Books to Look Forward to From Oneworld (Point Black - Crime)

 July 2021

Please God, don't let this be about Burrowhead...  An archaeological dig exposes a brutal history and a witness finally speaks. It seems the wickedness swirling in the harsh sea air of Burrowhead might be excised at last.  But before DI Georgie Strachan can lift the veil of evil, a black horse is slaughtered on an altar in the woods and human remains begin to surface. Sinister rituals connect past and present but no one wants to see, or tell, or hear, the truth. Soon Georgie must face the question: where do the missing souls of the village gather?  Where The Missing Gathers is by. Helen Sedgwick

Karolina or The Torn Curtain is by Maryla Szymiczkowa. Easter, 1895.The biggest event in the Catholic calendar is a disaster in Zofia Turbotynska's household. Her maid Karolina has handed in her notice and worse, gone missing. When Karolina's body is discovered, violated and stabbed, Zofia knows she has to investigate.  Following a trail that leads her from the poorest districts of Galicia to the highest echelons of society, Zofia uncovers a web of gang crimes, sex-trafficking and corruption that will force her to question everything she knows.  Set against the backdrop of the women's cause, Karolina, or the Torn Curtain refuses to turn a blind eye to the injustices and inequalities of its era - and ours.

October 2021

The Twelve Even More Days of Christmas is by Syd Moore.  With returning characters from the Essex Witch Museum series and a weirdly wonderful tale for each day of Christmas, these spooky stories are the perfect companion for long, dark winter nights. So wrap up warm and let yourself get lost in the world of the strange, the scary and the supernatural...

It only takes one... A murder.  A resident of small-town Visberg is found decapitated.  A festival.  A cultish hilltop community 'celebrates' Pan Night after the apple harvest.  A race against time.  As Visberg closes ranks to keep its deadly secrets, there could not be a worse time for Tuva Moodyson to arrive as deputy editor of the local newspaper. Powerful forces are at play and no one dares speak out. But Tuva senses the story of her career, unaware that perhaps she is the story...  Bad Apples is by Will Dean

When The Dead Comes Calling by Helen Sedgwick

I didn’t mean to write a Brexit novel. In fact, I really, really didn’t want to do that. I don’t even mention the word Brexit anywhere in When The Dead Come Calling.

What I wanted to do was write about a place and how it has been shaped by its past. More specifically, about how crimes of the past don’t just go away; how what we bury doesn’t just disappear. That is true in a literal sense for one of the characters when an unsolved decades-old crime against them becomes part of the present day police investigation into a brutal murder. It also happens in a more metaphorical sense for the village of Burrowhead – the fictional setting for my book on the Northwest coast of England – and to our society as a whole.

We have a past, here in the UK. It’s a deeply unpleasant one, and it is not done with us yet. What I was really writing about was a society on the verge of breaking, and societies don’t break overnight. To see the cause, to understand why a place becomes what it is, and fails the way it does, then we have to look back at what has happened there over generations, even over centuries.

In the present day, the villagers of Burrowhead are desperate. The village is isolated, miles from the nearest town, sitting on a wind-battered coast, and with very little left in the way of facilities. There is one shop, the Spar, run by Pamali Patel. There is a rusty playground – the site of the present-day murder that opens the book. Unemployment and poverty have led to hopelessness, which has brought with it resentment, blame, racism, and a deep-seated fear of otherness. 

The unemployment was caused, in part, by the closure of a nuclear site which, when it opened generations before, had brought jobs and hope – and incomers. Generations before that, the village had been more insular, people travelled less and lived where they grew up, and the smaller population felt safe. Except that, generations before that, the village was embroiled in the slave trade, suffered through crop failures and disease which led to hopelessness, which brought with it resentment, blame, racism, and a deep-seated fear of otherness. And before that…?

‘

The layers of it,’ says DI Georgie Strachan, the hero of my story. ‘The terrible layers of it.’

Of course, there are always different perspectives to consider. In the book I use multiple points of view to convey the experiences of people who have been shaped in very different ways. We see the kindness of one of the older villagers, his genuine desire to save the last remnants of his community and way of life. We see the village through the eyes of a visiting police officer, horrified by the levels of prejudice going seemingly unchecked. We see the perspective of a local woman who loves her home despite its failings, who is angry and frustrated by the lack of help and infrastructure. We see teenagers desperate to leave; we even see the beauty of the landscape, the wild coast, and the vast ever-changing sky.

But despite how much can change, there is something cyclical about how we seem to improve and then regress, as a society, and for this writer at least, we seem to be in a period of regression right now. I’m writing this blog from my home in the Scottish highlands (cue a chorus of ‘not us’) and I grew up in London (ditto) but if anything When The Dead Come Calling is about how we are all complicit, in a way. If our society is breaking, that means it has been breaking for a long time, and we have failed to intervene. 

Fergus Strachan, the husband of my DI, is a man who literally picks up other people’s rubbish. He’s also delving into the past while the present-day police investigation pushes forwards. Himself unemployed, he is becoming fascinated by the history of Burrowhead, by everything that the villagers have done and been through, and in that way we begin to see not only the guilt buried there, but some hope as well. I am, perhaps surprisingly, an optimist. What he will eventually find might turn things around again. Though, I must warn you, probably not until later in the series…

For now, the village of Burrowhead is desperate and, as has happened before, those who are seen as different are being blamed.

Look out of the window. It’s happening already.

