‘Trespasser’ by Paul Doiron

Published by Constable Crime,
23 May 2013.
ISBN: 978-1-78033-817-0

I read Doiron's first book, The Poacher's Son earlier this year with huge pleasure and eagerly waited for the next Mike Bowditch adventure.  Trespasser is equally good.  Mike Bowditch, a young Game Warden in rural Maine, learns that has been an accident on a lonely road at night.  A deer has been hit, a girl is missing.  He is ordered off the scene by a senior police officer and returns to his home (and somewhat hostile live-in girlfriend) though he is deeply worried about the girl's whereabouts and safety.  He is on the spot when her body is eventually found, as is yet another body, a little later.  

The girl's murder is identical to one which took place seven years earlier, for which a local lobsterman was jailed, despite his fervent denials of involvement, which are backed up a vocal team of sympathisers.  As the investigation continues, it seems increasingly likely that they are right, and he is an innocent victim. And how is the local problem family mixed up in it all, or the bad-boy father-and-son couple with their vicious brute of a pit-bull terrier?

Doiron writes a dense and skilfully-plotted story.  And again, his setting, the deep Maine woods and rocky coastlines, are beautifully realised. So are the well-depicted characters.  To give away more of the plot would spoil this book for the reader, and as before, the final twists are brilliant. Go for it!     

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Reviewer: Susan Moody

Paul Doiron is a native of Maine, he attended Yale University, where he graduated with a degree in English, and he holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College. He is the author of the Mike Bowditch series of crime novels, including The Poacher's Son, which won the Barry Award and the Strand Critics Award for Best First Novel and Thriller Award for Best First Novel, and the Maine Literary Award for "Best Fiction of 2010. His second book in the Mike Bowditch series, Trespasser, won the Maine Literary Award for crime fiction, was an American Booksellers Association Indie Bestseller and has been called a "masterpiece of high-octane narrative" by Booklist. His third novel in the series, Bad Little Falls, will be published on August 7.  He is the editor in chief of Down East: The Magazine of Maine, Down East Books, and DownEast.com. He is a former member of the Maine Arts Commission and a current member of the Maine Humanities Council. Paul is a Registered Maine Guide specializing in fly fishing and outdoor recreation and lives on a trout stream in coastal Maine.

Susan Moody was born in Oxford is the principal nom de plume  of Susan Elizabeth Donaldson, née Horwood, a British novelist best known for her suspense novels. She is a former Chairman of the Crime Writer's Association, served as World President of the International Association of Crime Writers, and was elected to the prestigious Detection Club. Susan Moody has given numerous courses on writing crime fiction and continues to teach creative writing in England, France, Australia, the USA and Denmark.  In addition to her many stand alone books, Susan has written two series, on featuring PI Penny Wanawake (seven books) and a series of six books featuring bridge player Cassie Swan.

William Ryan

Three Novels by William Ryan

Three excellent novels by William Ryan, well-researched and intricately plotted,  are set in 1930s Stalinist Russia and introduce Captain Alexei Korolev of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Moscow Militia, the regular police, depicting life when Stalin's Great Terror, already in train, is gathering pace. It was a time when ideologies of the left and the right held sway in Europe and supporters of those ideologies believed that, once the correct formula had been found and applied, a happy outcome for all would result except where thwarted by so-called Enemies of the People (ie. of the State), variously defined according to the ideology concerned. With modern hindsight, these ideologies and the dreadful excesses which resulted were clearly deeply evil, but those were different times and the outlook of many people was moulded by those beliefs.

One such is Korolev, a former soldier in the Russian Army who fought against the Germans in World War I, the Czarist forces in Russia's own civil war, and then the invading Poles. He is fundamentally a thoroughly decent man, straightforward and steadfast, who sees himself as a loyal Soviet citizen. He believes that the sufferings of the present will bring about a better future so long as the advances are not undone by the machinations of traitors, spies and saboteurs abroad and at home. But he is also aware that one false step, one word spoken, even in jest, out of turn, could result in disaster for him, his family, his colleagues and his friends. Anyone, no matter how eminent, even the feared Yagoda, General Kommissar of State Security, can be denounced for little or even no reason and then disappear into the Lubianka or the gulags as had also happened to a colleague of Korolev's who had made an unwise joke about the NKVD (the department responsible for state security). This atmosphere of perpetual fear and paranoia forms the overarching theme of all three novels manifested in the sinister power of the NKVD which is a continuing presence in all three novels as is the criminality and corruption of the state authorities.

