series, partly because it was the first, partly because I do think that it’s ‘different’.  Several reviewers have said that it breaks new ground.
Where do you get your ideas?The first idea for each book usually comes from a memory, an event or something that I see when I’m out – it could be a conversation or just the view from a train window.  This idea builds and grows in my mind for quite a while, until I’m ready to write an outline and, eventually, quite a detailed plot.

Who is your favourite character from your own work and why?That’s a really difficult question, particularly as I’m trying to develop the ‘regular’ characters in the DI Yates series all of the time.  Setting them aside, I like Peter Prance in In the Family , because, although he is intended to be both sinister and destructive, he is also amusing.  I also like Alex Tarrant in Almost Love , because she is an imperfect character.  She faces many of the moral dilemmas that all modern women have to tackle and she doesn’t always handle them very well; nevertheless, I think she is a sympathetic character.
Which character from the work of others do you wish you’d invented and why?In response to this, I’m not going to choose a character in a crime novel (though I have thought about it carefully and there are several that I admire).  But, for a well-rounded, complex, sympathetic yet irritating, intelligent yet sometimes highly irrational, perfectly credible, endlessly fascinating character whom I know I’d delight in if I could meet her, I don’t think that there is anyone to match Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse.
If you could have been someone from history involved in crime (good or bad) who would that be and why?That depends on your definition of crime!  Many actions and events that took place in history were not regarded as criminal at the time, yet would be today. I’m thinking of the forcible removal of children from poor families to be sent to Australia, for example.  The converse is also true: in the eighteenth century, there were more than 200 crimes for which those convicted faced capital punishment.
Today, we’d regard many of them as quite trivial.  (I was horrified to read in the Sunday Times last week that North Korea still uses the death penalty for minor crimes, or offences that we don’t consider to be crimes at all, such as ‘wasting electricity’.)
I’m very interested in Richard III.  I don’t necessarily believe that he was a villain, at least by the standards of his time – I think we have Shakespeare to thank for that particular interpretation of his character.  Nevertheless, I should like to have been able to get inside his head and find out what he was thinking during his momentous short life. 
Even if he didn’t murder the ‘princes in the Tower’, I suspect that, like many of the heads of large corporations today, he had to trample quite a few people underfoot on his way to the throne.
What are you working on now?As I mentioned above, I’m just completing Sausage Hall, the third DI Yates novel.  Like the first two novels in the Yates series, it is set mostly in Lincolnshire, though some of the action also takes place in Norfolk.  Sausage Hall is the name that the locals give the house that is called Laurieston in the novel. It is situated in the village of Sutterton and based on an actual house, which really was nicknamed Sausage Hall, because it had been built by a butcher who’d gone bankrupt in the 1850s.
My grandmother, who worked in domestic service all of her life, moved to Sutterton, which is about ten miles from Spalding and seven miles from Boston,  when she was sixty to become companion to a very old lady who lived there.  The old lady had been the wife of a gentleman farmer who was twenty years her senior, so he must have been born in the mid-nineteenth century.    
The house was frozen in a time warp.  It was packed with quaint furnishings; but the most astounding thing about it (though as a child I just accepted it as normal) was that the walls were decorated with many sepia photographs of the old lady’s husband when he’d been on safari in Africa as a young man.  These photographs must have been taken in the 1870s or 1880s and in many of them he was accompanied by several black women wearing very little except strings of beads. 
It has long been my intention to write about what I think might have happened in this house.  When I began researching the period and the district, my plot was given a considerable boost when I discovered that someone very famous had lived nearby in the late nineteenth century.  That person appears in the novel, too. The book is set in the present, but the characters and their actions are considerably influenced by what went on at Sausage Hall more than a century ago.
Bio:C.A. James was born in Spalding and sets her novels in the evocative Fenland countryside of South Lincolnshire.  She works as a bookseller, researcher and teacher.  She has a lifelong fascination with crime fiction and its history.  She is also a well-established non-fiction writer, under a separate name.
www.christinajamesblog.comhttps://www.facebook.com/pages/Christina-James/294111090704814@CAJamesWriter
DI Yates series:  In the Family , Almost Love , Sausage Hall (tbp), all published by Salt Publishing