Ted, Edward Wilson should have been with us to talk about his latest in the Catesby series ‘Farewell Dinner for a Spy’. Sadly we couldn’t go ahead due to his recent operation. However, we were so thrilled when he called in to sign copies last week and so Impressed how well he looked.

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We will arrange another date for later in the year TBC.  Signed copies available. Buy Farewell Dinner for a Spy here. 

Essex, February, 1991. The weather is biting cold. Everyone would rather be somewhere warmer, which is why it's a big surprise when a wanted drug smuggler, Bruce Hopkins, risks a return to his old haunts in Colchester after a decade long exile on the Costa del Sol. Lured back by a letter from the wife Hopkins left behind, no one is more surprised than him when he finds himself abducted and stripped bare only to be sent to a watery grave in the boot of a stolen Ford Sierra. The police wonder if it could be retaliation from a Spanish gang, sending a warning to their English counterparts?

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James Henry is the pen name for James Gurbutt. He has written four prequels to R.D WingCield's Frost series and three Essex-based novels featuring DI Nick Lowry. He works in publishing and lives in Essex. 

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Buy The Winter Visitor here. 

The Murky World of Timothy Wall is a new novel in the DI Carmichael series of crime novels from the inventive pen of Ian McFadyen (9th in the series).

A local private detective, Timothy Wall, is OK with allowing his secretary to finish a little earlier than normal to go out on a date with her new boyfriend. After all, all he has left to do that afternoon was to meet a new client at 5.20pm. But who was the stranger watching her leave the building, from the vantage point of a nearby café? Why was he watching her? Later that night a cleaner employed by a contract cleaning company finds the blood-stained corpse of Timothy Wall in his office. Stock, the irascible forensic scientist, confirms, with his typical bad grace, that it is, indeed a murder case. Carmichael and his team of detectives find the case to be a complex one that taxes their combined abilities as never before.

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Buy The Murky World of Timothy Wall here. 

John Nightingale is the Suffolk/London-based author of the David Knight crime trilogy (the last of which is now being written). He is an ex-Whitehall civil servant who helped resolve the Maxwell pensions scandal - and advised Ministers on alcohol misuse! John will be giving his perspective on crime writing in general, the rules of the genre, and what he hopes to achieve in the trilogy. The first in the David Knight series, The Appearance Of Murder, was one of the books of the year chosen by John Sutherland and Ian Rankin's pick for his Christmas stocking.

 

‘The most teasingly pleasurable crime mystery novel I’ve come across this year is The Appearance of Murder. The plot is cunningly set up around a novelist writing a crime mystery novel which then dissolves into the real thing. Or perhaps not. The play of appearance and reality is maintained to a satisfying denouement.’ 

JOHN SUTHERLAND 

The Times, Books of the Year 2015

 

In The Appearance Of Murder crime writer David Knight is dragged back into a past in which it seems he might have fathered a child or even committed murder. Neither possibility is going to be popular with his wife Kate. The trouble is that David hasn’t a clue about what actually happened…

 

In The Direction Of Murder David is asked to develop a film script based on one of his novels. He becomes uneasy when he finds that his detective is being portrayed by a method actor who believes he is David's detective, Tom Travis. Nor does it help that he has caught the eye of the director's glamorous, and very rich, wife. Then things get complicated...

 

The David Knight novels available to buy in store only. 

Local author Lin Le Versha will be with us discussing her collection of crime novels, focusing on her most recent ‘Blood Ribbons’.  Book 4 in the Steph Grant Murder Mystery series. A gripping Suffolk coast murder mystery full of twists, keeping you guessing until the very end.

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Lin Le Versha is a writer not to be missed, the brilliant new talent on the British crime writing scene. Each dark murder mystery in her fabulous crime series will keep you guessing until the very end when the final shocking twist is revealed. If you love Rachel McLean's Dorset Crime Series and Ann Cleeves's Shetland Series, then you are going to adore Lin Le Versha.

Jenny describes the challenges and pleasures of creating her  historical novel, ‘Small Acts of Kindness, a tale of the first Russian Revolution’. She briefly outlines the historical background to the revolt of December 1825, through a wide range of illustrations, shows how contemporary artworks and memoirs inspired the book’s plot and informed its vivid sense of place. She also discusses how, as an writer of fiction, she dealt with the problems encountered when the facts got in the way of the story.

The underlying theme of the book, the struggle against autocracy and the freedom of millions of serfs from bondage, has direct relevance to the situation in Russia and Ukraine today. 

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St Petersburg, 1825. Imperial Russia still basks in the glory of victory over Napoleon, but in the army and elsewhere resentment is growing against serfdom and autocracy. Vasily, a pleasure loving, privileged young man, returns home from abroad expecting to embark on a glittering career. Having become entangled in an impossible love affair, he joins a conspiracy to overthrow the government. Threatened by exile to Siberia or death, he is forced to flee the Tsar’s vengeance. Vasily hopes to rebuild his life in a distant provincial town. But he cannot forget his lost love, and now finds himself pursued by a rival who aims to destroy him. Can he escape the past, mend his broken relationships and find a better way to change the world?