Korolev is divorced and his ex-wife Zhenia and his son Yuri live some distance from Moscow. Given the appalling housing conditions in Moscow, Korolev is lucky to have a room in a flat occupied by the widow Valentina Koltsova and her daughter Natasha. Korolev's developing feelings for Valentina are one of the many strands in these novels as is his attachment to Russian Orthodox Christianity; he still has his mother's Bible which would be enough if discovered to render him liable to denunciation and deportation to the gulags.

Another theme is Korolev's strange relationship with Count Kolya of the Moscow Thieves, brought about by his friend and neighbour, the (real-life) Isaac Babel. The Thieves were a criminal organisation, which really existed (and still do today, according to on-line sources, in the shape of the Russian Mafia). They controlled the Russian underworld. They see themselves as being in perpetual opposition to any government or law enforcement agency with their own strict rules, ruthlessly enforced. Kolya supplies Korolev with information he would not have been able to gain otherwise. Similarly, Korolev is aided by his acquaintanceship with a gang of street children, orphans (often the children of those so-called Enemies of the People who had disappeared into the gulags) abandoned by the State to fend for themselves on the streets of Moscow

‘The Holy Thief’
Published by Pan Macmillan, 2012.  

 ISBN: 978-0-330-50840-7 

In The Holy Thief Korolev investigates the torture and murder of a young woman whose body has been found on the altar of a disused church. But there is clearly more to her death than a brutal killing: her clothes and teeth indicate that she was not from the Soviet Union. Colonel Grigorin of the NKVD is taking an interest in the murder; he informs Korolev that she was of Russian origin, had emigrated to the US as a child, had become a nun and had perhaps returned to the Soviet Union to buy religious icons. He suggests that, Jack Schwartz, an American living in Moscow, might have information. Then there is another murder, this time of a Thief whose body, identified by his tattoos, is found on a Moscow football pitch. One of the Thief's tattoos is a copy of the Kazanskaya, the holy Icon of Kazan, sacred to many Russians including the Thieves, depicting Mary and the Baby Jesus. Kolya tells Korolev that the murdered woman had been looking for the original icon, stolen many years before. Moreover, the killing of priests and nuns is forbidden by the rules of the Thieves. Korolev, with additional information provided by the gang of street children he has befriended, in particular, their leader, Kim Goldstein, and assisted by his colleagues, Semionov and Larinin, has to follow up all these leads in an exciting and satisfying tale of danger, deceit and violence.

‘The Bloody Meadow’

Published by Macmillan, 2011. 

ISBNs: (hb) 978-0-230-74271-1;

 (Trade pb) 978-0-230-75331- 0

The Bloody Meadow takes place in and near the Black Sea port of Odessa in the Ukraine, now an independent state but then part of the Soviet Union, and involves the apparent suicide of Maria Lenskaya, a production assistant on a film being made near Odessa called The Bloody Meadow. Korolev is sent by Colonel Rodinov of the NKVD to investigate Lenskaya's death; it appears that she was the mistress of Nikolai Ezhov, Yagoda's successor as head of the NKVD and equally fearsome, but this must be kept secret, the official reason being that Korolev is visiting his friend Babel who is scriptwriter for the film. On arrival in the Ukraine, Korolev is assigned an assistant, Nadezhda Slivka of the Odessa CID. However, the local NKVD chief, Major Mushkin, and his steely mother Elizaveta Mushkina, a comrade of Stalin's from before the Revolution, are overtly hostile. Suspicion at first falls on the elderly caretaker Efrim Andrychuk who discovered Maria's body but in Odessa Korolev encounters Count Kolya who tells him of rumours that guns are being smuggled from Nazi Germany via Odessa to anti-Soviet elements in the Ukraine and also that in return highly sensitive information is being smuggled out of the Soviet Union by a young woman. Kolya is concerned that the rumours could lead the NKVD to clamp down on all criminal activities including those of the Thieves. Could the informant be Lenskaya, for all her apparently spotless reputation as a model Soviet citizen? She had been brought up in an orphanage but if her parents turn out to have been Enemies of the People, this would be highly damaging to Ezhov. Or are her other lovers – the journalist Lomatkin, the film director Savchenko, and the bureaucrat Belakovsky – involved? The story is full of action leading to a bloody shoot-out in the tunnels under Odessa and a most unexpected denouement.

