Simon Mason on The Dangerous Man

The Dangerous Stranger is the fifth story in a series featuring a pair of mis-matched detectives in Oxford, both called Wilkins. Ryan Wilkins is Oxford born and bred, white, a chav who grew up on what the Americans would call a ‘trailer park,’ badly dressed, badly behaved, semi-feral in fact, with a chip on his shoulder and anger-management issues generally brought into play by encounters with privileged elites. Ray Wilkins is a member of the privileged elites, London-Nigerian, privately educated with a double first in PPE from Balliol College, Oxford, handsome, nattily dressed, articulate and suave, the golden boy of Thames Valley Police – until, much against his will, he was paired with Ryan. They are not related. They do not get on.

Oddly, what they get are results.

This new story is a thought-experiment. What if Oxford – gentle city of poets and scholars – had experienced a riot, as so many cities in the UK did, after the Southport murders? An out-of-control crowd lobbing Molotov cocktails at a hotel housing asylum seekers. And also: what if a young refugee was actually burned to death? (It’s an Oxford tradition, after all, if in abeyance for many centuries and formerly restricted to Jews and archbishops.) And furthermore: what if the victim then turned out not to be a refugee at all?

Perhaps it sounds very political. But the impulse wasn’t to discuss politics; the story seemed to arise naturally out of the anger and fear. There is action, for sure, but as Chandler said, what counts is emotion; and it seemed to me that there were unusual amounts of this arising, unstoppably, chaotically, from the basic situation I imagined.

This emotion affects all the characters, in different ways. Because it’s the fifth book in a series, some of the characters have naturally been around for a while. Little Ryan, for instance, Ryan’s four-year-old son. And his father, Ryan Senior, released early from prison (overcrowding issues) and now resident, to his disgust, in a hostel for rehabilitating prisoners. The Wilkins’s Superintendent is familiar too, fresh, steely and blonde as ever, but having to cope with a disciplinary enquiry, which tests her considerable reserves to the limit, and the Chief Constable, a massive, battered, malevolent presence, who openly hopes to get rid of those Wilkins ‘clowns’.

But there are new characters too. A sly criminal from Rotherhithe who hates Oxford even as his job keeps him there. An eager new DC, William, who simply won’t shut up and is a little too naïve for his own good. ‘Milky’ Nolan, twelve years old, excited to find himself at his first riot. Yemi Kosoko, world food grocery shopkeeper in Oxford’s ethnic Cowley Road and his friend, the chess-playing eccentric academic Nicholas Kinghorn, who dyes his beard lilac to remind him of weddings in Ghana. And finally, most important of all, Jallo (other names unknown, age unknown, country of origin unknown) who finds himself sleeping rough in Oxford’s nooks and crannies, and knows himself to be in horrible danger.

I like Oxford’s nooks and crannies, I must admit. I like the city’s double nature. Its deep Englishness (dons and quadrangles, meadows and river), and simultaneous air of foreignness (all those foreign post-grads, language students and care workers). I like its strange blend of permanence (we who live here) and transience (those who arrive and go, students, tourists). And I like its rooted elderly and great waves of youth. It seems to me excitingly unstable. Perhaps it’s that quality that gives rise to stories, not all of which it wants to tell.

The Dangerous Man by Simon Mason (Quercus Publishing) £16.99 Out Now

On a warm and pleasant evening in Oxford, gentle city of poets and scholars, rioters outside a hotel full of asylum seekers set a young refugee on fire. The city - the country - convulses in shock. Is this who we are? It's international news of the very worst kind, and the Chief Constable demands immediate and exemplary action in bringing the perpetrators to justice. The detectives leading the investigation fill him with misgivings, however: DIs Ryan and Ray Wilkins (no relation), Thames Valley's detective pantomime horse, one Oxford-educated, the other Oxford-trailer park. He doesn't understand why they work together. 'Do they even get on?' 'Somehow that doesn't seem necessary,' their Superintendent replies. Who burned the boy alive? Was it a far-right extremist? Was it an ordinary person who had simply gone along to watch and got caught up in the emotion? Could it even be one of the children who were there? Deploying a range of investigative skills, some standard, some unconventional and some frankly nuts, the Wilkinses do what they do: results with chaos. But when they discover that the victim was not an asylum seeker after all, or even a resident of the hotel, the whole investigation kicks into a completely different configuration.

The Shots review of The Dangerous Man can be found here.

Forthcoming books from Quercus Books (Including Maclehose Press)

 January 2026

They know she killed them. They've just never known why. Connie Cross was a trusted pharmacy assistant when she was arrested for the gruesome murders of at least seven strangers. Now, she's serving a whole-life order for the shocking crimes she refuses to explain. Olivia Lang never forgot Connie, the awkward teenager from a south London estate she first met while working for the police. Twenty years later, Olivia is desperate to understand what made Connie turn into a murderer. But as she begins to uncover the truth about the UK's most notorious female serial killer, Olivia risks revealing secrets she's kept hidden for years. Connie is by Charlotte Duckworth.

Darling Mine is by Romy Hausmann. She went missing decades ago. He is still looking for her . . . Julie Nowak has been missing since 7th September 2003. It broke her family. Only her father, Theo, doesn't give up on her. On the 20th anniversary of her disappearance, Theo is contacted by podcaster Liv. She's come across a new lead. But if Theo wants to find out the truth he must be quick before his progressing dementia smothers everything in darkness. Who has taken his daughter? Why does Julie's ex-boyfriend Daniel keep his mother's bedroom door locked, years after she passed away? And is there anything more gruesome than the uncertainty of not knowing what happened to your own child?

