Showing posts with label crime fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crime fiction. Show all posts

Thursday 24 August 2017

Pre-order The Secret Mother

My new psychological thriller THE SECRET MOTHER is now available to pre-order!

 

‘Are you my mummy?’ the little boy asks.

Tessa Markham comes home to find a child in her kitchen.
He thinks she’s his mother. But Tessa doesn’t have any children.

Not anymore.

She doesn’t know who he is or how he got there.

After contacting the police, Tessa comes under suspicion for snatching the boy. She must fight to prove her innocence. But how can she convince everyone she’s not guilty when even those closest to her are questioning the truth? And when Tessa doesn’t even trust herself . . .


~
Pre-order your copy via:  Amazon Kindle   iBooks   Kobo   Google Play

Nook is coming any day now.

Paperback and Audiobook coming soon...

Tuesday 7 June 2016

The Girl from the Sea - pre-launch teaser!

I'm two days from launching my first suspense thriller, The Girl from the Sea. Here's a sneak peek of the first few pages...


The dark water swallows me whole, pulling me under into blackness, dropping too fast. I cannot let the water take me, so I kick and flail. I push my body up. Water flows. Bubbles stream away. The sound of air and desperate splashes. The scent of damp night. And, at last, I see the inky sky once more. I don’t have enough energy for relief.  Instead, I gasp and thrash. All I know is that I must move my arms and kick my legs.

Keep moving forward.

Stay alive.
 
Chapter One

The scent of salt and seaweed. My throat, dry. Lips parched. Head aching. My clothes cling to me, heavy and wet. Cold. Shivering. I can’t think straight.
What’s happening?
Eyes closed. A rushing, bubbling, frothing. Birds, wind, warmth. I cough, a dry, echoing scrape. Painful. Everything sounds close by, yet far away. My body is stiff. Numb. I can’t move. Can I?
Water rushes over me. Cold and salty. Like it wants to claim me. To keep me covered. But it seeps away, replaced by a mixture of cool air and warmth.
My eyes fly open.
A fuzzy brightness greets me. I see blurred outdoor shapes in beige and blue and grey.
My head is pressed down onto something cold and hard. Not a pillow. Not a pavement. Sand. Wet sand. Something presses into my temple. A stone? I raise my head with difficulty. And bring up a reluctant arm. My hand peels away a pebble. Tosses it aside with herculean effort. I cough. Retch. There’s saltwater in my mouth. Bile. Tears. Snot.
Please, someone, tell me what’s happening. I feel as though I’m trapped inside my head, unable to look outside. Like I’m covered in a membrane. Sealed in.
A muffled voice breaks through my panic. I try to latch onto it. But the incoming words slip and slide away – a flow of sound that I can’t decipher. I try to keep my eyes open. To focus on something. But neither my eyes nor my ears want to cooperate.
‘Poppy, no!’
A snuffling black nose and a wet tongue. A whine and a bark.
‘Poppy, no! Come here!’
It’s someone’s dog. I still can’t focus properly.
‘Are you okay? I’m so sorry. Good girl, Poppy.’
I open my eyes once more and order them to focus.
‘Are you okay?’ The same voice, closer this time.
A face looms into my field of vision. I see a nose, a mouth, pink lipstick, glasses.
A noise comes from the back of my throat. But it’s just a rattle and a rasp. Nothing intelligible. What am I trying to say?
‘I called 999. Don’t worry. Poppy, sit! The ambulance will be here soon.’ A warm hand takes my cold one. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be okay.’
Will I? This person is here to help me. I know that much. That’s good. I can give myself over to the help of this woman. I close my eyes again. It’s too hard to keep them open. Too hard to focus.
More voices roll in and out like the salty water, like the breeze on my cheek. A wash of sound trying to break through to me. Part of me tries to resist the voices. Wants to keep them as a distant, blurring sound. Merging one with the other, like the waves and the wind. But a greater part of me needs to decipher the words. Needs to understand what’s happening.
‘Can you hear me?’
Another female voice in my ear. A younger, firmer voice. Her breath warm on my face.
‘Hello, can you open your eyes? Can you look at me?’
I force my eyes to open.
‘That’s it. Can you tell me your name?’
Warmth spreads over my body. Someone has placed a blanket over me. I’d forgotten how cold I was.
‘Look at me again. That’s it. Can you tell me your name?’
I’m staring into kind brown eyes. A woman in uniform. Her hair pulled back in a ponytail. I open my mouth to say my name. But then I close it again. My mind has gone blank. It hurts to think.
‘Can you hear me?’
I want to nod, but my head won’t obey. ‘Yes,’ I say, even though no sound comes out.
‘Good,’ the woman says.
‘Do you know where you are?’
‘Beach?’ My voice is a faint croak.
‘That’s right. Do you know which beach?’
‘No.’
‘Can you tell me how you feel, physically?’
‘Tired.’
‘Have you been in the water? Been for a swim in the sea?’
‘I think I was in the water,’ I whisper.
‘Are you hurt? Are you in pain anywhere?’
‘I . . . I don’t know. Sore throat. Headache. Cold.’
‘Alright. We’re going to get you up off this sand. Get you away from the waves where you’ll be more comfortable, okay?’
I close my eyes again. I’m scared. They’re going to move me, but what if my body’s broken? What if it hurts when they lift me?
The next few minutes pass in a strange blur. I’m lifted onto a stretcher. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be; my body aches, but there’s no sharp pain. People are watching. I’m awake enough to feel self-conscious. The woman in the glasses with the pink lipstick hovers over me for a moment.
‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘You’re in good hands now. Take care.’ She touches two fingers to my cheek, and then steps back.
And now I’m being moved. Carried away from the sea, across the sand. My body is still cold, but a warm breeze skims my face, the sun heats my forehead. I feel as though I’m floating. Light as air. The woman and the man in uniform talk to me, but I’m too tired to hear them. Their voices sway in and out, merging with the crunch of footsteps and the cry of the gulls.

