Bloody Scotland - NEWS

Bloody Scotland reveals new BIG name - Ashley Jensen star of the Agatha Raisin TV series -  appearing at this year's Festival

Last year one of the sell-out events at Bloody Scotland was Douglas Henshall, star of Shetland with Ann Cleeves, the author of the books which inspired the TV series.

This year we are thrilled to reveal that we will be emulating that success with a similar celebrity TV / book pairing featuring Ashley Jensen, star of the TV series Agatha Raisin and well known for her roles in Ugly Betty, Extras and Nativity who will be appearing on stage with M C Beaton author of the Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth novels.

The event will take place on Saturday 22 September 7-8pm in the Albert Halls.

M C Beaton said: I am delighted that the brilliant Ashley Jensen will still be playing Agatha Raisin in the second series to appear on Sky Television in the autumn, three episodes of ninety minutes. I enjoy Bloody Scotland because the organisers are efficient while managing to make it a friendly, almost family occasion.
 

For further information about Bloody Scotland contact fiona@brownleedonald.com

‘A Noise Downstairs’ by Linwood Barclay

Published by Orion Fiction,
12 July 2018.
ISBN: 978-1-40916398-5 (HB)

The Prologue opens describing how Paul Davis finds the bodies of two women in his friend Kenneth Hofman's car. He is then knocked unconscious by him.

Eight months later Paul is still suffering from headaches and sudden panic attacks and is very forgetful. Then things get really weird. He starts hearing a typewriter his wife bought in a garage sale and they keep downstairs being used, but his wife Charlotte can't hear anything. Even worse, when he puts a piece of paper in the machine one evening, messages start being typed on it overnight.

He is seeing a psychiatrist, a Doctor Anna White, and when he starts having bad nightmares about Kenneth coming after him, she agrees to go along with him to the prison to see Kenneth. He hopes it will help him understand why his friend carried out the murders. However, he comes away just as puzzled as before, and Kenneth cannot explain why he did it and why he made both women type letters of apology before he killed them. Apologies for what?

He now really starts to lose it, he becomes convinced that the messages which continue every night, are coming from the dead women and that they are trying to reach him from the grave. Even worse, in his deluded state he starts to believe the typewriter is the same one Kenneth made the women type their apologies on.

Anna suggests he voluntarily attends a psychiatric hospital, but his good friend Bill talks him out of it saying they may want to keep him in and then he will never find out the truth. However, how long can he go on as things are?

Kenneth's son Leonard seems to blame Paul for his father getting caught, can he have anything to do with the strange goings on? But how could he get in the house?

He really does get paranoid, what can he do, can he get to the bottom of the mystery before he completely loses his mind?

Wow, what a gripping, creepy story. It made me feel really sorry for Paul especially hearing things no one else could. No wonder it was driving him insane. I really found it a difficult book to put down, just had to keep reading the next chapter and then the next one!  Highly recommended, a very clever story full of shocks, surprises and unexpected twists.

------

Reviewer: Tricia Chappell

Linwood Barclay was born 1955 in Darien, Connecticut.  After graduating high school Barclay studied literature at Trent University in Peterborough. While at university, he began a correspondence with Ross Macdonald that proved inspirational for Barclay. They met once, at which time Macdonald inscribed one of his books to Barclay, "For Linwood, who will, I hope, someday outwrite me." After graduation, he could not sell any of his novels so he found work on a number of local newspapers, starting his journalism career in 1977 at the Peterborough Examiner, moved on to a small Oakville paper in 1979, and then to the Toronto Star in 1981 where he was, successively, assistant city editor, news editor, chief copy editor and Life section editor. He lives in Toronto with his wife, Neetha and two children.

www.linwoodbarclay.com

Tricia Chappell. I have a great love of books and reading, especially crime and thrillers. I play the occasional game of golf (when I am not reading). My great love is cruising especially to far flung places, when there are long days at sea for plenty more reading! I am really enjoying reviewing books and have found lots of great new authors.

‘An Unfinished Murder’ by Ann Granger

Published by Headline,
July 2018.
ISBN: 978-1-4722-5265-4(HB)

This, the sixth in this favourite author’s Campbell and Carter series, opens twenty years ago when two children, Josh and Dilys Browning, find the body of a young woman in a spinney behind the row of council houses where they live with their foster mother, Nina (Auntie Nina) Pengelly. Their previous life with their drug-taking mother and a succession of violent boyfriends had taught them to steer very clear of the police; and Dilys’s tendency to behave violently is another factor. But when Josh realises that Dilys has taken a bracelet from the dead girl’s wrist which spells her name – Rebecca - he tells her to throw it away and she does. A few days later Josh goes back to the spinney and there is no sign of the dead girl. Neither child tells anyone of their discovery.

Now, in the present day, Dilys is in prison for a crime of violence and Josh, a gentle giant, is working as a gardener for the retired Detective Superintendent Alan Markby and his wife Meredith. And Josh has discovered that Dilys hadn’t after all thrown the bracelet away but had kept it a box with various keepsakes. Ever since he and his sister had discovered the dead girl’s body he has been haunted by the memory. So, having learned that Markby had been, before retiring, a very senior policeman, he shows it to Markby, who remembers all too well that he had been in charge of an investigation looking into the disappearance of a young girl called Rebecca Hellington. That had been a mystery which had never been solved; she had never been found, alive or dead and the case had eventually been closed. Now, however, forensic archaeologists have been called in; they find a buried skeleton which is identified as that of Rebecca Hellington.

So Markby is called in and finds himself assisting Alan Carter who is now himself a Detective Superintendent but who at the time of Rebecca’s disappearance had been Detective Sergeant Alan Carter. So, both men are investigating what is now very much a live case and they must work together on contacting all those people who knew Rebecca twenty years ago, one of whom must know the truth about Rebecca’s death. Working with them is Detective Inspector Jess Campbell and, on a rather more unofficial basis, Meredith. Unsurprisingly, those who had known Rebecca in the past lest their own secrets be revealed are rather hesitant about revealing too much themselves and it takes a deal of careful inquiries and co-operation of the four investigators before the mystery is solved.

The author tells us in a foreword that many readers of her previous Mitchell and Markby series, which ran to 15 titles, had been asking for another in that series. But in what form should they make their comeback? She decided that they would now both be retired but would become involved when Markby’s advice is sought. This is an arrangement which works perfectly in this story; it is wholly convincing and believable. And the story as a whole has all the virtues which we expect from this writer. The characters are all lively and totally credible and the plotting immaculate. Highly recommended

------

Reviewer: Radmila May

Ann Granger was born in Portsmouth where she was a pupil at the then Northern Grammar School for Girls and went from there to London University where she achieved a BA in Modern Languages (French with German). After a period spent first teaching English in France and then working in the Visa Section of British Embassies around the world. She met her husband, who was also working for the British Embassy, in Prague, and together they received postings to places as far apart as Munich and Lusaka. She is the author of the Mitchell and Markby Mysteries, the Fran Varady series and more recently the Lizzie Martin mystery series. She lives in Bicester, near Oxford.

 https://www.anngranger.net/

Radmila May was born in the U.S. but has lived in the U.K. since she was seven apart from seven years in The Hague. She read law at university but did not go into practice. Instead she worked for many years for a firm of law publishers and still does occasional work for them including taking part in a substantial revision and updating of her late husband’s legal practitioners’ work on Criminal Evidence published late 2015. She has also contributed short stories with a distinctly criminal flavour to two of the Oxford Stories anthologies published by Oxpens Press – a third story is to be published shortly in another Oxford Stories anthology – and is now concentrating on her own writing.