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Blog Tour - No Bodies by Robert Crouch

10/29/2017

What's the book all about? Here's the product description.

Why would environmental health officer, Kent Fisher, show any interest in finding Daphne Witherington, the missing wife of a longstanding family friend? The police believe she ran off with Colin Miller, a rather dubious caterer, and Kent has problems of his own when a young girl who visits his animal sanctuary is rushed to hospital.

When enquiries into Colin Miller reveal a second missing wife, Kent picks up a trail that went cold over a year ago. But he’s struggling to find a connection between the women, even when he discovers a third missing wife.

Is there a killer on the loose in Downland?

With no motive, no connection and no bodies, Kent may never uncover the truth.

You can buy it here.

Here's my review - and a bit about the author, Robert Crouch.

Kent Fisher, is once again on the trail of a murderer. The problem is, there are missing women, but no bodies. Colonel Witherington, a local bigwig, has charged Kent with finding his missing wife Daphne, or bringing her murderer to justice. As the investigation progresses, Kent discovers links between the missing women and sets off to find justice. Meanwhile, he himself, or at least, his animal sanctuary, may be implicated in another tragedy. He gets in deeper, and doesn’t help himself by his attitude to his boss.

This is the second Kent Fisher mystery and follows directly on from the first, No Accident. I think you really need to read the first, as this would be confusing as a stand-alone. A little more explanation of who people are when they first appear in the book would help new readers. Having said that, this is equally refreshing, set as it is around the investigations of an environmental health officer, rather than a police officer. Kent Fisher is a warm, stubborn and occasionally hopeless character whom I couldn’t fail to warm to. The author handles his writing deftly and the story is very funny, witty and full of sharp observations. I really enjoy this series and look forward to more.

The author -

Inspired by Miss Marple, Inspector Morse and Columbo, Robert Crouch wanted to write entertaining crime fiction the whole family could enjoy.
At their heart is Kent Fisher, an environmental health officer with more baggage than an airport carousel. Passionate about the environment, justice and fair play, he's soon embroiled in murder.
Drawing on his experiences as an environmental health officer, Robert has created a new kind of detective who brings a unique and fresh twist to the traditional murder mystery. With complex plots, topical issues and a liberal dash of irreverent humour, the Kent Fisher mysteries offer an alternative to the standard police procedural.
Robert now writes full time and lives on the South Coast of England with his wife and their West Highland White Terrier, Harvey, who appears in the novels as Kent’s sidekick, Columbo.

Robert's website is here and this is where you can find his author page on Amazon.

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Author Chat - Will Macmillan Jones

10/26/2017

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Today I'm chatting to the Welsh wordsmith Will Macmillan Jones, author of many books in a wide variety of genres. He's just published a new horror book. Timely!

Tell me, Will, have you always been interested in horror as a genre? Did you read it in your younger days?

When I was just teenage, I discovered Dennis Wheatley. I wasn’t supposed to, of that I am sure; but the books were in my Grandfather’s library and my parents did not really monitor what I read. So I devoured those, and enjoyed the vibe that they created. A little later came Lovecraft, which was of course much harder going, then Poe and Stoker, Le Fanu, Shelley… so yes, I suppose. I read very widely, across a lot of genres though and so my bookcases are full of not just horror and fantasy, but humour, philosophy, detective novels, thrillers, espionage, humour, historical, adventure, real life adventure… I could go on but won’t.

I was a Wheatley fan myself back in my teens. I've occasionally wondered, is the Mr Jones in your horror series really you? He’s not a ghost or demon hunter but evil things seem to accrete around him. Do bad things happen to you?

No, he isn’t me. Or at least, he wasn’t ever planned to be. He is himself: someone with a Karmic burden to work off. An unlikely, middle-aged unheroic hero, as one reviewer called him. The latest book, Demon’s Reach, reveals a little about his family’s past that explains why Darkness seems to gather so easily around him. The final book in his collection will resolve this for him, one way or another. I haven’t decided if he will survive the final confrontation yet, or pass on to a less stressful incarnation.