 

The walls are toothpaste green, and the air smells of old socks and disinfectant. Stale and recycled like an overheated aeroplane. I’m sitting up in a hospital bed in the Accident and Emergency department, waiting for a doctor to see me. A nurse has already taken my blood pressure and temperature. The curtains are pulled around the sides of my bed, but they’ve been left open at the end so I can still see out. A teenage boy lies in the bed opposite, his mother at his side. I can’t tell what’s wrong with him. My thoughts are clearer now than earlier, my mind a little sharper. But my head still throbs, and I can’t quell the panic in my chest, the constant fluttering in my stomach or the tightness in my throat.
Nurses stride past, calling out instructions to colleagues. Trolleys clatter as medical equipment is wheeled up and down the ward. At least I’m warm and dry. They took my wet clothing, and now I’m wearing a hideous blue hospital gown. I tense as I hear a woman’s voice getting closer. Her accent is pretty, and I wonder where she’s from. Maybe Russia, or Poland?
‘The one from the beach?’ I hear her say. ‘How long?’
Another woman replies: ‘Only a few minutes.’
The women step into my line of sight. One is a young doctor in a white coat, her blonde hair pulled into a bun at the back of her head. The other is an older lady, a nurse. The doctor looks up at me and smiles. The nurse continues on her way.
‘Hello. I’m Doctor Lazowski.’
‘Hi,’ I croak.
She picks up a clipboard from the end of my bed and comes closer. ‘How are you feeling?’ she asks.
‘Strange,’ I reply. ‘A little dizzy. I have a headache. I’m tired . . . and a bit freaked out.’
‘Can you tell me your name?’
I open my mouth to answer, but, like before on the beach, nothing comes out. I give a small embarrassed laugh. ‘I . . . It sounds so silly, but I just . . . I can’t seem to remember.’ I run a hand across my damp and tangled hair.
‘That’s okay,’ she says. ‘Do you know where you live?’
‘I . . . I think. I  . . . No. I’m sorry. I don’t know. How can I not know?’ My voice is trembling and I’m on the verge of tears.
‘You’ve had a shock,’ she says. ‘Just try to relax. Try to stay calm. You’re here now, and we’ll look after you. Okay? You have some retrograde amnesia, but with any luck, your memories should return soon.’
The word “amnesia” makes me catch my breath.
‘I’m going to run a few tests,’ she says, closing the curtains fully. ‘We’ll see how you are, physically, and then we’ll try and get those memories back.’
I nod again, hit by a wave of exhaustion. My eyes want to close. I feel the pull of sleep, but Dr Lazowski is talking again. I should try and concentrate.
‘Can you sit up, please?’
I do as she asks.
‘I’m going to listen to your heart and lungs. Just breathe normally.’ She takes the stethoscope from around her neck and begins examining me, first by placing the end of the stethoscope on my back. Then, on my chest.
‘Can you remember swimming in the sea?’ she asks, as I clumsily try to rearrange my hospital gown.
‘No.’
‘Were you in the water at all?’
‘I think so. But I don’t know. I remember lying on the beach, soaking wet. The waves were coming over me.’ I give a shiver at the memory.
‘Hmm, Okay,’ she says. ‘We don’t know how long you were in the water. I’m worried about a possible lung infection, so we’ll have to keep you in for a few days at least. To keep an eye on you.’
‘Is it serious?’ I ask.
‘Just a precaution,’ she replies. ‘We’ll also get you on an IV drip.’
‘A drip?’ I don’t like the sound of that.
‘You’re dehydrated,’ she says. ‘You need fluids.’
I close my eyes and massage my forehead with the tips of my fingers. What’s happening to me? What am I doing here? How on earth did I end up unconscious on the beach?
Why can’t I remember anything?

