The Crime Warp

Wow, what a great read. There are lots of well-written crime novels on the market but this one grabbed me personally. Perhaps because it’s set in a police academy and I’ve been a teacher and lecturer myself, perhaps because it’s set in Quebec and I was born in Canada, perhaps just because it’s a great plot with interesting characters. The second part to the setting is an unmapped village in the Eastern Townships with a small church and a stained-glass window concealing a mystery. The main protagonist, Inspector Gamache is a good man. It’s not really fashionable in these image driven days to be good anymore - we need to be successful, look good in selfies, be interesting and appear to take an interest in social justice, as long as there is no personal cost to us. However, no one wants to be thought of as good or decent anymore. Police inspectors are supposed to be drunks or have any amount of neuroses or skeletons in the closet and be as demon driven as the criminals they are...

We know so little of the life of William Shakespeare. Some have even questioned his very existence. Where did he get his ideas from for say, The Merchant of Venice or The Two Gentlemen of Verona or even Romeo and Juliet? As far as we know, Shakespeare never left the country. But what if he had? What if a young William had travelled to Italy in the company of two fellow Englishmen as a sort of assistant spy? What if he had stayed in Venice and Verona, associated with locals, perhaps even fallen in love with a local beauty, while gathering intelligence for his queen? What if he had to survive vicious attacks, escape plots on his life and evade the spies of a Pope determined to destroy the English heretic queen? Now, that would be an exciting read, wouldn’t it? Benet Brandreth did just that in his first two William Shakespeare thrillers. The Assassin of Verona follows on from The Spy of Venice . A young William Shakespeare (the year is 1585) is disguised as the steward of the...

I have a new friend. An Essex girl of all people! Rosie Strange, the protagonist of the Essex Witch Museum Mysteries (Strange Sight is the second and I enjoyed it as much as the first, if not even more so). Rosie has the perfect attributes for being my friend: a good dose of self-awareness coupled by an equally strong dose of self-acceptance. Yet there is still plenty of scope for mystery.  Descending from a line of people with reputedly extra-sensory gifts, she is firmly rooted in scepticism. Working with (and perhaps having a crush on) Sam, the museum curator and investigator of the paranormal, forces her to confront uncomfortable phenomena, with even a gruesome murder thrown in. It would take more than that though, to shake an Essex girl, unless her blingy boots get scratched in the process or a manicured nail gets broken.  Do you believe in ghosts? Well, at the last Harrogate Crime Writers’ Festival, I attended a panel discussion on murder mysteries and crime fic...