The Streets of ... London by author of the Colin McDermott series, Jim Napier




Jim Napier, author of Legacy (Friesen Press, 2017)

There were three legacies in Sally Beck’s brief life. The first was her grandmother’s bequest, which allowed Sally to attend an elite girls’ school. That was followed by the second, a life-changing event she experienced while a student there. The final legacy was due to Sally’s chance encounter, years later, with someone from her past which set in motion a chain of violence no one could have foreseen.

When a young woman killed in London traffic is found to be carrying no identification, Detective Inspector Colin McDermott is assigned to figure out who she is and to track down her family so they can be notified. Soon he discovers she had not one but two identities, which concealed a very private life. When the trail leads back to McDermott’s alma mater, the detective is faced with the possibility that the young woman was murdered—and whether an old friend and mentor is involved.






The decision to pick contemporary London as the setting for my police-procedural series was an easy one. I didn’t want to over-work the Cozy English Village theme, which already features so many murders that any such town would be the crime capital of Europe, if not the world! And I wanted to explore specific settings, such as universities and large corporate business firms that just don’t exist in smaller communities. For example, my first novel in the Colin McDermott series is largely set within a university: the fictional St. Gregory’s College, which is located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Much of the action takes place in the university college, or in the area nearby: Regent Park Crescent for example, or on the streets themselves, where a young woman dies in London traffic (see the cover!). But I also venture a bit north, to McDermott’s flat on Warrington Crescent in Camden Town, and also south of the Thames, to the home of the victim’s parents, on the modest and thus incongruously-named Hope Street, in Clapham. So London, with it’s varied districts, and containing a diverse ethnic and cultural population, provides a rich setting, able to satisfy all my creative whims. That said, the next book in the series, Ridley’s War, will take the reader north to Yorkshire, and then to southern Italy, before returning to London!




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