 

Friday 1 June 2012

ABSOLUTION TOUR - Guest Post and Giveaway!

Today, I'm privileged to be hosting the Absolution Blog Tour
featuring an Ebook Giveaway and Guest Post


Louis Corsair is the author of urban fantasy crime novel, Absolution

In 1947, a gangster murders private investigator Raymond Adams.
In 2011, he’s brought back to life for 24 hours to solve the supernatural murder of
a Hollywood Adult film star.

When the son of a Pit Lord is murdered in Hollywood, the celestial beings in charge of the Four Realms ask Raymond Adams to figure who did it and find the victim’s missing soul. Without memories of his life, he accepts the case to gain eternal peace. But the job is daunting:

24 hours to nab a killer...
24 hours to find a missing soul...
24 hours to unravel the victim’s exotic private life...
24 hours to stop a plot to send the universe into chaos...

With only the help of a possessed cop and a medium, Adams must trek through a Hollywood underground filled with pornography, prostitutes, the homeless, and sadists, along with supernatural monsters. But can he solve the case when his own haunting memories keep surfacing, telling him exactly what kind of man he was in life?


To win an ebook copy of Absolution,
leave a comment in the box at the bottom of this post.
Easy peasy!

Here's Louis' thought-provoking post on crime fiction:

Shalini was kind enough to let me use up some of her space for my thoughts. Particularly, on something that was related to my novel, Absolution, a detective mystery and an urban fantasy. I begin:

These days, playing the news on the television is an invitation to writing crime fiction. Not a day goes by that someone here or there wasn’t murdered in the most heinous way. The murder of a wife, family, self, strangers, permeate and fester in our society. Anger seethes in these stories and it bothers you to some degree that they are real and not the stuff of fiction. All writers of crime fiction, mystery, etc. attempt to capture the reasons behind these grotesque acts. I did too.

Simple as it seems, I mean there are murders galore each day here in Los Angeles, this is not so. Trying to work out a murder in fiction is counter-intuitive. You write a story as if you didn’t know who committed the crime and why, but of course you do. Somehow you must forget. You lay out the clues, present the witnesses, the victims, their lives, hoping the reader will follow along; the smallest glitch leaves a reader stranded, unable to make sense of the rest of the action. To say that writing mystery is easy is the biggest lie there is.

I read the essay “The Simple Art of Murder” by Raymond Chandler after finishing a draft of Absolution. Needless to say, it influenced the drafts that came after it. In it, Chandler criticizes authors of the classical mystery novel for lacking realism. There are puzzles the reader must solve, the whodunit, which turns murder into a game. I agree with him that these authors do not give the act of murder enough respect. But let me explore what these authors were trying to do.

Agatha Christie and others like her, tried to tackle the problem of mystery writing by bringing the reader into the action. Instead of just having her detective figure things out, she wanted the reader to put things together too. In one of her best known novels, And Then There Were None..., her detective leaves it up to the reader to figure out who the culprit is. So that in the end if you can’t figure it out it really is because of your faculties. As Hannibal Lecter said, everything you need to solve the murder is right there on those pages.

Like I said above, to make a game of something like murder is just not right. It makes murder detecting a fun activity so that by the end you feel like you earned a reward for solving the crime. In real life, detectives rarely ever feel like this and each new murder disgusts them. Their minds suffer. How does Poirot stay so un-changed by the multiple murders he has had to solve in Christie’s novels? It’s just too fantastic to believe.

Let me move on to the hardboiled guys, the best known are Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler--though there are numerous others. They gave the act of murder its due respect and each crime revealed some of the dark nature of humanity.

These writers attempted to solve the problem of mystery writing by not worrying about it. In a Chandler novel, you get a mini puzzle, but he drowns it in the complex nature of the crime. In the end, the puzzle doesn’t even matter, just what it says about human beings--The Big Sleep famously leaves one of the many murders in its pages unsolved and without any clues as to who might have done it. The detective too is changed by each new crime. They become jaded, cynical, wondering why humanity is the way it is.

Between the two, I think that Hammett succeeded at creating a real human being in Sam Spade, than Chandler did with Marlowe. Phillip Marlowe is too good to be true. He always follows his moral compass. He never leaves a dame without protecting. He’s a knight in shining armor, smoking a cigarette. Sam Spade would screw you over if the circumstances were just right.

Do you see the problem with this type of mystery fiction? Marlowe and his contemporaries are just not believable enough. Their treatment of murder is excellent, but the protagonists lack something. I would have enjoyed Marlowe more if he had been a divorced man with children trying to understand him and a wife who sometimes loved him but felt mostly that he was a lost cause. Detectives have wives in real life. They have children. Some have substance abuse problems. They have racial prejudices even though they are, deep down, the “good guys.” They are all around human beings with enormous flaws.

