A.A. Abbott

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Book Review – To Die For, by Colin Ward

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Angela Marsons’ tough but tortured Detective Inspector Kim Stone featured in my blog in April. Ironically, only 6 miles from Kim’s base in the Black Country, Colin Ward’s DI Mike Stone is operating out of Aston CID. Are they perhaps related?

Another detective with a troubled past

I sometimes think Ruth Rendell cornered the market in crime stories about happily married detectives with her Wexford series, set in rural Sussex. Kim and Mike Stone, in the dynamic and densely populated West Midlands, face completely different personal and professional challenges. Just like Kim, Mike lives a single life, has a troubled past and is tasked with tracking down a serial killer. That’s where the similarities end. Mike is by no means a loner. He enjoys the buzz of managing his team of sleuths. The pages of the book crackle with the excitement of the incident room as ideas are captured on the whiteboard and underlings despatched to follow leads. A depraved murderer is slaughtering young mothers, and Mike must find him before more families are smashed apart. There is a heavy focus on police procedure. This is fascinating, yet doesn’t detract from the rising tension when more bodies are found and the killer begins taunting Mike with texts.

Twists in the tale

Birmingham provides a kaleidoscopic background to this thriller, from smart bars to parks to the sprawling estates that ring the city’s outer perimeter. I suspect anyone who knows Brum will work out how the killer is transporting his victims well before the nerve-racking showdown. However, other readers are unlikely to guess. There are still plenty of twists in the tale. For example, although Colin Ward sprinkles clues throughout the book, it was an agreeable shock to me when the killer was finally unmasked. I didn’t see it coming.

A Book Review of Colin Ward's Birmingham crime thriller To Die For

Carries the reader with it until the very last word

The book isn’t perfect – as a writer myself, I tend to spot typos and repetition, and I found a couple of dozen. However, the story is well-written and so compelling that I couldn’t stop turning the pages. Mike Stone’s life, sanity and love hang in the balance unless he can stop the killer. To Die For carries the reader with it until the very last word.

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Birmingham is a fascinating backdrop to Colin Ward’s book, and it also features in three of the tales in my short story collection, Something In The City – get it free here

Thriller of the Month – The Darkest Lies, by Barbara Copperthwaite

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Like the famous Echo & The Bunnymen song, “The Darkest Lies” revolves around a killing moon. On brightly moonlit nights, two young girls are brutally attacked. Fobbed off by police and betrayed by friends, Melanie, mother of one of the victims, turns detective to find out who’s responsible for the awful crime.

At thirty-three, Melanie is a housewife and journalist manqué who has lived in the same Fenland village all her life. She thinks she knows everybody’s secrets, including her daughter’s. After all, Beth is an only child, and both Melanie and her loving husband have a close relationship with her. Nevertheless, as Melanie unpeels the surface of her neighbours’ lives, unpleasant truths are revealed. Melanie finds herself in danger, too, but willingly embraces it in her quest to avenge her daughter.

The strain on Melanie’s mental health and her marriage are too apparent. It’s impossible not to sympathise with her despite the poor choices she makes in her desperation to cope. This maintains suspense, as do the tantalising glimpses of the killer’s thoughts that punctuate the narrative.

“The Darkest Lies” is Barbara Copperthwaite’s third thriller. As ever, the pages keep turning right up until the nail-biting conclusion – on a moonlit night, of course…

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Like Barbara, I’m a British crime thriller writer. With other authors, I’ll be taking part in a big online thriller giveaway in June – sign up for my newsletter to find out more, and receive a free e-book of short stories.

Thriller of the Month – Dark Fragments, by Rob Sinclair

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An unreliable narrator isn’t often used in a thriller, perhaps because it requires a great deal of skill to keep a reader engaged once it’s clear the “hero” is anything but. John Grisham did it well in “The Racketeer”. Now British writer Rob Sinclair joins him with “Dark Fragments”.