True Blue is by Joe Thomas. New Year's Eve 1988. An illegal rave in Hackney. Acid House has arrived in the UK. But the Second Summer of Love is no golden era for Britain. A decade of Thatcher is starting to bite and her planned "Community Charge" will only rub salt in the wounds. Privatisation has lined shareholders pockets, but at what cost? A nation stripped of its assets, going for broke. DC Patrick Noble is assigned to a task force working out of Stoke Newington, gathering evidence of police corruption to use against his new colleagues. But this is a dangerous game. And his underlings - spycop Parker and reluctant civilian Suzie Scialfa - are getting restive. Turns out blackmail and intimidation can only get you so far. Meanwhile, council solicitor Jon Davies is once again lifting stones that shouldn't be lifted - this time plumbing the depths of the deal to privatise water. As the country hurtles towards disorder, in the form of riots that even the Iron Lady can't withstand, Noble walks an inexorable path towards his own inescapable fate. Things can only get better. But first they have to hit rock bottom.

February 2026

The Killing Floor is by Elly Griffiths. Ali Dawson is a police detective who leads a unit that investigates cases so cold her team must travel to the distant past to solve them. But Ali and the team haven't been allowed to time-travel ever since their technical expert, Jones, got stuck in Victorian London, never to be seen again. To distract herself from meaningless tasks, Ali decides to look into a present-day case - an apparent suicide of a young man who fell to his death from a high building. She believes the death is linked to a psychic medium called Barry Power, who convinced the boy he could fly. Ali goes to one of Power's shows where he claims to be in contact with Jones. When Ali notices that evening that her cat, Terry, has gone missing, she decides to go back in time just long enough to prevent Terry from escaping through his open cat flap. A dangerous plan which backfires, and she finds herself once more in Victorian London, where she meets Jones, as well as Power, and the darkly mysterious Cain Templeton with whom Ali has unfinished business from her previous visit to the past . .

Cromarty, The Black Isle, 1831. As seagulls shriek and rise on the coastal winds, a circulating library in the bustling port town of Cromarty is meeting for the first time. Ostensibly united by a love of books, the demands of social convention have brought together a disparate group of people. Charlotte Mackenzie, the remote and fragile wife of the local laird, seeks an escape from a loveless marriage; her best friend, Rachel Mackay, a former governess who is ardently in love with her own older husband, the town's minister; the young schoolmaster, John Learmonth, newly arrived from Edinburgh with secrets in tow; and the gentle bank clerk, Ludovic Cameron who dreams of a new life across the ocean, far from his erstwhile schoolmate, the malevolent Farquhar Hossack. When the laird befriends a wounded officer, a chain of events is set into motion that threatens to upset the delicate equilibrium of the community. Against the backdrop of mass emigrations, an encroaching cholera epidemic, political unrest and the campaign to abolish chattel slavery in the British Caribbean, the people of Cromarty must negotiate their new world and each other, flitting in and out of each other's lives through one extraordinary year. The Cromarty Library Circle is by Shona Maclean.

The Widows is by Anna Smith. One false move could get them killed. Ruby, Bella and Cissy are used to the high life. Married to gangland bosses at the top of their game, the riches of Costa del Sol are at their fingertips, the world at their feet. But when Cissy's husband is brutally murdered, everything changes. With his lifelong friend - the notorious drug lord Tommy Mallon - hellbent on revenge, the three women are forced to go on the run. Soon they find themselves caught up in an explosive struggle for money and power. A new life awaits - but only if they can outrun the one they've left behind.

March 2026

The Move is by J P Delaney. Few beginnings can be deadly . . .  Kate and Matt Crowther are finally moving out of London, in search of a better life for their young family. Trade Cottage seems to be the house of their dreams - and they immediately hit it off with the sellers, Rosemary and Paul Finch, who brought up their own family there.  When Kate and Matt move in, they're pleased to discover the Finches still very much in evidence: offering advice, introducing them to the local community, and becoming honorary grandparents to Will, 11, and Tilly, 9. But when the Finches take exception to Kate and Matt's renovations, relations with the neighbours sour, and Kate and Matt find themselves subjected to a vicious campaign of hate. But Kate isn't giving up her dream home without a fight. And it turns out Trade Cottage has secrets of its own to reveal - secrets that may endanger the very family Kate has moved there to protect .

Vital Signs is by Kate Webb. Can a killer leave no trace? August 2010. The Tobins - a happy, well-off family - spend a sunny afternoon at a birthday party with friends. By dawn, most of them are dead. It's a crime that grabs headlines and shocks the nation. The key suspect, Aidan Tobin, was known as a loving husband and father, but his desperate attempt to take his own life is as good as a confession. The case begins and ends with him. August 2021. A survivor of the attacks regains a memory of that horrific night. Chloë Tobin never believed her father was guilty. Only six at the time, she is the sole witness to the brutal attacks. Now, she insists that somebody else was involved. Could she be right? DI Matt Lockyer and DC Gemma Broad of Wiltshire Police's cold case unit aren't so sure. But as they begin to investigate, they soon discover there's more to this case than meets the eye. After all, why would a man who had everything destroy it all?