And besides that, don’t the plots of the hardboiled novels seem incredibly fantastic? The crimes reported on television lack this air of fantasy. Some crimes, the most difficult to hear about, occur to satisfy urges and many times without any real reason at all. This is an observation, not true criticism. I would rather read any Chandler novel than watch the news if you gave me the chance. The complexity of the plot is permissible and necessary when you compare it to the simplistic nature of some mystery fiction.

So we come to our modern era of mystery writing. Today’s writers have overcome the problem of the loner detective who seems to have no life except detecting. In the novel, A King of Infinite Space (in the top ten for the Kindle UK Amazon list), the author, Tyler Dilts, has Detective Beckett trying to solve a murder, nothing different here--Dilts was one of my teachers so don’t mind the plug for his book.

But this detective has lost his wife and his existence seems meaningless after the fact. There is a murder, treated with due respect, and a puzzle that drives the plot. But the story lacks the fantastic nature of the Marlowe novels--ultimately, the crime was committed for a simple reason. The concern in A King of Infinite Space is with the individual who struggles to find meaning. 

Ah! Existentialism in mystery fiction. This is an evolutionary step. The writer solves the problem of mystery writing by looking at the crime through a different lens. You don’t have to follow along. The crime is secondary.

It is now that I finally come to the Urban Fantasy Mystery novel. This sub-genre has been popularized and re-energized recently thanks to writers like Jim Butcher. But because it is a budding genre, it’s leaning on its predecessors heavily. Marlowe returns in these novels because he’s so easy to get behind. The plots are mostly simple, saving the complexity for the magic system. The whodunit element is not hard to figure out, but it seems inconsequential when compared to the fantasy elements. We have not reached the place that current non-urban fantasy mystery writers have reached. We look at the darkness of things, except we mean it literally.

In fact, I could say that this type of Urban Fantasy is just another form of Epic Fantasy. But we who dabble in this type of fiction are not just wasting our time. We do have some relevance. These novels look at the dark nature of human mythologies, which is why you sometimes find Angels and Demons in them and gods and demigods. But this is an investigation for another day. I have rambled on enough.

I hope that if you do try Absolution, you will try to fit it into the categories I’ve created here.


Thank you, Louis. I really enjoyed your post. It made me think - which is quite something for a friday morning!

You can find Louis Corsair in the following places:
Blog     Goodreads     Facebook

Absolution is available from the following stores:
And grab it quick because it's only $0.99/£0.77 for as long as the tour lasts!!
Amazon US     Amazon UK     Barnes & Noble      Smashwords     Paperback on Amazon

Don't forget to leave a comment below for the chance to win an ebook copy of Absolution

Tuesday 12 July 2011

BiteMarks by Drew Cross

Drew Cross is a thirty-year-old former model and ex-cop (sadly never a model cop!), now masquerading as a Financial Services professional, from Nottingham, England. He is married with two young children - The Zeds (Zac and Zara) - and a stroppy weimaraner called Charlie. When he's not reading, writing, toddler-wrangling or weimaraner-wrestling, Drew likes to practice martial arts, cook south-east Asian cuisine, and meditate. He hopes one day to break the habit of referring to himself in the third person.


Blood, lust and bloodlust collide when the police hunt for a vampiric attacker threatens to shine an unwelcome spotlight onto the dark secrets of one that they call their own...








What will readers like about your book?
Despite the darkness of the subject matter, there is a good scattering of humour and playfulness throughout the book. Shane Marks is a memorable and complex character (which we'll continue to see as the other books in the series are released), and this is not a paint-by-numbers police procedural, there are several big surprises to keep you guessing. Please ignore the publisher blurb though, guys; this is not a 'vampire' novel, it's crime fiction and there are no supernatural characters involved.


What inspired you to write it?
When I left the police force a number of years ago I felt that I'd had an insight to the both job and to the city that I live in, that many people never get to know. I also had a ton of resentment and anger, so this seemed like a constructive way to channel those feelings!


Do you have any new works in the pipeline?
Loads! There's TrackMarks - the second book in the 'Marks' crime fiction series; a YA fantasy trilogy called 'The Scarmap'; a WIP YA novel called The Girl and Her Ghost, about a girl who upon choosing to end her life meets somebody who already has...I've also just released 'Under The Influence' a vicious and creepy horror short on Smashwords; and finally (for now), there's a satirical piece under construction too called 'Selling It', which can't decide whether it wants to be a script or a novel.


Who are your favorite authors?
Thomas Harris, John Connolly, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Poppy Z Brite...probably a dozen others that will occur to me once I've sent this mail too!


Tell us something about yourself that not many people know.
I have a Mensa tested IQ of 155.


Thanks so much, Drew!

www.drewcross.blogspot.com

Bitemarks is available from Amazon and Smashwords