A Talk Beside The Fire

Taken For Granted

"On Stupidity"

The Hawkshead Hostage (Lake District Mystery Series) by Rebecca Tope

Hardback:  There is something brewing in the Lake District.

Summer has come to the Lake District town of Windermere, where Persimmon 'Simmy' Brown runs her own florist shop.  But with the shop struggling for money, a contract to provide floral displays for a hotel in Hawkshead could not be more welcome.  However, Simmy's association with the hotel soon turns sinister when she finds a body in the lake.

To make matters worse, her friend, Ben - responsible for alerting her to the discovered body - is now missing and thought to be kidnapped.  Caught up in both a murder and kidnapping investigation, Simmy begins chasing clues left by her missing friend.

With many suspicious characters bustling in and out of the hotel, while simultaneously trying to cope with her father's encroaching dementia, solving the puzzle seems a gruelling challenge, but Simmy is compelled to uncover the truth.

The Hawkshead Hostage (2016) is the fifth book in the page-turning Lake District Mystery series.  The sixth and next book - The Bowness Bequest - will be released on 18 May 2017.

About the author:  Rebecca Tope, a British crime novelist and journalist, lives on a smallholding in Herefordshire, where she plants trees and watches wild birds, but manages to travel the world and enjoy civilisation from time to time as well.  Most of her varied experiences and activities find their way into her books, sooner or later.  In 1992, she founded Praxis books, a small British press.

She is the author of three murder mystery series, featuring the fictional characters of Den Cooper, a Devon police detective, Drew Slocombe, a former nurse, now an undertaker, Thea Osborne, a house sitter in the Cotswolds, and Persimmon Brown, a florist in the Lake District.  Her books are set in real English villages.  She uses a kind of "anti research", avoiding discussion with any of the villagers, but does walk along the footpaths and visits most of the village pubs.

She is currently working on a biography of Sabine Baring-Gould.  Tope is also ghost writer of the novels based on the ITV series Rosemary and Thyme.

Rating:  3/5

Exalted Simplicity In Winter

As 2016 Nears The End...

A Time To Reflect

Prescription For Murder: The True Story Of Mass Murderers Dr Harold Shipman (True Crime) by Brian Whittle and Jean Ritchie

Paperback:  He was a pillar of the community, serving on local committees, donating prizes to the rugby club, organising charity collections.  His patients thought the world of him:  he was attentive, kind, never too busy to chat.

Yet Dr Harold Frederick Shipman was also the most prolific serial killer the world has ever known, with between 200 and 300 victims.  Quietly, for many years, the small, bespectacled GP was making unexpected house calls - and walking out leaving a dead body behind.

They were near-perfect crimes.  The middle-aged and elderly women he tarted trusted their doctor:  they willingly rolled up their sleeves for what proved to be a fatal jab of morphine from his syringe.  The murderous career of Dr Shipman only came to an end when police in Hyde, Greater Manchester, were called to investigate a forged will.  Overnight, they found themselves embroiled in the biggest murder case in British history.

This is the story of Fred Shipman, a mass murderer whose motives will puzzle psychiatrists and psychologists for generations to come, and whose tally of victims will never be fully known.

Prescription for Murder (2000) is a compelling account of these monstrous crimes and of the man who committed them, examining Shipman's early life and the traumatic death of his mother, his home life with his wife and children, and his public front as a caring family doctor.

The authors have had unparalleled access to friends, colleagues and patients.  Their in-depth and authoritative investigation looks at how he killed, how he was able to get away with it for so long and - most important of all - why he did it.

About the authors:  Brian Whittle has been a superb feature writer and a tabloid and investigative reporter on national newspapers for more than thirty years.  He was the editor and proprietor of Cavendish Press, the leading news-gathering agency in the north-west.  Pictures taken by Cavendish Press of the first macabre exhumation by floodlight of one of Shipman's victims made the front pages of newspapers around the world.  Brian Whittle's intimate knowledge of Hyde, the Greater Manchester area and the police investigation of Dr Harold Shipman make him ideally qualified to tell the story of the sinister GP.  He saw very early on that the case was not only a huge human tragedy, but also that there were great political implications in how Shipman had got away with his murders for so long.  By devoting hundreds of hours to investigating the serial killer's activities in Hyde, Brian became an expert on the subject, interviewed by the world's media.  Sadly, in 2005, The Manchester journalist Brian Whittle collapsed and died, aged 59.

Jean Ritchie is also an investigative journalist with more than thirty years' experience working for national newspapers and magazines.  She is the author of twenty-one successful books (from ghosted autobiographies to investigative non-fiction), including the bestselling Myra Hindley:  Inside the Mind of a Murderess.  Her other titles include Stalkers, the first full account of the stalking phenomenon, and The Secret World of Cults, an investigation into dangerous cults and religious sects.  She joined Fleet Street as a reporter for the Daily Mail, moving to the Sun as a features writer, where she covered showbusiness, politics, human life and investigations.  She has ghost written on a number of major titles including Wherever You Are: The Military Wives and The Yorkshire Shepardess.

The Best Pillow

Snowman Book Stack Seen at Cambridge Central Library

Put Your Head In The Sand

Reading A Good Book In Silence

The Phantom (Harry Hole Series) by Jo Nesbø

Paperback:  When Harry left Oslo again for Hong Kong - fleeing the traumas of life as a cop and the horrors of a case that nearly cost him his life - he thought he was there for good.

But then the unthinkable happened.

The son of the woman he loved, lost, and still loves is arrested for murder:  Oleg, the boy Harry helped raise but couldn't help deserting when he fled.

Harry has come back to prove that Oleg is not a killer.  Barred from rejoining the police force and denied permission to reopen the investigation, he sets out on a solitary, increasingly dangerous investigation that takes him deep into the world of the most virulent drug to ever hit the streets of Oslo (and the careers of some of the city's highest officials), and into the maze of his own past, where he will find the wrenching truth that finally matters to Oleg, and to himself.

Phantom (2012) is the ninth book in the incredible Harry Hole thriller series set in Oslo.  Phantom is translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett.

About the author and translator:  Jo Nesbø is a musician, songwriter, economist and prize-winning author.  His first crime novel featuring Harry Hole was published in Norway in 1997 and was an instant hit, winning the Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel (an accolade shared with Peter Høeg, Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson).  His bestselling Harry Hole series has been a huge success in the UK and across the world.

Don Bartlett lives in Norfolk and works as a freelance translator of Scandinavian literature.  He has translated, or co-translated, Norwegian novels by Lars Saabye Christensen, Roy Jacobsen, Ingvar Even Ambjørnsen-Haefs, Kjell Ola Dahl, Gunnar Staalesen and Pernille Rygg.

Rating:  5/5

Persevere In Reading