The Dangerous Stranger is by Simon Mason. On a warm and pleasant evening in Oxford, gentle city of poets and scholars, rioters outside a hotel full of asylum seekers set a young refugee on fire. The city - the country - convulses in shock. Is this who we are? It's international news of the very worst kind, and the Chief Constable demands immediate and exemplary action in bringing the perpetrators to justice. The detectives leading the investigation fill him with misgivings, however: DIs Ryan and Ray Wilkins (no relation), Thames Valley's detective pantomime horse, one Oxford-educated, the other Oxford-trailer park. He doesn't understand why they work together. 'Do they even get on?' 'Somehow that doesn't seem necessary,' their Superintendent replies. Who burned the boy alive? Was it a far-right extremist? Was it an ordinary person who had simply gone along to watch and got caught up in the emotion? Could it even be one of the children who were there? Deploying a range of investigative skills, some standard, some unconventional and some frankly nuts, the Wilkinses do what they do: results with chaos. But when they discover that the victim was not an asylum seeker after all, or even a resident of the hotel, the whole investigation kicks into a completely different configuration.

April 2026

Laura never meant to lie, but old habits die hard. When Annie Adams heads to London to visit her mother, Laura, the last thing she expects to find is a dead body. Least of all for it to be Fliss, the budding artist Laura had just taken under her wing.  Annie is no stranger to murder - after all, she's solved a few cases already. And something about the way Fliss died feels familiar. She's seen a case like this before. Or read about it, rather, in the journals of her dead Great Aunt Frances, whose close friend was killed in the 1960s in the exact same way: with her heart surgically removed from her chest. As threats pile up on Laura's doorstep, it soon becomes clear that she's next, and that she's hiding something . . . With her mother's life on the line, can Annie find the killer before it's too late?  From the gritty streets of 1960s Soho to the lofty galleries of present-day West London, follow Annie and Frances as they race to bring a killer to justice. How to Cheat Your Own Death is by Kristen Perrin.

Fresh from case of the stolen heart, one that shattered his belief in the regime he works for, Samson Kolechko is confronted with a mystery that borders on the impossible. How could a squad of Red Army soldiers have disappeared from the Galician bathhouse, leaving only their boots and their uniforms as evidence they ever existed? Faced with such a fantastical conundrum, Samson resorts to fantastical investigation method: stitching his operative severed ear into a bathhouse worker's jacket, he is able to eavesdrop on his every move. But he discovers far more than he bargained for, uncovering human remains in the stoves and the presence of a sinister religious cult in the city. With his quick-witted new wife Nadezhda at his side, Samson must not only solve the case but navigate the political turmoil that still grips Kyiv as civil war looms and trust between neighbours and comrades is eroded day by day. The Lost Soldiers is by Andrey Kurkov.

May 2026

Just Kill is by Remi Kone. London during a blistering heatwave. A man wakes in the middle of the night, hearing noises from downstairs. He assumes it's a burglar - nothing prepares him for what he finds. Across the city, DI Leah Hutch and DS Benjamin Randle are called to a murder scene outside their jurisdiction. A woman has been killed - the only suspect, a friend from Leah's past who refuses to speak to anyone but her. Meanwhile, fourteen-year-old Zed Okoro's mother has vanished. He will do anything in his power to find her - even if it means risking his own life. As Leah and Randle investigate, they discover a conspiracy with roots far from home. Three incidents. One connection. What secrets make people kill?

In a brilliant feat of literary detective work Master of Lies by Piers Blofeld tells the extraordinary untold story of Anthony Blunt's life as a spy. Based on extensive research into newly released files he is revealed as not simply "the fourth man", but the most dangerous spy of the twentieth century. During the war, as the fate of the world hung in the balance, Blunt's intelligence was being fed straight on to the desks of Hitler, Stalin and Churchill. His hand was secretly guiding our collective fate and his treason led to the deaths of tens of thousands. He casts a shadow which looms large to this day. The official narrative is that Blunt was the least of the Cambridge spies - and yet he was the one who got away with it. While the rest drank themselves to death in dingy Moscow flats, Blunt revelled in his brilliant career as an art historian, Surveyor of the Queen's pictures and Knight of the Realm. He was protected not just by his many friendships with the great and the good, but by the brilliance with which he played the game - his was a secret too big to be told.

June 2026

These are your neighbours. One is a killer. Reeling from a very recent divorce, Frankie has moved into a glamorous London neighbourhood. This is a new chapter in her life. She's decided to put down roots with the beautiful Persian cat she left her marriage with named Blue. But little niggles with her perfect new life start to grow and when Blue returns one night from slipping into places he shouldn't, Frankie's concerns solidify. Two words are roughly scratched into his collar: HELP ME. Unsettled and unwilling to ignore the incident, Frankie roots out an old unused "Cat Cam" collar. What slowly begins as a voyeuristic fascination with her neighbours and the secrets they're hiding soon turns into a perilous quest for the truth that threatens to bring untold terrors to her doorstep. These are your neighbours. One is a killer. Reeling from a very recent divorce, Frankie has moved into a glamorous London neighbourhood. This is a new chapter in her life. She's decided to put down roots with the beautiful Persian cat she left her marriage with named Blue. But little niggles with her perfect new life start to grow and when Blue returns one night from slipping into places he shouldn't, Frankie's concerns solidify. Two words are roughly scratched into his collar: HELP ME. Unsettled and unwilling to ignore the incident, Frankie roots out an old unused "Cat Cam" collar. What slowly begins as a voyeuristic fascination with her neighbours and the secrets they're hiding soon turns into a perilous quest for the truth that threatens to bring untold terrors to her doorstep. Nine Lives is by Catherine Steadman

