PUBLISHED BY CANELO CRIME ON 27th JANUARY 2022
On the tree-lined banks of Surrey’s River Wey, a decaying corpse is dug up by workmen in the middle of an Anglo-Saxon burial site. His modern dental fillings show that this is no Dark Age corpse…
DCI Craig Gillard is called in, but the body’s condition makes identification difficult. One man, however, seems to fit the bill: Ozzy Blanchard, a contractor employed by the same water firm doing the digging who disappeared six months ago, his crashed company car found nearby.
But then an X-ray of the corpse throws the investigation into turmoil. A shard of metal lodged in his neck turns out to be part of an Anglo-Saxon dagger unknown to archaeologists. Who wielded this mystery weapon and why? Does the answer lie in a murderous feud between two local families?
The deeper Gillard digs, the more shocking truths he will uncover.
Nick Louth is a best-selling thriller writer, award-winning financial journalist and investment commentator. A 1979 graduate of the London School of Economics, he went on to become a Reuters foreign correspondent in 1987. It was an experience at a medical conference in Amsterdam in 1992 while working for Reuters, that gave him the inspiration for Bite, which was published in 2007 and went on to become the UK No1 Kindle best-seller for several weeks in 2014. It has sold a third of a million copies, and been translated into six languages.
Freelance since 1998, he has been a regular contributor to the Financial Times, Investors Chronicle and Money Observer, and has published seven other books. Nick Louth is married and lives in Lincolnshire.
Heartbreaker was published in June 2014 and received critical acclaim from Amazon readers, with a 4.6 out of 5 stars on over 100 reviews. A third thriller, Mirror Mirror, was published in June 2016, and The Body in the Marsh in September 2017.
‘To the frustration of my publishers, I’ve wandered between many sub-genres of the thriller world – medical, terrorism, psychological – and even a hint of zombie! I’ve also packed in issues that are normally covered in women’s fiction in commercial novels that have the pace deemed necessary to lure male readers. This is deliberate. I spent years as a journalist, and remain wedded to the idea that action and page-turning power should not deduct from the ‘intelligence’ of a book, or lead it away from the grey areas of contemporary issues to conclusions set in black and white.’
‘In Bite, this was the way that (at the time of writing in the late 1990s) diseases that killed the most people were those that got the least investment by drug companies – because the customers were poor.’
‘In Heartbreaker, part of which is set in a refugee camp in Lebanon, I wanted to show the dilemmas facing Western journalists who routinely cover terrible events, and the price that is paid by the drivers, translators and fixers who work for them. Radicalisation, particularly how it works on women, is a key part of the book and has since publication in 2014 become an even more topical issue since the rise of ISIS in Syria.’
‘With Mirror Mirror, I have dived into the world of women’s identity and self-image in the age of celebrity and branding. Why a beautiful woman, beaten up by her famous boyfriend, is persuaded not to report it to the police, to protect the value of a forthcoming branding deal. I hope readers will look at the questions posed in this book, and my others, and when the last page is turned have something to take away with them.’
‘The Body in the Marsh is my first police procedural, set in Surrey and the Romney Marsh area of Kent. It’s a tale of a shocking murder, reflecting an unhappy marriage in the midst of apparent success, and contains what I think is my best-ever twist.’
WHAT DID I THINK? Nick is one of my favourite authors, I love his books. The settings are in the southeast UK so local to myself which I really like as you can picture the places. This was one of his best stories as it really kept you guessing about the characters, so not knowing if they were good or bad, then he gives you some surprises that you were not expecting. Another best seller for Nick, well done.
