In Jo Callaghan's first book featuring Detective Superintendent Kat Frank paired up with a virtual AI detective called Lock, In the Blink of an Eye , it was arguably the science fiction aspect that came to the fore - but the (arguably better) sequel focuses more on being an excellent police procedural crime novel. Frank and Lock have been moved from cold cases to a frontline murder that rapidly becomes a national news story - the victim has been crucified. (I don't know if the release of the book was timed intentionally, but I read it over Easter.) Tension mounts as a second crucified body is found - while the team is still thrashing around trying to find a viable suspect. Where in the first book, Lock (and people's reaction to his holographic presence) featured heavily, here he becomes significantly more part of the team, and we see not only his limitations, but some consideration of how much he should be considered a conscious entity. If anything, his abilities are slight...

Janice Hallett has rapidly become the best active light crime writer, bettering her first two books with the outstanding The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels , so I rushed to purchase her latest, a Christmas sequel to her remarkable debut The Appeal . Written in her distinctive modern epistolary style - in this case primarily featuring emails and WhatsApp messages, it is an entertaining piece of fluff, but not up to the usual standard. Let's get the good part in first. The storyline features a pantomime, and there is a particularly strong thread of humour here - more so than usual in her books. Christmas always makes a great setting for a cosy mystery, and this comes across nicely here. There was one point (featuring a dog and a bone) when I laughed out loud and plenty more to smile at. As always, Hallett manages brilliantly at using the apparently distancing style of collecting written communications to really get us into the heads of the characters and to keep track of a ta...

A good British crime novel is a wonderful thing, and I felt fairly confident coming to Dead Simple because according to the cover it has sold 14 million copies. But, for me, it was a huge let down. Peter James manages a couple of interesting twists and turns along the way, which I presume accounts for those sales. But the characters are mostly two-dimensional, the plot is incredibly far fetched - and this is a world where mediums can solve crimes. There are a couple of interesting ideas in the plot line, but the trouble is that James piles coincidence on unlikelihood to produce a ludicrously infeasible string of events. Add to this a deus ex machina ending dependent on a psychic's ability to exactly locate a missing person using a pendulum and a map (why do we bother with the police, when psychics could just solve all the crimes?) and the result is a book that convinces me not to take another step in the Roy Grace series. I usually put links to Amazon at this point - but I...

The latest self-pubbed Capel novel, An End to Innocence I've been a professional writer for over 20 years, but when I first started to get into writing, I wrote a number of novels which, despite getting positive feedback from publishers, never made it into print. For a long time they languished in the electronic equivalent of the back of a drawer, but the relative ease of modern self-publishing made me wonder if it was worth digging them out - and it has been a really positive experience. I've now published five of my Stephen Capel detective novels - three written way back when and just updated to introduce trendy aspects such as mobile phones, plus two written over the last couple of years. I used Amazon's Createspace platform, and though it appears somewhat overwhelming to start with, if you take it steadily it is surprisingly painless. For the interior of the book, I've used the Createspace formatted Word template on offer to download, which provides a very...

I'm pleased to say that I have just published the fourth in my Stephen Capel murder mysteries, A Twisted Harmony , and I've done something I never thought I would: at the end of the book, I've tagged on the first chapter of the follow-up novel An End to Innocence , which will be published in the autumn of 2017. When I read a book and hit one of these 'bonus' chapters at the end, I tend to feel a little cheated. This is because I rarely bother to read them, so it feels like the book is shorter than it appeared to be. And the reason I don't read them is because I don't like books to leave things dangling. Inevitably, reading just the first chapter of a book leaves the reader in suspense, potentially for a long time. (It's that US habit of ending a TV series on a cliffhanger until next season.) I made the decision to do it this time for two reasons. One is that I already really liked the way the new book was shaping up in my mind, so I wanted to get s...

I have been hugely enjoying the re-run of the BBC's Conan Doyle-meets-Dr Who modern day version of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Sherlock . The whole thing is so beautifully conceived, right from the initial idea that John Watson is a doctor invalided out of the war in Afghanistan, something that worked in both periods. It's simply one of the best things on TV at the moment. Yet excellent though it is, it does highlight for me a real flaw in the original concept that still plays through today. At the end of the second episode, Professor Moriarty ruthlessly executes a criminal who has let Holmes beat her. Even though she is sitting in a secure location, he effortlessly kills her. Yet somehow, despite the fact Holmes repeatedly thwarts him, he finds it difficult to bump off our hero. The fact is, the same technique as used at the end of episode two would shut down the whole business in an instant. I know Conan Doyle had to have Holmes escape Moriarty's fiendish attempts to...

This is the book that reminded me about Judge Dee These days historical murder mysteries are common fare. We might not hear much about Brother Cadfael any more, though the legacy remains, but I challenge anyone who likes their mysteries with a touch of history not to like the Shardlake series. However recently, while looking for a bit of fiction on my shelves to recover from a bit too much review reading, I re-discovered Robert van Gulik. In my teens I loved his murder mysteries set in seventh century China, featuring the remarkable Judge Dee Jen-djieh. Dee, based on a real historical character was a magistrate - a role that combined local admininstrative official, judge and CID inspector. van Gulik has an interesting style. While creative writing classes would probably reject him (he's fairly liberal with adverbs, for instance) he manages to set the scene using quite sparse description - he never gets bogged down in floweryness, yet you really do get a feel for the time a...

I've just finished reading a book and briefly I was upset. I felt manipulated by the author - cheated. At first sight, this is a pretty feeble reaction. The whole business of writing fiction is a matter of manipulation. To transfer the reader from their comfy chair to a different place, into danger, into someone else's head - it's all manipulation. But the good author does this in such a way that you don't notice. You mustn't ever see them pulling the strings. Now in this case it was puzzling that I felt like this, because it's a very good author indeed. So what was happening? I won't tell you who, or which book, or this will turn into a spoiler. But it was a crime novel. When I'd bought it, Amazon had splashed after its name 'an X Y crime novel', where X Y is the name of the writer's detective. Yet by the time I got 3/4 way through the book it was very obvious that X Y only had a bit part - another detective was the main character. Here...