I worked for many years in business consultancy (writing many books like the bestselling “Successful Time Management [Kogan Page]) before branching into other genres, including fiction and light-hearted travel writing (e.g., Beguiling Burma [Rethink Press]). My five novels all involve ordinary people caught up in situations that involve mystery or crime (or both). Like most fiction writers, I find it difficult to recognize where ideas come from, though I do draw on various aspects of my own life; for example, Long Overdue [Stanhope Books] involves sailing and a missing person. Certainly, I relate to sailing and, for many years, owned a boat.
This story has a thread of crime but describes how the life of a young woman, unsuccessful at school and stuck in a drab supermarket job she hates, changes when she takes on the apprentice job to a locksmith. Just as she begins to think she has a proper career, she finds herself involved in criminal activity, and with her life under threat, she must draw on all her strength and resolve to stay ahead of the situation and carve out a better life for herself.
A screenplay of this story has just won four major awards: first prize in its category at the prestigious Berlin International Screenwriting Festival, Best UK Script at the Cambridge Script Festival and with film bodies in New York and Los Angeles.
I love this author whose books are full of wonderful quirky descriptions and dark humour unusual in this genre. I love the unusual characters and setting. A writer living in Thailand and getting to grips with the culture and people as he also gets caught up in criminal activity.
This title is the first of a series (best read in order)–I have enjoyed reading all of them enormously as the long-term story has developed alongside clever page-turning standalone plots.
Travel writer Poke Rafferty was good at looking for trouble - so good that he made a little money writing a few offbeat travel guides for the young and terminally bored. But that was before Bangkok stole his heart. Now the expat American is happily playing family with Rose, the former go-go dancer he wants to marry, and with Miaow, the wary street child he wants to adopt. Yet just when everything is beginning to work out, trouble comes looking for Poke in the guise of good intentions. First he takes in Miaow's friend, a troubled and terrifying street urchin…
This is the first in another series by this author, which I also love. This time, the main character is both highly engaging and unusual—Junior Bender is a burglar, a successful one, who has time to act as a fixer or investigator for other criminals. Inevitably, this puts him in danger, and the plots involve his own exploits and those on behalf of others.
It is a premise that works so well and is enhanced by this author’s excellent writing and a thread of humor.
Quick-talking burglar Junior Bender gets blackmailed into starting a new career as a private investigator for crooks in this hilarious Hollywood mystery
Junior Bender, a burglar with a magic touch, is being blackmailed into taking on a new freelance job. One of LA’s biggest crime bosses is producing a porn movie that someone keeps sabotaging; Junior’s job is to figure out who’s responsible and keep the movie on track.
The trouble is, he’s not sure he can go through with the job, blackmail or no blackmail. The actress lined up to star in the film, Thistle Downing, is an ex-child…
Everything about the premise here is somewhat unusual, creating a delightful tale. The main character is a crime reporter who goes a good bit further than just reporting as she gets involved in a variety of criminal endeavors.
The main unusual feature is that she comes with an entire family who are… well, eccentric does not begin to describe it. Throw in a setting in Thailand and a quirky feel to the whole thing (one character dismisses a body as an animal, which another corrects by pointing out that it is wearing a hat!). It's Great fun, as are sequels featuring the same characters.
When crime reporter Jimm Juree is forced to follow her family from Chiang Mai to a fishing village on the Gulf of Siam, she's convinced her career is over. Her journalism will surely dwindle to reports on the annual monsoon-induced floods, for what crimes could possibly happen in such an out-of-the-way place? A local palm oil plantation owner and his worker are excavating a well. They dig down six feet and hit metal. It turns out to be the roof of an old Volkswagen combi, which, once unearthed, is found to contain two skeletons - one of them wearing a…
Another unusual premise. An asteroid has been spotted on a collision course with Earth, and civilization appears doomed, yet our hero remains set on solving his current case, a death originally dismissed as suicide, which is, in fact, a murder.
Surprisingly, the two themes are made to sit well together, and the intent to solve the crime never seems inappropriate in dire circumstances. This is a real page-turner, which I loved.
In THE LAST POLICEMAN, Edgar Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Ben H. Winters, offers readers something they've never seen before: A police procedural set on the brink of an apocalypse. What's the point in solving murders when we're going to die soon, anyway? Hank Palace, a homicide detective in Concord, New Hampshire, asks this question every day. Most people have stopped doing whatever it is they did before the asteroid 2011L47J hovered into view. Stopped selling real estate; stopped working at hospitals; stopped slinging hash or driving cabs or trading high-yield securities. A lot of folks spend…
I loved this book, a thriller from a writer normally at the literary end of the spectrum (the writing is great) in which the hero is the murderer. A bored Englishman working as a teacher in Italy looks to solve his money problems by marrying a student from a well to do family.
The situation spirals out of control as theft, blackmail, and murder spin from his obsessions. It is a great story, and I loved the fact that it never lost credibility for a moment and that I questioned the way I regarded such an essentially unsympathetic character as the hero.
The first Duckworth novel is "Better than Silence of the Lambs . . . Macabre fun orchestrated with immaculate precision. It's a killer" (Los Angeles Times)
Morris Duckworth teaches English to the pampered rich of Verona, and Morris is not pleased. Living a meager existence in a squalid apartment, he regards his privileged students with envy and disdain, first wreaking revenge by petty theft, and then, like all good criminals, graduating to grander larceny. When one of those students, a beautiful but vapid heiress named Massimina, falls in love with him, Morris can almost smell upward mobility. However, after the…
Introducing the irrepressible Liddy-Jean Carpenter, a young woman who has learning disabilities but also has a genius plan.
While Liddy-Jean spends her days doing minor office tasks with nobody paying attention, she sees how badly the wand-waving big boss treats the Marketing Department worker bees. So, she takes lots of notes for a business book to teach bosses to be better. Liddy-Jean likes office-mate Rose and Rose’s new friend Jenny, but she doesn’t like Rose’s creepy boyfriend. So how can she save Rose?
Liddy-Jean knows with certainty that love is love, and she concludes that Rose should be with Jenny, bosses should do better, and everybody needs the services of Liddy-Jean, Marketing Queen.
Liddy-Jean Marketing Queen and the Matchmaking Scheme
Novelist and filmmaker Mari SanGiovanni introduces readers to the irrepressible Liddy-Jean Carpenter, a matchmaker with special talents who will charm readers with her wit, wisdom, and sensibilities in this warm, enchanting love-is-love office romance.
Liddy-Jean Carpenter has learning disabilities. But she also has a surprisingly genius plan.
While she spends her days doing minor office tasks with nobody paying attention, she sees how badly the wand-waving big boss treats the Marketing Department worker bees. So, she takes lots of notes for a business book to teach bosses to be better.
While compiling pages of bad behavior notes, she finds she…