“Dark Fragments” is a departure for Sinclair, who has previously written tense third person spy thrillers about secret agent Carl Logan. This, his first book for crime publisher Bloodhound, is told in the first person by Ben Stephens. At first, management consultant Ben seems a nice, ordinary guy. He adores his children and his wife. Yes, he’s down in the dumps, but who wouldn’t be in his situation? After all, he’s being threatened by gangsters over a soured business deal, he’s haunted by the unsolved murder of his first wife, and his career has plateaued. We can all imagine struggling with that kind of baggage.

This is where Rob Sinclair is very clever. Having made us sympathise with the man, perhaps even identify with him, alarm bells ring as Ben takes extreme actions to solve his problems. Rash and impulsive, he resorts to infidelity and violence, all the while seeing himself as a victim. The level of self-justification is such that the dramatic finale of the book is easy to believe, although it still comes as a surprise.

Sinclair’s style is pacy, energetic and liberally punctuated with cliff hangers. In consequence, “Dark Fragments” is a quick read, which leaves the lingering feeling that the ordinary people you meet every day may not be quite what they seem.

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“Dark Fragments” is set in Birmingham, England. I also write crime thrillers that are (at least partly) set in the city and I very much enjoyed Rob Sinclair’s descriptions of its swanky and seedy areas. Do you like to read about places you know? Email me at aaabbottstories[at]gmail.com.

Thriller of the Month – Trouble with Product X, by Joan Aiken

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The late British writer Joan Aiken is best known as an author of supernatural children’s stories, but her adult tales are worth seeking out too. This thriller is like a Formula 1 car, racing along at breakneck speed with many twists on the way. It’s a period piece, written about fifty years ago and set in a world my parents would recognise, when a train from London to Penzance took nine hours and you could avoid rush hour traffic jams in London.

Just as TV’s Mad Men showcased the US advertising industry in 1960s Manhattan, “Trouble with Product X” sheds light on their counterparts in London. Product X is a wonderful new perfume, expected to take the market by storm. Certainly, manufacturers Gay* Gal think so, and ad agency Salmon and Bucknell is delighted to win the account. It’s all hands to the pumps and Martha, a young copywriter, is despatched to Cornwall to produce ads for TV. She’s accompanied by colleagues, cameramen and assorted hangers-on, including a creepy client and his unpleasant chums. The trouble with Product X, as she rapidly discovers, is that the formula has been lost – or has it?

Tension rapidly mounts as the rich and beautiful are revealed to be feckless kidnappers and murderers. Luckily, Martha finds some good eggs on whom she can rely, including stalwart colleague Tom and a community of brusque monks with hearts of gold.

The book is a fun, quick read, and could almost be approached as historical fiction given that the events take place five decades ago. Joan Aiken worked as an advertising copywriter herself, and writes amusingly of the flattery employed to sell unprepossessing products. There too many twists and turns in the plot to describe, but all are believable (just!), and the book is well-written. Hats off to The Murder Room for republishing it for the Kindle. Note that old paperbacks are available for pennies on Amazon under another title, “Beware of the Bouquet”.

 

*The word “gay” is used a lot in the book in a very old-fashioned sense, basically describing a desire to go drinking and dancing.

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I’m also a writer of fun, fast thrillers – read The Gap, a “5 minute crime thriller” set in modern London, FREE, here.

Thriller of the Month – The Woodcutter, by Reginald Hill

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“I lived in a fairytale,” Wolf Hadda tells his psychiatrist from his prison cell. As far as he’s concerned, he achieved the impossible and won his fair lady.

Trouble is, they’re no longer together. In fact, Wolf, a former financial whizzkid, is now a convicted paedophile and fraudster. He’s penniless and his youthful good looks are gone, ravaged by an accident during an unsuccessful escape bid. Needless to say, he’s been abandoned by family and friends.

Elf, his psychiatrist, finally achieves the breakthrough that at first seems impossible. Wolf admits the crimes he’s been denying for seven years. He’s released on parole. Elf congratulates herself on a job well done. She visits his remote country cottage and even begins to acknowledge that she feels attracted to this reformed character. Then, as bad things begin to happen to those who have crossed Wolf Hadda, she starts to question her own judgement.

