Crime Fiction

I’ve always been fascinated by what drives people to commit the most heinous of crimes. There is always a reason for it. A reason that comes out of a very twisted mind but a reason that they can use to justify their actions. Crime transcends every social class, every race, gender, sexuality, religion. It’s one of the few things where it can be said that we all think the same. Now I love giving you a great plot with believable characters who find themselves in rather awkward situations, with lots of twists and turns to keep you guessing for as long as I can. A lot of people ask how a nice guy like me can come up with such brutality and wickedness in my crime fiction stories. Well, that’s for me to know and for you to hopefully never find out about.

Farrell is a senior detective with the New South Wales police in Australia and when we first meet him, he’s been sent out to the fictional town of Kingsbrook to take over as lead officer at the local cop shop. He brings his daughter Sapphire with him. She’s just finished school and wants to take a year off being starting university. She gets a job in a local café. His wife is a make-up artist on film and TV sets and is often working away. They’ve both strayed off the beaten track in their marriage and one of the reasons he’s been sent out to Kingsbrook is because he recently had an affair with his area commander, a woman who doesn’t take kindly to him choosing his marriage over her. But he has the last laugh on her because he’s immediately given a case that rattles the cage of some senor regional officers who he finds to have been corrupt, and at the end of book one ’The Final Hours’ he realises that he’s quite settling down in Kingsbrook and intends to stay. The second book is called ‘Destined for Murder’ and the third, ‘The Darkness in Him’.

This volume brings together three crime novels ‘Who Are the Bad Guys?’, ‘A Very Personal Murder’, and ‘The Wild Heart’. They’re all very much separate stories and include the repercussions of a terrorist attack on Manchester’s Piccadilly station, a man who finds out who murdered is best friend thirty years ago and in doing so discovers a devastating secret about his own identity that makes him wish he’d left well alone, and a man who was once a member of a loyalist paramilitary gang in Belfast but who turned informer on his former comrades and given a new identity in Manchester. Those former comrades now know who and where he is, and they’ve put a price on his head. His lover says he’ll stay with him, but will he be prepared to kill in order to save him?Each one in the volume can be bought separately if you prefer.

Barton is with the Greater Manchester police and there are fifteen titles in this series.Jeff leads a varied team of detectives solving crime in and around Manchester and though he comes across as a genial man, his instincts as a senior police officer are as sharp as steel. He’s a single parent of his son Toby and has a male nanny, a ‘manny’, called Brendan who not only looks after Toby but is also Jeff’s housekeeper. Jeff’s wife died of an aneurism when Toby was a baby. She was of Chinese heritage and Jeff has made sure that Toby has a good relationship with his grandparents who’ve also taught him to speak Mandarin. Jeff has had the odd girlfriend here and there, but he’s never got over his wife’s death. Not really. Not where it counts. And he’s more or less decided to wait until Toby is grown up and on his own way before he turns is attention back to his personal life. When you meet him in the pages of each book, I’m sure there’ll be ladies out there who would want to ‘rescue’ him. But sorry girls, he doesn’t need it. Life for him is bringing up Toby as best he can, being the best police detective he can be, and it’ll be a while yet before he pays any attention to his own personal needs.The last one in this Barton series will be out next year and I think that the story I’ve come up with will provide a fitting end to a character who will always remain one of my absolute favourites.

But who knows, after the last one, he might be back one day