After Bruno misses several phone calls from Pamela, he worries that something has happened to his beloved horse he keeps at her riding school. But her reason for calling is entirely unexpected: Pamela’s new lodger has been murdered. Bruno knows that Pamela isn’t capable of killing anyone, but then who’s the culprit? And what’s the motive? The dead woman had only just moved to town to take a job at the local nursing home—she had no enemies in the village, and no friends, either. As Bruno wrestles with these complications, the force realizes that Bruno can’t be impartial when Pamela is involved, and assigns the case instead to their rising star rookie, Fabien. Bruno is happy for Fabien to take the lead. After all, Bruno’s been distracted—by his foundering relationship, by a documentary crew determined to transform the sleepy Vézère Valley into a tourist hotspot, by a group of opinionated small businesses Bruno wants to help organize a logistically complicated night market. He can’t seem to catch a break. But when Fabien realizes that the victim is connected to his past, Bruno has to step back in to help. The village has never felt more crowded, and the clock is ticking: Will Bruno and Fabien be able to catch a killer? A Murder in Springtime is by Martin Walker. 

Remi Kone - From TV Drama Producer to Crime Thriller Author

My first job in television was making up stories for a soap. I couldn’t believe such a role existed - I had loved telling stories all my life, and I was going to be paid for something I had been doing since I was a child. I joined a team of story liners and, over the course of a year, I wrote numerous stories about characters of all ages and backgrounds - some of whom had appeared on screen for decades; others whom I helped create. It was the best training I’ve ever had and, when I sat down to write my debut crime thriller novel, INNOCENT GUILT, those lessons I had learned at the start of my TV career proved invaluable.

INNOCENT GUILT began with an image: a woman covered in blood, carrying a baseball bat walks into a police station. She doesn’t say a word; she’s not injured, and the blood isn’t hers. Is she the victim or the perpetrator? Who is she? What has she done? I wasn’t sure at first, but I wanted to find out.

My lead character, Detective Leah Hutch, is outside the police station when the mute woman appears, and we mainly follow the investigation through her eyes. After several years of working in series television, I have first-hand experience of how attached audiences can become to characters, developing allegiances that bring them back to a TV show, season after season. I wanted to create a central character with whom readers would want to go on a journey across multiple books. I spent a while pondering who Leah is and how she sees the world, but it wasn’t until I started to think of the chapters as scenes that she really came to life. As I wrote, I imagined her in each scene - how would she react to each conflict - big and small? How did that drive the story forwards? The chapters became shorter and sharper, and the words started to flow. Sometimes Leah surprised me, and I had to change course from what I had originally planned. With each draft, I got to know her better and discovered layers I hadn’t envisaged. 

We mainly follow the story through Leah’s eyes, but hers isn’t the only point of view in the novel: A journalist called Odie Reid receives a mysterious tip-off about a dead body in a park. She has history with Leah and tries to link the dead body to the mute woman, determined to solve the case before Leah does. Thus begins a cat and mouse game between two women who don’t like each other, as they investigate the case in parallel.

When it came to structuring the novel from two different perspectives, I turned to the world of television once more. Since my days working on a soap, I have primarily worked on returning drama series. I have spent hours helping screenwriters plot multiple story strands across several episodes, building to the season climax, and I approached INNOCENT GUILT in much the same way. The main difference was that now, as opposed to working in a team, I was on my own. I have a fantastic agent and editor, but in those early stages, it was just me and the blank page.

I am often asked how working on a book differs from producing television drama and which I prefer: Writing books is in many ways solitary, whilst TV is more collaborative, particularly when it comes to the practicalities of TV production. Having said that, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how useful my TV experience has been, and I’m thankful for those early days spent sitting in a room with my fellow story liners, creating imaginary characters and talking about their lives as if they were real.

Innocent Guilt by Remi Kone (Quercus Publishing) Out Now

Victim or murderer . . . Can she discover the truth? On a misty autumn afternoon, a woman covered in blood clutching a baseball bat walks silently into a London police station. The two officers assigned to her case are DI Leah Hutch and DS Benjamin Randle. But the woman refuses to speak. She is not injured and the blood on the bat is not hers. What has she done? Is she the victim or the perpetrator? As Leah and Randle start their inquiry, a man is found battered to death in a nearby park. Journalist Odie Reid receives a tip off and is determined to solve the case first, trying to link this death to the woman held in custody. Leah and Odie have history and very quickly their cat and mouse game becomes personal, leading them both to the very darkest corners of their pasts.      

A review of Innocent Guilt can be found here on the Shots Mag website.

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British Nigerian Emmy-nominated producer, Remi Kone has worked on a number of well-known television dramas, such as KILLING EVE, SPOOKS and LEWIS. She lives in London, and INNOCENT GUILT is her first novel.

 

Instagram: @remikonewriter

Fish and Fowl: Categorizing the Genre-Bending Novel

I am a native-born Scot with a Nigerian surname, a US passport and an English accent.  If some librarian of humanity were to place me on the shelf beside my brothers and sisters, where, I wonder, would I be filed?  In the fiction section, perhaps.  Possibly under cryptids.

When it comes to categories, I’m a bit of a nightmare.  And yet it’s a fundamental of human nature that everything must be sorted, catalogued and put into boxes.  A nice, compact label to sum up the entirety of a thing in all its nuanced glory.  Even something as ostensibly descriptive as blonde or brunette is freighted with sub-text.  It is highly unlikely, for instance, that the persons generated in your mind by the previous sentence were male.

Categories are fundamental to who we are for a reason.  We need shortcuts to get us through the day, otherwise the one-and-a-half kilos of fat sheltering behind our eyeballs would cook itself into render.  Imagine going through life treating every pedestrian crossing you come across as something you’ve never seen before; or wondering if the unaccompanied two-year old bawling their eyes out in the park is a lost and frightened child, or merely some very tiny, very upset grown-up.  Life would very quickly grind to a halt.