‘The Twelfth Department’

Published by Macmillan 2013. 

ISBN: 978-0-230-74275-8

In The Twelfth Department Korolev has returned to Moscow. His son Yuri is staying with him but seems troubled. Apparently Zhenia's flat has been searched by the NKVD and Korolev's efforts to contact her are unavailing. And Korolev and Slivka (now transferred to Moscow) have a murder to investigate: the eminent scientist Boris Azarov has been shot in his flat in Leadership House, an elite apartment block for Soviet VIPs. Azarov, head of the prestigious Azarov Institute where secret scientific psychological research is carried out, was almost universally disliked, particularly by his deputy, Arkady Shtange. But almost at once Korolev and Slivka are pulled off the case by Colonel Zaitov of the NKVD. Korolev is glad to be rid of a case with probable dangerous political elements and, having refused a request from Count Kolya to look into the Institute's activities, takes himself and Yuri off to his friend Babel's dacha (country cottage)for a few days, where they encounter Kim Goldstein, now no longer in a street gang but in a local  orphanage. Then two NKVD operatives arrive, sent by Zaitov, to bring Korolev and Yuri back to Moscow. But Yuri has disappeared and cannot be found either in the country or in Moscow. And there has been another murder, this time of Shtange, which Korolev and Slivka must solve while also desperately seeking Yuri.

These three novels are the first of a series set in the pre-World War II Soviet Union. There is plenty of scope for more which will be eagerly awaited.

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Reviewer: Radmila May

 

William Ryan  is an Irish writer living in London. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and the University of St Andrews and worked as a lawyer before taking up writing full-time. His first novel, THE HOLY THIEF, was shortlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year, The Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award, The CWA John Creasy New Blood Dagger and a Barry Award. His second novel, THE BLOODY MEADOW, was shortlisted for the Ireland AM Irish Crime Novel of the Year. William  lives in London with his wife and son.

http://www.william-ryan.com

‘The Feast of Artemis’ by Anne Zouroudi

Published by Constable Crime, 

2013. 

ISBN: 978-1-4088-3753-5

Hermes Diaktoros arrives in the town of Dendra for the festival to celebrate the end of the olive season.  Intent only on an indulgence of fine food and wine, he learns that the feuding between two of the local families has reached epic proportions, with an act of sabotage that results in the badly burning of a young man of one family, and the death of the patriarch of another.

Hermes method of investigation; is a source of pleasure for the reader as he interviews the parties concerned ion his good-mannered way, leaving behind him only goodwill but always achieving his goal.

The story is an intriguing one. What looks straightforward on the surface hides a complex, devious and quite evil plot.

In this investigation we meet up with Dino, Hermes’ brother – an entertaining character who seems to think that the pleasure of his company is sufficient payment for the copious amounts of wine he consumes.

As in previous books the reader is uncertain from whence Hermes comes. When asked - as he frequently is -  if he is from the police, his answer is that he represents a higher authority, and episodes in the lives of those who do not heed him or help him in his investigations do seem to take unexplained turns for the worse.

A marvellous character, solving an intriguing mystery. This book is most highly recommended.

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Reviewer: Lizzie Hayes.

Earlier books in the series are: The Messenger of Athens, The Taint of Midas, The Doctor of  Thassaly, The Lady of Sorrows, The Whispers of Nemesis, and The Bull of Mithros.

Anne Zouroudi  was born in rural  Lincolnshire, but raised in South Yorkshire.  She was educated at Sheffield High School for Girls.  She then went into the IT industry, a career which took her to both New York’s Wall Street and Denver, Colorado. In America she began to take seriously her ambition to write fiction, and bought a typewriter for her first short stories.  On returning to the UK, she booked a summer holiday with her sister. The location they chose was a tiny island in southern Greece.  Anne spent a number of years living in the islands; she married a Greek, and her son was born there. Anne currently lives with her son in Derbyshire’s beautiful Peak District, where she’s working on the next book in the Greek Detective series.

