It’s Now Four in the Charts

We’re into day three of 2013, and there is no letting up on the STAC chart activity. As at 6:30 this morning there were no less than FOUR of the five books in the UK Kindle British Detectives top 100.

In descending order, they were:

Murder at the Murder Mystery Weekend #27

The Filey Connection #33

A Murder for Christmas #49

The I-Spy Murders #92

The odd one out is A Halloween Homicide, which despite enjoying a higher overall ranking than The I-Spy Murders, doesn’t appear in the chart.

To keep this in perspective, the STAC Mysteries are not setting the world on fire. They’re not challenging the likes of Lee Child, Karin Slaughter, or even Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. But we’re not trying to compete with them.

Amazon UK lists 1908 Kindle titles in the Crime/Mystery/British Detectives category. Four of my books are within the top five percent of that category. For an unknown, working from a small base with a comparatively new publisher, that’s not a bad showing in under a year.

Is STAC capturing imaginations?

Some of the reader feedback indicates this is so. Reader A Jardine said of The Filey Connection: the characters all seem like people you’ve met at some time.

The STAC Mysteries are easy reads. If you’re faced with an eight-hour, transatlantic flight, how are you going to pass the time? Watch four movies in a row? Or dip into your Kindle and follow the light-hearted adventures of Joe, Sheila, Brenda and the gang as they seek to crack another devious crime between the blood pressure pills and halves of bitter?

The STAC Mysteries are not designed to harass the reader, but to entertain. The clues are all in there, mingled with the red herrings, the gags and the inevitable shopping trips, slipped in between the arthritis embrocation  and jiggling to the 70s disco music.

From settling into your seat at 35,000 feet, to the captain announcing descent into New York, you can lose yourself in a world that is far removed from the gloom and doom of everyday headlines. From boarding the train at Manchester Piccadilly, to getting off at Euston, you can drop into a world where the reality of political posturing and celebrity chit-chat takes second place to a puzzle, which only a razor sharp mind like Joe’s can crack.

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Want to know more about the STAC Mysteries, get the background on the characters and locations? Checkout their website.