Publishers, shocking as it may seem, are human too.  When it comes to books, they like to categorise them.  They need to categorise them.  If the reader is looking for a fast-paced thriller, they do not want to wade through historical textbooks on the Serene Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire in order to find one.  That would be . . . not efficient.  So, publishers make it easy.  We have thrillers, and sci-fi, and cosy crime, and romance, and paranormal romance and the list goes on.  Pick your category and start browsing.  Job done.

But the list is not endless.  What if someone has written something that is two or more of these things?  What then?  What bookshelf could possibly be home for a mutant creation like that?

I’m asking for a friend.

This friend likes to write stories.  If he has a great idea for a story, he’ll write it.  But the deluded fool never bothers to think about the type of story he’s writing.  It’s enough for him that it’s a cool story.  He wrote a sci-fi adventure called Braking Day, then a murder mystery called A Quiet Teacher, and a follow-up called Two Times Murder.  And then . . . then he wrote Esperance, a police procedural that turns weird.  About a cop who’s in way over his head, wondering how someone can drown in seawater on the 20^th floor of a Chicago apartment block hundreds of miles from the ocean.  About a woman who materialises out of nowhere in Bristol, England asking questions about a ship that set sail in 1791.  About how each, unknown to the other, has set out on a path where human justice and inhuman crimes will crash into each other with dire consequences.  How does one label a book like that?  On what shelf does it fit?  It is part crime novel, part thriller, part sci-fi, with a dash of historical fiction thrown in for good measure.  Exactly the sort of hot, buttery mess that might be written by a native-born Scot with a Nigerian surname, a US passport and an English accent.

Not that I did, of course.  I’m asking for a friend, remember?

My friend’s publishers have decided to run with “speculative fiction”, by which I think they mean a novel set in the “real” world with science-fiction (“speculative”) elements.  On the other hand, Library Journal in the US described Esperance as “recommended for readers who love intricately blended genre stories that ask big questions”.  And if one were to open up the programme for this year’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, one would find said friend described as, you guessed it, a “crime writer”.  You pays your money and takes your choice, I guess.

Which kind of brings me back to the question we started out with.  On what shelf does one put a native-born Scot with a Nigerian surname, a US passport and an English accent?

So, here’s the thing.  I am not Scottish or Nigerian or American or English.  I am all of these things.  At the same time.  I know, right!  But now we can answer the question.  My librarian of humanity should keep me on all of those shelves.  Everywhere all at once, so to speak.  That way, I’m easy to find and always where I belong.  Similarly, whether the reader happens upon Esperance as speculative fiction, or sci-fi, or crime, or thriller, or anything else, I hope they’ll give it a try, regardless.  It’s a cool story.

Not that I care, really.

I’m only asking for a friend.

Esperance by Adam Oyebanji (Quercus Books) Out now.

An impossible death: Detective Ethan Krol has been called to the scene of a baffling murder: a man and his son, who appear to have been drowned in sea-water. But the nearest ocean is a thousand miles away. An improbable story: Hollie Rogers doesn't want to ask too many questions of her new friend, Abi Eniola. Abi claims to be an ordinary woman from Nigeria, but her high-tech gadgets and extraordinary physical abilities suggest she's not telling the whole truth. An incredible quest: As Ethan's investigation begins to point towards Abi, Hollie's fears mount. For Abi is very much not who she seems. And it won't be long before Ethan and Hollie find themselves playing a part in a story that spans cultures, continents . . . and centuries.

More information about the author and be found on his website.

 

 

Extract from The Sins of Our Fathers by ,Åsa Larsson

District Prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson was standing at her height-adjustable desk when Sergeant Tommy Rantakyrö stuck his head in the door.

“What deep sighs those were,” he said.

Rebecka grinned. She hadn’t been aware she’d been sighing.

“Sign of age,” she said. “I’ve turned into my grandmother. She was always sighing. And they were very definitely those ‘if only the good

Lord would put me out of my misery’ kind of sighs.”

Tommy Rantakyrö laughed and put a paper bag on her desk.

“Afternoon snack,” he announced. “Raw food balls, one liquorice and one ginger and cinnamon. They’re a cure for sighing.”

“Too right! And now the good Lord won’t have to deliver me from evil quite yet.”

“Not for an hour anyway.”

(…)

“How’s it going, reviewing the case backlog?” he asked with a nod at the piles of paper on her desk.

Rebecka gave another of her grandmother’s sighs and raised her hands in supplication. Tommy sighed even louder. They both laughed at the little joke they had come up with and now shared.

Rebecka’s boss Alf Björnfot had taken all his accrued holidays, added a two-month leave of absence and gone off to Alaska. The trip he’d been dreaming of with his grown-up daughter. Seeing bears and fishing for salmon.

Rebecka’s colleague Carl Von Post had been appointed acting chief prosecutor. On the last day of work before his holiday, Björnfot had come into Rebecka’s office and put a yellow Post-it on her notice board.

“TRY NOT TO BE A PAIN”. Written only half in jest.

“Try to get along with Calle,” Björnfot had said. “I know he’s not your favourite person but he’s been here longest, so I’ve got to make him acting chief. But I don’t want anyone ringing me on the warpath and spoiling my trip.”

(…)

Von Post’s footsteps could be heard in the corridor. A few seconds later and he appeared in the doorway. Boyishly ruffled hair, neatly pressed shirt and not even a hint of a beer belly.