‘The Drowned Man’ by David Whellams

Published by ECW Press, 

13 June 2013. 

ISBN: 978-1-77042-043-5

Chief Inspector Peter Cammon is called out of retirement to travel to Canada to retrieve the body of a murdered colleague. He takes the assignment reluctantly but then gets involved in investigating the crime. He is an experienced police man with a wealth of helpful colleagues and relations so the investigation develops rapidly in the UK, Canada and the USA.

The murder was an example of overkill - the man was brutally attacked, run over and dumped in a canal yet the probable cause for his death was relatively trifling. He was concerned with the purchase of three letters from the US Civil War which involved John Wilkes Booth, who was eventually the assassin of Lincoln. The story is a fascinating one as Peter copes with diplomatic personnel and University lecturers, searches for the beautiful Alice Nahri and returns home at intervals to take his dog Jasper for walks. The background of the letters and their significance today - particularly in Quebec - is fully developed. The complications of the investigation over three countries are eventually unravelled by the inspector but not without thrills on the way.

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Reviewer; Jennifer Palmer

This is the second book about Chief Inspector Peter Cammon, the first is Walking into the Ocean.

David Whellams spent 30 years working in criminal law and amending the Criminal Code in such areas as dangerous offenders and terrorism. Walking Into the Ocean is the first book in this series. He lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

 

Jennifer Palmer Throughout my reading life crime fiction has been a constant interest; I really enjoyed my 15 years as an expatriate in the Far East, the Netherlands & the USA but occasionally the solace of closing my door to the outside world and sitting reading was highly therapeutic. I now lecture to adults on historical topics including Famous Historical Mysteries.

‘A Case of Doubtful Death’ by Linda Stratmann

Published by The Mystery Press

ISBN 978-0-7524-4

Frances Doughty earns her living as a detective in West London.  It is an unusual career for a young woman in 1880 but she is successfully solving many small mysteries - lost pets, straying husbands, comparative shopping - and also pursues big issues such as disappearances, blackmail and murder.

In her third case she is employed to find an employee of admirable reliability who has disappeared on the same night as the death of his employer. 

           

The fascinating setting of this strange event is the waiting mortuary where corpses are left to decompose before burial so that there is no possibility of them being buried alive.   The whole industry around this is explored from the mortuary to the burial sites where coffins have wires to be pulled by the inmate to ring a bell to show that he or she is alive!  In the waiting mortuary there are strings attached to the toes and fingers of the corpses to record any response.   The irony of the corpse of the founder of the mortuary being displayed there is obvious.  Complications abound as Frances investigates Henry Palmer’s disappearance.   The mortuary becomes a more and more sinister place with the doctors showing their dubious attitudes.   Frances negotiates the problems of questioning these irascible gentlemen with great aplomb assisted by her faithful companion, Sarah, and her various acquaintances in high and low society.   One unusual area of knowledge that Frances has is pharmaceutical since her father’s business in which she had assisted him was a pharmacy.  The solving of the mystery comes with great drama and encompasses several of Frances’s cases.  The unraveling by Frances of these cases is cleverly plotted.

           

The setting of Linda Stratman’s books is always excellently shown - she has an intimate knowledge of Victorian life - the polite and rather seamy side of things - through her nonfiction books and she leaves the reader feeling that he or she has actually traversed the streets of Victorian London. 

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Reviewer: Jennifer S. Palmer

This is Linda’s third book about Frances Doughty, detective.  The previous books are The Poisonous Seed  and The Daughters of Gentlemen.  Her nonfiction books include Chloroform: the Quest for Oblivion; Essex Murders; Whiteley’s Folly: the Life and Death of a Salesman and, very recently, The Marquess of Queensbury: Wilde’s Nemesis.  

Linda Stratmann was born in the city of Leicester on 4 April 1948. Linda attended Medway Street Infants and Junior School, in the days of the eleven plus, and from there I went to Wyggeston Girls Grammar School. Her earliest ambition was to be an astronomer, and she read and wrote a great deal of science fiction. She also read biology, zoology and medicine, and seriously considered a medical career. But by her teens, she had developed an absorbing and life-long interest in true crime, probably taking after her mother who loved to read about famous trials.  After a period of rebellion Linda I took her A levels and went to Newcastle University in 1971, graduating with first class honours in psychology three years later. She then joined the civil service, and trained to be an Inspector of Taxes.  In 1987, unable to resist the pull of London she moved there, married her second husband, Gary in 1993. In 2001 she left the civil service, and started a new career as a freelance writer and sub-editor, and in 2002 was commissioned to write her first published book on the history of Chloroform.

http://www.lindastratmann.com/

Jennifer Palmer Throughout my reading life crime fiction has been a constant interest; I really enjoyed my 15 years as an expatriate in the Far East, the Netherlands & the USA but occasionally the solace of closing my door to the outside world and sitting reading was highly therapeutic. I now lecture to adults on historical topics including Famous Historical Mysteries.

