First Monday Meeting- Tonight 6 March.

Report by Radmila May of the February meeting
Goldsboro First Monday Meeting, 6 February 2017

From left to right- Barry Forshaw, Sheena Kamal, David Young, Steph Broadribb and Matthew Hall

This first meeting of 2017 took place in the elegant Judges’ Room of Brown’s Hotel in St Martin’s Lane in the heart of the West End.

One of the speakers was Matthew Hall (M.R. Hall). Formerly a barrister and also a screen writer, he began a series of crime novels featuring Coroner Jenny Cooper. A Life to Kill is the last in the series: it deals with the aftermath of the British Army’s involvement in Afghanistan. Just as the last soldiers are about to leave Helmand, a soldier is abducted and the patrol sent to rescue him is ambushed, two members of which are killed, leaving a number of questions unanswered and about which family members are desperate to know the truth. The Army is stonewalling but Jenny Cooper is determined to find out.

Another speaker was Steph Broadribb who, before taking the City University M.A. course in Creative Writing (Crime Fiction), trained as a bounty hunter in the States. She also blogs as www.crimethrillergirl.com The protagonist of her debut novel, Deep Down Dead, is Lori Anderson, a fearless bounty U.S. hunter but whose vulnerability is her daughter 9-year-old Dakota who suffers from leukaemia. Lori finds herself tackling not only a child exploitation racket but the Miami Mob. The novel has been described as ‘breathtakingly fast-paced, hard-boiled and heart-breaking’.

David Young, formerly a newspaper and radio and TV journalist whose first novel, Stasi Child, won the 2016 CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger (reviewed in Mystery People), has followed with Stasi Wolf in which detective Karin Muller is sent to the town, Halle-Neustadt, where a pair of twins has gone missing. But Halle-Neustadt is a new town and the all-powerful Stasi have forbidden the publishing of anything that might tarnish its shiny image so how can Muller and her team effectively search out the child snatcher?

The last speaker was the Canadian writer Sheena Kamal whose debut novel, Eyes Like Mine was inspired by Sheena’s own previous job as a TV researcher where she became aware of the plight of missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada. Her protagonist Nora Watts gave up her daughter for adoption 15 years ago. But now the girl has vanished and the police are not interested in looking for her so Nora sets out to find her and her quest leads her into danger in the remotest parts of Canada.

The Moderator was the able and cheerful expert on crime fiction and TV Barry Forshaw.

For more information about the novels and their writers, go to the First Monday website,
www.goldsborobooks.com/latest-news/february/monday/crime 

 

 

First Monday Meeting, London
The next meeting will be on the 6^th March at
 Browns – the Judges’ Court – 82-84 St Martins Lane London WC2N 4AG,
6.30-7.30 pm, Cost £7.00.
Speakers are: Erin Kelly, Daniel Cole, M J Arlidge, Barry Forshaw