“Hi there, Tommy,” he said in comradely greeting and patted him a bit too hard on the back. “How’s it going, Martinsson?”

Rebecka froze. There was a difference between her and Von Post, or perhaps between her and the upper class. He was as pleasant as a television presenter to everyone he met, both enemies and allies. She, on the other hand, found it hard to disguise her true feelings and became curt and uptight, her neck stiff and her lips pressed tightly together. She found it difficult to look people she didn’t like in the eye. She despised herself for not being able to play the game. Condemned to being the psychological underdog.

Carl Von Post gave her a knowing smile. She could loathe him for all he cared. It seemed to please him that she failed to respond when addressed.

“How’s it going with the frozen goods?” Von Post asked, turning to Tommy.

“The corpse in the freezer? In the end we commissioned a helicopter that finally managed to land. And picked up both the freezer and the old guy who was dead in the house.”

“What?” Von Post exclaimed. “There were two dead people? Murders?”

“We don’t know yet. They’re both at the medical examiner’s now, so Pohjanen will be ringing when he’s got something to tell us.”

“Good, good. Anything new on that front take it up with me. Martinsson’s got her plate full with—”

“Yea, I know,” Tommy cut him off. “I brought her some goodies to cheer her up. That’s a hell of a pile she’s got to work through.”

Von Post’s smile got even wider.

“It’s really incredibly good for her, you know, to work through the backlog. She didn’t get her position as prosecutor the normal way, did she. I was a trainee prosecutor for nine months and then an assistant prosecutor for two years. So there are certain basics she lacks.”

Rebecka gritted her teeth and stared at Von Post. It was outrageous that he should be talking over her head while making it sound as though she were less qualified than him. In truth she was overqualified, and he knew it. She imagined he lay awake at night tortured by the realisation that she had given up what would be his dream job, a lawyer at Meijer & Ditzinger, for her current position in the Prosecution Service. And he’s bound to think they would welcome me back with open arms if I wanted, she was thinking. Though I’m not sure that’s true.

“Anyway, I really should let you get on,” Von Post said to Rebecka, and gave Tommy an encouraging look.

But Tommy made no move to leave. Rebecka leaned back in her chair and fished a raw food ball from the paper bag.

“Feel like sharing?” she asked Tommy. Von Post vanished down the corridor.

“That guy,” Tommy said. Rebecka gritted her teeth. Do not complain, she admonished herself.

(…)

“Screw Von Post,” she said as cheerfully as she could. “These balls are so delicious, shall we share another one? What was that about a corpse in a freezer?”

“Don’t know yet, it looks like it had been there for a long time.”

“Butchered?”

“No, apparently not. Shame you’re not going to be the lead on this

one, von Post is all psyched about it.”

“So you’re going to have fun together on a freezer murder,” Rebecka said. “Don’t think about me sending shoplifters and taggers and speeders to prison.”

“You’re a terror, you are,” Tommy said with admiration. “You know we all think that.”

“All but one,” Rebecka said, before adding, quick as a flash, “not that I’m bothered though.”

She rooted around the paper bag with exaggerated interest.

“She’ll get over it,” Tommy said. “You know what Mella’s like.”

Rebecka immediately lost interest in the bag and the raw food balls.

“Mella?” she asked.

“Oh hell, you meant Von Post . . .”

Tommy swallowed the rest of the sentence; his eyes turned towards the Post-it note on Rebecka’s wall.

“Mella!” Rebecka exclaimed. “Is Anna-Maria pissed off with me?

Why?”

“Forget it,” Tommy pleaded. “I thought she’d been in here to complain. Please forget I said anything.”

“Just what have I done to her?” Rebecka said, upset. “I mean, we haven’t even seen one another for . . .”

She dropped the bag on the desk and walked towards the door.

“There’s no need to say anything. It really won’t be that hard to find out.”

She strode noisily along the corridor. Tommy debated whether to rush after her but decided not to.

“No, I’m off home,” he said aloud. “This is about to blow.” 

The Sins of Our Father by Åsa Larsson (Translated by Frank Perry) (Quercus Publishing) Out Now £20.00

Forensic pathologist Lars Pohjanen has only a few weeks to live when he asks Rebecka Martinsson to investigate a murder that has long since passed the statute of limitations. A body found in a freezer at the home of the deceased alcoholic, Henry Pekkari, has been identified as a man who disappeared without a trace in 1962: the father of Swedish Olympic boxing champion Boerje Stroem. Rebecka wants nothing to do with a fifty-year-old case - she has enough to worry about. But how can she ignore a dying man's wish? When the post-mortem confirms that Pekkari, too, was murdered, Rebecka has a red-hot investigation on her hands. But what does it have to do with the body kept in his freezer for decades? Meanwhile, the city of Kiruna is being torn down and moved a few kilometres east, to make way for the mine that has been devouring the city from below. With the city in flux, the tentacles of organized crime are slowly taking over . . .

In The St Hilda's Spotlight - Peter May

 

Name:- Peter May

Job:- Author and former television dramatist

Twitter:- @authorpetermay

Website:- http://www.petermay.co.uk

Introduction:-

Peter May is a scottish author and a naturalised French citizen. He is the author of a number of different series and standalone novels. 