I started out in The Showing with Mister Jones actually being a secondary character. The main character was, of course, the House itself and its non-corporeal inhabitant. Mister Jones was the foil for the House. It is the same in Portrait of a Girl. The eponymous Girl is the focus of the book, and her choice of Mister Jones as her life enhancing victim was a coincidence. Of course it was always more than that.

As for me? Well, I am rather hoping that the arrival two years ago of my new partner has been a turning point that shows I have worked off loads of my bad karma. There’s been enough of it to go at, it would seem. And as I have openly said, the house in The Showing actually is my Grandfather’s house, and there is an extent to which that book was the direct result of my trying to find an explanation for the events I experienced there in my childhood. With a couple of added killings that I don’t recall myself. But then, childhood memories are notoriously incomplete.

Do you have any belief in an after -life? It seems necessary to believe in the persistence of the human soul after death if you’re going to get hauntings, doesn’t it?

As a Buddhist, I’m actually a firm believer in reincarnation, so that’s a ‘No’ to the afterlife in the Western Philosophical sense. But that does not preclude the idea of life-force persisting after death or returning in other forms. Many writers argue that after death, the atman (soul is the closest Western equivalent) exists for forty days in a form of limbo before rebirth. This in itself opens possibilities, and I see no reason why in certain circumstances this limbo state should not persist a little longer… Then Buddhism itself is full of many wonderful and esoteric demons, gods and beings with different natures to us humans you know! But as a writer, I am working not just with my own beliefs but with the cultural references of the society I’m living in. Revenants, ghosts, tormented souls trapped within places and/or objects – all these are ideas that my imagination can work with and reference points that I can use to trigger an anticipated range of responses from the readers.

I never forget that the point of these novels is to entertain, after all: so any and every cultural reference is available to me. The Curse of Clyffe House introduces a monster from an ancient world, as portrayed in The Mabinogion. A rich vein of material for any paranormal enthusiast.

Tell us about the other genres you write in.

If I am known at all, which is entirely unlikely, it is probably for my comic fantasy collection The Banned Underground. This collection deals with the adventures of a fantasy rhythm and blues band, and the witches, wizards, elves, dwarfs and assorted magical beings that they meet on the road. This lets me tell lots and lots of gags and thoroughly enjoy myself caricaturing many of the musician friends and acquaintances I have and hang around with. The more recent books have all had a somewhat deeper point to them, too, which may or may not have been apparent to the casual reader.

In addition, I am a performing poet and oral storyteller working around the Valleys and coast of South Wales, and some of that work seems – almost by osmosis- into my books.

I also have a couple of fantasy books for young children out, with the firm intention of writing a few more of these. But I have to say that writing for that age group is much harder than anything else that I have done!

What are you working on at the moment?

I have some Sci fi novels in the final stages of preparation, the eighth book in The Banned Underground comic fantasy collection is coming along very nicely, and a further paranormal story – not involving poor Mister Jones – is also half written. In addition I have outlines for a further three books, one of which is quite heavily fleshed out! And I use that term with careful consideration. And that’s all the teaser you are going to get right now about that one. Hehehehehe.

In my Dreams
I wander the wide lands of Death
Hoping
That my return ticket is still valid.

(Write what you know, they say. Do you think that I might be in trouble?)

I hope not! Otherwise a lot of authors will be in there with you!

Thanks for answering all those questions, Will.

You can find Will's Amazon page here and his new book, Demon's Reach is available here.
And here's the cover and blurb.

All families have secrets or skeletons in the cupboard, hidden away from view. Most of those secrets are better left undisturbed, for very good reasons. When Mister Jones agrees to deal with the Estate of a recently deceased cousin, he finds that the secrets hidden by his family are very dark indeed, and that the skeletons in this cupboard are very real – and not yet entirely dead.

Drawn once more by Fate into a world where magic and myth are all too real and danger lurks at every turn, Mister Jones confronts a past that seeks again to become the present, and to plunge his future into a rising Darkness.