-----

When The Dead Comes Calling by Helen Sedgwick. (Published by Point Blank) Out Now

In the first of the Burrowhead Mysteries, an atmospheric murder investigation unearths the brutal history of a village where no one is innocent.  When psychotherapist Alexis Cosse is found murdered in the playground of the sleepy northern village of Burrowhead, DI Strachan and her team of local police investigate, exposing a maelstrom of racism, misogyny and homophobia simmering beneath the surface of the village.  Shaken by the revelations and beginning to doubt her relationship with her husband, DI Strachan discovers something lurking in the history of Burrowhead, while someone (or something) equally threatening is hiding in the strange and haunted cave beneath the cliffs. 

Books to Look Forward to from Oneworld - Point Blank Books

January 2020

In the first of the Burrowhead Mysteries, an atmospheric murder investigation unearths the brutal history of a village where no one is innocent.  When psychotherapist Alexis Cosse is found murdered in the playground of the sleepy northern village of Burrowhead, DI Strachan and her team of local police investigate, exposing a maelstrom of racism, misogyny and homophobia simmering beneath the surface of the village. Shaken by the revelations and beginning to doubt her relationship with her husband, DI Strachan discovers something lurking in the history of Burrowhead, while someone (or something) equally threatening is hiding in the strange and haunted cave beneath the cliffs.  When The Dead Comes Calling is by Helen Sedgwick.

February 2020

An eerie and absorbing novel following a criminal psychologist who has discovered shocking and possibly dangerous connectionsbetween a serial killer and her stepdaughter.  Criminal psychologist Seonkyeong receives an unexpected call one day. Yi Byeongdo, a serial killer whose gruesome murders shook the world, wants to be interviewed. Yi Byeongdo, who has refused to speak to anyone until now, asks specifically for her. Seonkyeong agrees out of curiosity. That same day Hayeong, her husband's eleven-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, shows up at their door after her grandparents, with whom she lived after her mother passed away, die in a sudden fire. Seonkyeong wants her to feel at home, but is gradually unnerved as the young girl says very little and acts strangely. At work and at home, Seonkyeong starts to unravel the pasts of the two new arrivals in her life and begins to see startling similarities. Hayeong looks at her the same way Yi Byeongdo does when he recounts the abuse he experienced as a child; Hayeong's serene expression masks a temper that she can't control. Plus, the story she tells about her grandparents' death, and her mother's before that, deeply troubles Seonkyeong. So much so that Yi Byeongdo picks up on it and starts giving her advice.  The Only Child is by Mi-ae Seo.

Murder often comes with an easy scapegoat...  When a boatman is murdered on a remote island off Van Diemen's Land, the authorities want to blame a famous, and very inconvenient, political prisoner.  In this, the third in the Monsarrat series, Hugh Llewelyn Monsarrat and his trusty housekeeper, Mrs Mulrooney, are sent to remote Maria Island to solve the murder of corrupt tradesman Bart Harefield. When Harefield is murdered with an axe, blame is laid at the feet of Thomas Power, the charismatic Irish revolutionary held in detention. Monsarrat and Mrs Mulrooney soon realise their real job is to tie Power neatly to the crime, so he can be hanged without inciting rebellion.  But were there others who also had reason to want to shut Harefield up?  The Power Game is by Meg and Tom Keneally

March 2020

Black River is by Will Dean.  FEAR.  Tuva's been living clean in southern Sweden for four months when she receives horrifying news. Her best friend Tammy Yamnim has gone missing.  SECRETS.  Racing back to Gavrik at the height of Midsommar, Tuva fears for Tammy's life. Who has taken her, and why? And who is sabotaging the small-town search efforts?  LIES.  Surrounded by dark pine forest, the sinister residents of Snake River are suspicious of outsiders. Unfortunately, they also hold all the answers. On the shortest night of the year, Tuva must fight to save her friend. The only question is who will be there to save Tuva?

April 2020

The Chemical Reaction is by Fiona Erskine.  Jaq Silver can’t catch a break. After escaping almost certain death at the hands of her old chemical engineering employers, she soon finds herself up to her neck in even hotter water. Deep in debt, she decides to take on a risky contract in China to earn money and investigate the rather mysterious disappearance of an old student. Nothing is as it seems, never more so when the factory overnight completely vanishes…  From fraudulent art auctions in London to a convoy of male strippers in Shanghai, the mystery of the vanishing factory begins to look even more complicated as the days pass. Jaq needs to work out what happened and whether it has anything to do with her nemesis Frank Good and time is running out. As Jaq is pulled further and further into a murky underworld of deceit and corruption, things soon take an explosive turn.

May 2020

It's 1961 and the white heat of the Space Race is making the Cold War even colder.  Richard Knox is a man with secrets, and not just because he's a secret service officer. He's been hung out to dry by someone in MI5, and the only way to save his career could destroy his world.  Meanwhile in a closed city outside Leningrad, brilliant physicist Irina Valera discovers the secret to sending messages from Earth to space, and faces an unimaginable personal tragedy.  With Britain's own latest espionage breakthrough stolen, and its top spy trapped in a mysterious coma, Knox must find a new ally to help him uncover the traitor in MI5's ranks - Abey Bennett, one of the CIA's few female recruits who's determined to prove herself whatever the cost.  As the age of global surveillance dawns, three powers will battle for dominance, and three people will survive...  Red Corona by Tim Glister.

June 2020

Struggling with long-buried family secrets and her own recent heartbreak, artist and pet portraitist Susie Mahl hopes her brief sojourn as art-tutor at a Scottish mansion will prove a distraction. Can she get her eclectic mix of students to behave long enough to draw a Highland cow? Can her hosts the Earl and Countess of Muchton save their family estate and its prize art collection? Will Susie's pupils actually manage to survive the week?  Scotland has an air of mystique about it, with mist-covered glens and its beautiful rivers and hills, but it also has a darker side, soon discovered by Susie. She must look towards her craft for the answers. But can anyone be trusted, or is she in this alone?  A Trick of the Light is by Ali Carter.