The Blackhouse the first in the Lewis Trilogy was first published in France under the title L'Ile des Chasseurs d'Oiseaux. It won the Prix des Lecteurs at Le Havre's Ancres Noires Festival in 2010 and won the Barry Award for Crime Novel of the Year and the Cezam Prix Littéraire Inter CE (Readers' prize for best novel by a European author, published in France) in 2011. It was also chosen as one of the Richard and Judy books for the autumn 2011 list. The second book The Lewis Man won the French daily newspaper Le Télégramme's 10,000-euro Grand Prix des Lecteurs, the Prix des Lecteurs at Le Havre's Ancres Noires Festival, 2012 and the won the 2012 Prix International at the Cognac Festival. The Chessman, the third book in the trilogy was published in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Book of the Year 2014.

In 2014, Entry Island (a standalone novel) won both the Deanston's Scottish Crime Novel of the Year and the UK's ITV Crime Thriller Book Club Best Read of the Year Award. It also won the French Trophée 813 for the Best Foreign Crime Novel of the year 2015. In 2021 he was awarded the CWA Dagger in the Library which recognises the popularity of an author's body of work with readers and users of libraries.

The Enzo Files are set in France featuring a half scottish, half Italian former forensic scientist, now working as a biology professor. His has written six books in his China thriller series and he is the only westerner to be honoured by the Beijing Chapter of the Chinese Crime Writers Association where he is an honorary member.

His most recent book is The Night Gate which is an Enzo File book. Peter May is currently writing A Winter Grave that is due out in January 2023.

Current book? (This can either be the current book that you are reading or writing)

I am in the production process with my latest book, which will be released next January. I have just gone through the copy-edit and should receive proofs within the next two weeks. “A Winter Grave” is a thriller set in 2051 (the year of my 100th birthday) in a world transformed by climate change. It is largely set in the West Highlands of my native Scotland and I feel that it might be one of my very best.

Favourite book?

“The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B” by J.P. Donleavy. I first read this book when I was eighteen, and it profoundly influenced my writing style.

Which two characters would you invite to dinner and why? 

Inspector Jules Maigret to discuss the insights into the human condition that made him such a intelligent and compassionate investigator; Charles Latimer, Eric Ambler’s mystery writer in “The Mask if Dimitrious”. I’d love to ask him why he didn’t regard the extraordinary adventures he had just been through as inspirational material for his next book – rather than sitting down at the end of it to write yet another “golden age” murder mystery set in a country mansion.

How do you relax?

Writing and recording music. Music has been one of the great loves of my life, playing in bands from my early teens and into my twenties. Now that I have more time, and a little money, I have been able to install a home recording studio to indulge my passion fully. I will be bringing out an album of original songs later this year.

Which book do you wish you had written and why?

Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast”, because I would love to have lived that life, met those people, experienced those things.

What would you say to your younger self if you were just starting out as a writer.

Stick at it. No matter how many knockbacks you receive, just keep writing and believe in yourself, even when others don’t.

How would you describe your series characters? 

I have only once set out to write a series – the Enzo Files. My China Thrillers only became a series at the prompting of my publisher. Likewise the Lewis Trilogy. I loved the characters in both those series because through them I was able to explore emotions and experiences, and create the kind of long term relationships I had learned to craft as a writer of TV soap. But Enzo was a character with whom I wholly identified. My age, my cultural background. Scottish, now living in France, and toiling to repair the fractured relationship with his daughter from a previous marriage. We have grown old together, drunk great wine and eaten wonderful food together, entered semi-retirement together, and might one day sit down to discuss a future collaboration.

With Town and Country: Green Lanes to Mean Streets being the theme at St Hilda's this year, Where is your favourite town and where is your favourite country? Why have you chosen these?

My favourite town is Toulouse – La Ville Rose. A wonderful old mediaeval town built of red brick, with a thriving student culture that makes it such a living, vibrant place, even for an oldie like me. My favourite country is the part of rural south-west France where I live. Rolling hills, majestic rivers, forested valleys, ancient stone villages, and a way of life that is laid back and life-affirming.

What are you looking forward to at St Hilda's?

My regret is that I won’t be there in person. Because of this damned pandemic, I’m not ready to travel yet. I love Oxford, and have done several book events there, and I am sad at missing the opportunity to visit a place of such historical importance in the pioneering of women’s rights in education. Happily, due to the wonders of the internet, I will be able to join the audience for a live interactive after my pre-recorded speech, and I’m looking forward to that very much.

The Night Gate by Peter May (Quercus Publishing) Out Now.

In a sleepy French village, the body of a man shot through the head is disinterred by the roots of a fallen tree. A week later a famous art critic is viciously murdered in a nearby house. The deaths occurred more than seventy years apart. Asked by a colleague to inspect the site of the former, forensics expert Enzo Macleod quickly finds himself embroiled in the investigation of the latter. Two extraordinary narratives are set in train - one historical, unfolding in the treacherous wartime years of Occupied France; the other contemporary, set in the autumn of 2020 as France re-enters Covid lockdown. And Enzo's investigations reveal an unexpected link between the murders - the Mona Lisa. Tasked by the exiled General Charles de Gaulle to keep the world's most famous painting out of Nazi hands after the fall of France in 1940, 28-year-old Georgette Pignal finds herself swept along by the tide of history. Following in the wake of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa as it is moved from château to château by the Louvre, she finds herself just one step ahead of two German art experts sent to steal it for rival patrons - Hitler and Göring. What none of them know is that the Louvre itself has taken exceptional measures to keep the painting safe, unwittingly setting in train a fatal sequence of events extending over seven decades. Events that have led to both killings. The Night Gate spans three generations, taking us from war-torn London, the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, Berlin and Vichy France, to the deadly enemy facing the world in 2020.