This isn’t so much a fairytale gone wrong as an allegory, especially as it features the shadowy JC, a spymaster with the power to put wrongs right. In a tale with many twists, it’s not always easy to tell who the good guys are, but at least we know by the end.

Reginald Hill sold millions of his Dalziel and Pascoe detective mysteries. The Woodcutter is another type of book altogether. With dodgy Russians, bent coppers, cokeheads and toffs, there are enough crazy characters and action scenes in The Woodcutter to please any thriller fan, but a heart-warming seasoning of humour and romance too.

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Like Reginald Hill, I’m a British crime thriller writer (my most recent book is The Vodka Trail), but I have other strings to my bow too. Get a free e-book of short stories – including crime, horror and romance! – by signing up here for my short and sweet newsletter.

Crowdfunding fiction

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The Thriller of the Month is taking a back seat in March (not least because I’m busy writing my fourth crime thriller), so I’ve asked writer Pete Sutton for a guest blog explaining why he’s using crowdfunding to publish a bunch of short stories. Pete is the editor of Far Horizons magazine, and he’s crowdfunding in order to publish not just one, but THREE BOOKs of short stories that first appeared in Far Horizons! Here’s why…in his own words…

Far Horizons started with a simple idea. A bunch of writers on a Facebook group who were either unpublished or self-published wanted to create an anthology. That simple premise became Far Horizons e-magazine and we got enough stories and art to make a second then a third etc. Two years later the team and magazine have grown.  Our original remit hasn’t changed though. We exist to give new writers a voice. We will edit new writers until they become publishable. It is a labour of love.

The magazine has always been free. This has been to get the widest possible reach for the stories which are mostly from writers learning their craft. No-one gets paid at the moment and we offer adverts for the author’s work in payment for sending us their stories.

Our original idea to create an anthology is still sound, and so we have now created three.  Our hope is that by selling anthologies we’ll raise enough money to start paying our contributors. This is the main reason we are crowdfunding. The anthologies will be published regardless of how much money we make via the crowdfund. But we hope to raise enough money to cover our costs – and our real desire is to raise enough money to start paying our contributors.

We will do more anthologies and we will continue to publish the magazine (although the form may change after our second birthday). We also hope to publish some of the serials we have featured over the months as a thank you to the authors that have given us those serials.

Former Heroes we previously published but have remastered for this launch. It has stories in from published and self-published authors including David Gullen (Author of Shopocalypse and Open Waters), Gaie Sebold (author of the Babylon Steel and Shanghai Sparrow books), Sara Jayne Townsend (author of Soul Screams and Whispering Death) , Andrew Goodman (author of the Emperor Initiative series), Kate Charles (Author of Faisollus), Jim King (author of Trouble at the Docks) and Pete Sutton (author of A Tiding of Magpies and Sick City Syndrome). These are tales of men and women, and in one case a building, that have had a heroic heyday but that is now in their past. What do heroes do when they are no longer heroes?

Our most popular issue was our Zombie special so we saw there was an appetite for braaaains, er for well-told tales of the shambling undead. This anthology was filled through open submissions. We had a lot of fun reading all the stories and choosing the best to highlight.

Fantastically Horny started as a Facebook IM conversation. One of the staff writes erotica under a pen name and inquiring minds wanted to know if they put aliens or elves in, since they also write SF&F. We then wondered if anyone had ever put together a SF&F Erotica book. Which then inevitably led us to wanting to put together a SF&F Erotica book…

So we have ended up with not one, but three anthologies to launch. We hope that people feel inspired by our magazine and want to help us help new writers. Please head over to the Indiegogo and pledge. 

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Writer Pete Sutton is signed to Kensington Gore Publishing, who are about to launch his collection of short stories, “A Tiding of Magpies”, very soon. His novel, “Sick City Syndrome”, will follow later in the year. Read Pete’s excellent blog here, and follow him on Twitter at @suttope.