Michael Stanley

Leigh Russell in conversation with
Michael Stanley

At 2pm Thursday 30th May I was sitting in the lounge bar of the Bristol Marriott Hotel in Bristol, waiting to interview Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip who write together under the name Michael Stanley. The third book in their series set in Botswana - Death of the Mantis - won the Barry Award and was shortlisted for the Edgar Award last year. This was a rare opportunity to meet a team who had flown in from the African and American continents to appear at Crimefest in the UK, and my chance to investigate how they work together

Leigh: How did you first begin writing together?

Michael: Our first book, A Carrion Death, opens with a game ranger and an ecologist coming across a hyena devouring a human body. This idea came to us in the mid-1980s when we saw a pack of hyenas pulling down a wildebeast, eating everything except the hooves and horns. We couldn't help thinking what a wonderful way that would be to get rid of a body! We talked about writing a mystery based on this interesting premise. Then, being academics, we spent the next twenty years discussing the idea before we did anything about it. When Stanley retired and I was approaching retirement, we thought we would give it a try. So we started writing A Carrion Death with that question: why was it so important the body completely vanished? Only of course the naked body was discovered before the hyenas finished, so it didn't turn out to be the perfect murder after all.

Leigh:  Tell us about the process of writing as a team. Is there an 'ideas man' and a 'getting it down on paper' partner or do you write separate chapters - and who gets to write the most exciting scenes?
Stanley: Michael writes all the sex scenes...

(Michael laughs)

Stanley: We try to be in same physical location when starting a new book. We've both plotted and pantsed books, outlined very carefully and winged it as well - as in A Carrion Death which started with an idea not a plot. We always talk about the back story, ideas we want to emphasize. We discuss that as much as possible - drawing mind maps, making  notes, brainstorming - before we go own ways. For the most part we live on different continents, (Michael in Johannesburg, Stanley in Minneapolis and Knysna on the Indian Ocean coast in South Africa) so even when we're both in South Africa we're not in the same location. It couldn't have worked without email or skype. Wherever we are in a book we talk about where it's going to go. We're usually both writing at the same time, working on different pieces of the book which may be part of a chapter or maybe three chapters. Once we've finished we send what we've written to each other for immediate focused and involved critiquing. We are very critical of one another.

Michael: We're never nice.

(They both laugh)

When I say their editor must love them, Stanley agrees their editor receives what he calls "a very clean copy .

Leigh: In an author-editor relationship the author will always have the final word.  Do you ever fall out about what you write, and if so, how do you resolve your disagreements?

Michael: We do disagree. In the whole process Stanley described, the first step is that the other person gets an initial draft. The initial comments are just about content and structure which are debated between us. It's such fun!

Stanley: The real question for us is: how does anybody write alone?

Michael: We may have some disagreement over a word or two. The tie breaker is: "whoever wrote it first gets to keep it" unless the editor changes it - and our editor never has! But we have a high acceptance feeling when the editor makes suggestions. We take our editor's comments very seriously.

Stanley : But our editor only looks at a "finished" manuscript

Leigh: Tell us about your real life adventures, like being charged by an elephant.
Michael: Stanley used to rent a plane in South Africa, because he's a private pilot. We'd go game and bird watching. Once we were canoeing down the Zambezi. We had stopped for lunch once on a little island,

and an elephant appeared from under a tree. He looked at us, walked around, looked at us again, walked around once more, then charged. We were ready to leap into the crocodile-infested Zambezi when our game ranger jumped out, waving his arms and shouting. The elephant literally skidded to a halt and wandered off.

Leigh:  Your love of Africa comes across strongly in your writing. Does that shared background help you in writing together, and why did you choose to write about Botswana not South Africa?

Michael: It's definitely the case that our shared background helps us. We chose Botswana not South Africa because we love Botswana, the people, and the diverse environment, from the wonderful Chobe game reserve in the North to the Kalahari desert and the Bushmen peoples.