Can he escape the Demon’s Reach?

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The making of The Novice's Demon

10/23/2017

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I don't know for sure how other writers work but I usually get an idea, start writing the story, and only when it's well along do I begin to think about a cover. The Novice's Demon was written the other way round.

We'd been on holiday in May and I'd been snapping views to send to friends and family as 'ecards' - emails with a photo attached. A coach tour brought us to the Somerset village of Dunster, where I photographed a grotesque head decorating an archway at Dunster Priory.

My clever friend Jonathan Hill emailed back to say 'Book Cover'! As he designs my covers, I gave this a lot of thought. I wanted to base the story around the image, and what that might convey to a medieval mind. I grabbed the word demonic and ran with it. It was obviously only going to be a short story as I was basing it around one event.

I wanted to explore the differences between superstition and science as ways of looking at the world. I have my characters trying to explain what was happening to a young girl living an ascetic life, at the age when she might be most susceptible to suggestion and/or hysteria. The reader, of course, has modern science to interpret things - but it isn't always able to do so. We still can't explain some supernatural events to everybody's satisfaction. I leave it to the reader. What happened?

Details on Amazon

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Blog Tour - The Fallen Agent by Oliver Tidy

10/11/2017

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The book -

Jess Albion has recently started a new life on the other side of the world with a new identity. She used to be MI5. Then a job went bad, someone died and she was made an example of in the British courts. But MI5 look after their own. Or they did until rumours of a planned Al Qaeda biological terror attack on London started circulating. Now someone in the British security services is giving agents up in return for information. No price, it seems, is too high to save London from the ultimate threat.
When Jess’s fresh start is compromised she has a choice to make: run and hide and spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder or go looking for the threat and snuff it out. On her own, she’d run, but she has Nick on her side.
The Fallen Agent is a story of love and hate, of loyalty and betrayal, of revenge and all that goes with it.

You can buy it here in the UK or here in the US.

The Author -

Crime writing author Oliver Tidy has had a life-long love affair with books. He dreams of one day writing something that he could find in a beautifully-jacketed hard-cover or paperback copy on a shelf in a book shop. He’d even be happy with something taking up space in the remainder bin, on a pavement, in the rain, outside The Works.
He found the time and opportunity to finally indulge his writing ambition after moving abroad to teach English as a foreign language to young learners eight years ago.
Impatient for success and an income that would enable him to stay at home all day in his pyjamas he discovered self-publishing. He gave it go. By and large readers have been kind to him. Very kind. Kind enough that two years ago he was able to give up the day job and write full-time. Mostly in his pyjamas.
Oliver Tidy has fourteen books in three series, a couple of stand-alone novels and a couple of short story collections. All available through Amazon. Among his books are The Romney and Marsh Files (British police procedurals set in Dover) and the Booker & Cash novels, a series of private detective tales set in the south of England and published by Bloodhound Books.
Oliver is back living on Romney Marsh in the UK. His home. He still wakes in the night from time to time shouting about seeing his books on a shelf in Waterstones.

My review -

They say there’s honour among thieves but there doesn’t seem to be much in the world of the secret service. Someone high up in Vauxhall Cross is sacrificing agents to save his own job. Add in Al Qaeda, a rich Albanian, unfeasible amounts of money and the threat of a terrorist attack on London and you have the ingredients for an exciting thriller.

The characters are well-drawn, with good points and flaws to make them three-dimensional and believable. There are several high-octane points in the story which keep it bouncing along, making you wonder what can possibly happen next. The author vividly portrays the setting of the book – much of it in Albania. Altogether, this is a top notch spy thriller which I have no hesitation in recommending.

You can find Oliver's Amazon author page here and his Facebook page here.

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Blog Tour - No Bodies by Robert Crouch

Author Chat - Will Macmillan Jones

The making of The Novice's Demon

Blog Tour - The Fallen Agent by Oliver Tidy

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