‘Under the Hammer’ by Samantha Dooey-Miles

Published by Verve,
19 March 2026.
ISBN: 978-0-85730-938-9 (PB)

Meet Jemma. She's just lost her boyfriend, her best friend and her job, and she's in danger of losing her home. And just one person is to blame. Her landlord Colin. 

But Colin is about to get his just deserts. 

Jemma has been binge-watching one of the many television property renovation shows – and lo and behold, Colin turns out to be one of the featured landlords, who buy up empty houses, give them a lick of paint then let them out at extortionate rents. Her own experience shows that landlords like that are more interested in lining their own pockets than keeping their tenants safe and comfortable. So, when Colin arrives at Jemma's flat to carry out a long overdue electrical repair and leaves in a body bag, electrocuted by his own faulty wiring, Jemma finds it very, very hard to be sorry. 

She gets a job at an estate agent's who manage properties for landlords like Colin, where she falls for Gavin, the boss's extremely good-looking sidekick. She's still angry with Colin in particular and landlords in general and starts to formulate a plan to exact a revenge on the whole pack of them. Colin's death may have been an accident – but is Willie's? He's the first landlord on her list, and when he accidentally falls off a bridge and drowns, Gemma happens to be close by. At six in the morning.

And so, it continues.

This is a crime novel from a different perspective. We're supposed to identify with the killer, detest the victims as much as she does and want her to succeed in her mission to rid the world of greedy landlords. The author does this through mostly successful humour, and a cast of characters who are eccentric to say the least. Potty-mouth Jemma is every boss's dream, or nightmare, depending on your point of view. She does the bidding of Brian, who owns the estate agency, but makes sure she turns his extra-mural shenanigans to her advantage as she pursues her own agenda. Gavin is drop-dead gorgeous, tall, broad-shouldered with brown curly hair, a moustache – and is quick to tears and has painted fingernails; and though he and Jemma are soon in bed together, he's a 'they'. Brian is short and squat, and a serial adulterer; one of Jemma's main tasks is to ensure his phone is where he has told his wife he'll be. And there's a host of supporting players, all with their own quirks. 

The question is, will Jemma fulfil her mission, and more importantly, will she get away with it? Or is some form of comeuppance waiting round the corner? Now that would be telling!
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick 

Samantha Dooey-Miles’s fiction focuses on first-person, female voices. Her work explores rage, shame, embarrassment and the significance seemingly small moments can hold. Her stories have been published in New Writing Scotland, Gutter and Postbox amongst others. In 2021 she won a Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award. She has had monologues performed by Slackline Productions and Coronavirus Theatre Club. Her short plays have been staged by Short Attention Theatre and at Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch.

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.