Authors Electric

  Hi, my name’s Joy Kluver and I’m new to the Electric Authors blog. Thanks to Debbie for allowing me to join. I write police procedurals and my detective is DI Bernadette ‘Bernie’ Noel, based at Wiltshire Police. So I thought I’d kick off by telling you about some of my favourite police procedurals from 2021.   The Trawlerman by William Shaw This is the DS Alex Cupidi series sent in Kent. As Cupidi lives in Dungeness, it’s a wonderfully atmospheric book. Shaw always brings themes into his stories and this one looks at mental health in particular. Cupidi is dealing with PTSD and is signed off work but that’s not stopping her from investigating the case of a murdered couple.   Love Lies Bleeding by Rebecca Bradley This is the eighth book in the DI Hannah Robbins series. It’s fair to say that Rebecca Bradley has been pretty unkind to Hannah in the last few books and she’s a woman on the edge. Hannah is overusing prescription painkillers to deal with injuries ca...

It’s my birthday today, and guess where I’ll be? Yes, you’ve guessed it, I’m still partying at the Edinburgh eBook Festival . But, and it’s a big but, I’ll have to behave myself, and not partake too much of the happy juice. As if I would? You see my contribution to the festival today will be in the company of the police, because I’m examining the police procedural in crime fiction. I might be put in the position of saying – ‘It’s a fair cop, guv.’ I must admit this is the post that gave me the most problems. You see in my search for police procedurals, I went to the source. Policemen writing crime fiction. I wasn’t wrong, they knew about police procedures, but the writers I chose knew damn all about writing fiction. Now I’m sure there must be some good books out there written by policemen, but I couldn’t find them. Now I’ve tempted fate, and I’ll probably be harangued by police writers for evermore! My own crime novels contain an element of police procedures, although I’m su...

Phenomena like the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy are a constant fascination to me. What they seem to show is that no one has any idea at all why some books take off and some don’t. Quality doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it at all. Crap novels become best sellers, wonderful novels become remainders. The big publishers throw money at some of their titles, and they still bomb. Word of mouth is meant to be king, yet everyone I know who has read Fifty Shades etc (or claims to have done so) is lukewarm. How many sold? Twenty million? Thus I now crave your indulgence as friends, real and virtual, to name two books by two authors you won’t have heard of, and give you tasters of their work. This is done, naturally, with their full permission, and I have absolutely no commercial interest in either of them. One is a friend called Margaret, the other a friend called John. John’s book is a police procedural called No Place for Dinosaurs, and the other a weird and wonderful shor...