(Both Michael and Stanley waxed lyrical about Botswana.)

Michael: Yes, Botswana is one of characters in our books.

Stanley: Many detective stories are set in cities. You could move the story to any city. Setting a murder mystery in a country like Botswana is different because they're not very moveable. It's a country the size of France. It takes days for a pathologist to get from one side of the country to another. So the country imposes itself on the solving of mysteries.

Michael: And the cultures affect the stories. Each one of our books has a back story concerning a current issue in southern Africa.

Leigh: How did you make the transition from writing non-fiction, in your academic lives, to writing fiction?

Michael: I never really thought of it as a transition. Stanley has written non-fiction books but I'd only written academic papers. Most of time we both worked with other people, so our collaboration was foreshadowed. I never thought: How do I move to this new approach? After what we had both done, we knew how to construct sentences, and how to structure our time. We had those sorts of skills, and we had both been educators so had spent a lot of time making our ideas comprehensible to other people. But with A Carrion Death we really had to learn as we went along. Probably if we'd known how much we had to learn we wouldn't have started.

Stanley: And of course we both read a lot of fiction, which helps.

Leigh: Tell us about your latest book, Deadly Harvest?
Michael: Deadly Harvest came out this month. The back story deals with the pervasive influence of witchcraft in Botswana, and specifically the use of body parts for black magic potions.

Stanley: Our third book was the most difficult: Death of the Mantis. It deals with the plight of the Bushmen, a politically and emotionally charged situation. We both believe it's not appropriate for novelists to take a moral position so the two major sides of the story are articulated by people who would articulate them in real life. The Bushmen are seen sympathetically but I think novelists lose some credibility if they become too 'soap boxy'.

We've started Kubu number 5 and we're pantsing it. We don't know where it's going. We have a sense, but anything could happen.

Michael: With both Deadly Harvest and Death of the Mantis we knew how they were going to end, but we didn't know how that ending was going to happen. We battled with that quite a bit before we felt comfortable that the endings were credible.

Leigh: Tell us about your protagonist. Is he based on anyone you know?

Stanley: When we started out, our protagonist, Kubu, wasn't going to be a protagonist at all. We didn't know anything about him in chapter 1. One of the characters is a professor, because we are both professors, and we thought he was going to be our protagonist. We had to send a policeman to the crime scene, and on the way there he took over and became our protagonist, Kubu.

Michael: He got in his landrover with lots of sandwiches to eat on his journey, and opera to sing to in the car. On the way he thought about how he had become a detective, and by the time he reached the body, he had taken over.

Leigh: Which of you created him?

Stanley: I think everybody in our books is created by both of us.

Michael: Kubu is a nickname, meaning hippo in the Setswana language, because he's a big guy. He likes his food. He's also very focused. And hippos are the most dangerous mammal in Africa.

I ask if Kubu is ever going to travel outside Africa. Stanley gives an enigmatic smile as he says that anything's possible.

Leigh:                I can't imagine writing with someone and it's been fascinating to hear about how you manage this so successfully?
Stanley:             The most important thing is you have to trust each other. We say 50% of the sentences in the books have words from both of us, and that's not far off.
Michael:            Each of our books explores a particular issue. A Carrion Death is about blood diamonds and greed for resources in South Africa. The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu is about the Zimbabwe Rhodesia war and its effect on the surrounding countries, Death of the Mantis  looks at the plight of Bushmen of the Kalahari, and Deadly Harvest is about basic belief in black magic and the power of witch doctors.

So I feel I've solved the mystery of how two authors can write together. As anyone who has met them will attest, Michael Seers and Stanley Trollip are genuinely charming. Either one of them would be a joy to work with.

Together they are enthralling.

www.detectivekubu.com

Facebook.com/michaelstanleybooks@detectivekubu

Leigh Russell is the author of five books Cut Short, Road Closed, Dead End, Death Bed and her latest book Stop Dead, published May 2013. Cold Sacrifice the first in a new series featuring Ian Petersonis will be out  later this year in print, (already out as an ebook).
Cut Short (2009) was shortlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger Award for Best First Novel. Leigh studied at the University of Kent gaining a Masters degree in English and American literature. A secondary school teacher, specializing in supporting pupils with Specific Learning Difficulties as well as teaching English, Leigh Russell is married with two daughters and lives in Middlesex.