A Winter Grave (Quercus Publishing) Out January 2023

2051. The warnings of climate emergency have been ignored and vast areas of the planet are under water, famine and population displacement are now the norm. Cameron Brodie, a Glasgow detective who has been diagnosed with cancer has been given six months to live when he is ordered to investigate a suspicious finding of a body entombed in ice on a mountain near the village of Kinlochleven. After a hazardous journey to the isolated and ice-bound village he meets the pathologist assigned to the perform the autopsy, Sita, an immigrant originally from India. Sita's autopsy establishes that the body, that of a missing journalist George Younger was murdered. She has collected evidence that once put through the DNA database could identify the killer. But after a restless nights sleep Brodie wakes to a crime scene and must race against time to identify the faceless killer.

Phoebe Wynne on Writing Tricky & Unlikeable Heroines

Credit @Josephine Gronk

 When reaching for my next book to read I have a terrible habit of ignoring my TBR and rereading Jane Eyre. Until last year, when my first novel was published, and I devoured as many contemporary novels as I could. In those acclaimed bestsellers I discovered a wealth of spunky and funky heroines, who in their own various and brilliant ways seemed to have no flaws at all.

 Every protagonist is the main character of her story, the one that makes decisions and faces the significant obstacles within the plot. In my studies of writing, I have always understood that a heroine can do one of two things: be the driver that propels the action forwards and changes the world around her, or the reactor to the action that moves around her within her world. The gothic novel – the genre within I write – prefers the latter. In its simplest form, picture this: a young woman, hair streaming, standing in front of a doomed-looking castle, the victim of her circumstance, a desperate damsel in distress, a captive desperate to escape her fate. Her deepest desires tend to be different from her actual needs, but we as readers cheer her on and champion her as she makes dreadful mistakes and stumbles towards her inevitable fate.

I have seen a downward trend in this type of heroine. It is a shame, because we need her, because we are her. We cannot all be Katniss Everdene.

 A real woman is messy, complicated, tricky, moody, and surely more interesting. As a reader I am thrilled by particularly darkly lit characters that are morally problematic. Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne is a perfect example of this, as she reveals a third of the way through the novel that she is not only alive and well but had planned the whole thing. Her ‘anti-cool-girl’ declaration lit up almost every woman I know as we each recognised her furious logic glowing through the novel’s narrative. One friend of mine, though, threw the book on the floor in disgust and refused to read any further. We are not friends anymore.

 The protagonists of my two gothic novels are a troubled teacher in her mid-twenties, and a bratty young girl on holiday with her wealthy parents. In MADAM my first is an everywoman introduced into a monstrous boarding school world, in THE RUINS my second is a little girl that becomes a monster in response to the oppressive collective she is forced to live inside. Both find themselves on the edge of the world they inhabit, both struggle to properly interact with the other members of their society, and both find every day a challenge. In the end, these characters find what they need in a very messy, destructive, and beautiful way. My young women are brutal and brutalised – too much perhaps, for many readers. But they have come from an ordinary place, and they make themselves extraordinary by what they do and by what has been done to them.

There are gentler and more expert versions of this – Jo March of Little Women, Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice, even Jane in Jane Eyre. Every one of them loved, adored, and celebrated even today – because they are versions of ourselves: foolish, loving, muddled, passionate, desperately happy and unhappy, both wrong and right. I would love to meet another one of these complicated heroines in contemporary novels, but I have not.

It might be because fundamentally, as a reader I am drawn to the real heroines – the ancient ones. Women in classical mythology suffered more viscerally and lived lives more colourfully outside of our regimented modern societies. These women have shouted loud at me from a young age, and as a result, I have based many of my characters on ancient women. There is a current trend to pick these characters up and guide them towards a warmly reimagined version of their story – and in almost every example they become more likeable. But I say, let them be. Let women be horrible if their story needs them to be horrible. Medea kills her children to save them from a disastrous future, to punish her husband, and to ensure a secure future for herself. Agrippina poisons the Roman emperor, her uncle, in order to place her own son on the throne and is tormented and assassinated as a result. There is little of this in today’s storytelling – but perhaps we need it. Let female characters be angry, unhappy, and violent if it is true to them. Let them scream and cry and fight back, while male characters rush horribly through their own stories as ever, like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Humbert Humbert in Lolita, and even Patrick Bateman in the American Psycho. I say, bring back our tricky and unlikeable heroines. Let us be rid of the superhero woman and allow ourselves to revel in the flawed everywoman.

 The Ruins by Phoebe Wynne (Published by Quercus Publishing) Out Now

Amidst the glamour of the French Riviera lies the crumbling facade of Chateau de Setes, a small slice of France still held by the British aristocracy. But this long since abandoned chateau is now up for sale, and two people are desperate to get their hands on it despite its terrible history.  Summer, 1985: Ruby has stayed at the chateau with her family every summer of her twelve years. It was her favourite place to be, away from the strictures of her formal childhood, but this year uninvited guests have descended, and everything is about to change...  As the intense August heat cloaks the chateau, the adults within start to lose sight of themselves. Old disputes are thrown back and forth, tempers rise, morals loosen, and darkness begins to creep around them all. Ruby and her two young friends soon discover it is best not to be seen or heard as the summer spirals down to one fateful night and an incident that can never be undone...  Summer, 2010: One of the three young girls, now grown and newly widowed, returns to the chateau, and in her fight to free herself from its grip, she uncovers what truly happened that long, dark summer.  With riveting psychological complexity, The Ruins captures the glittering allure of the Mediterranean, and the dark shadows that wait beneath the surface.

 More information about the author and her work can be found on her website. You can also follow her on Twitter @phoebewynne and on Instagram @phoebewynnewrites