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Wednesday November 21, 2012
Woking Library
The Surrey Library Newsletter told me some time ago that Mark Billingham was due to appear for an evening at the Woking branch so I duly got tickets and Rob and I trekked out there to see him "in conversation" with another author.
As I have mentioned before in the context of his reading his own work for audio books, Mark is originally a performer and so provided a very entertaining evening. It seemed clear to me before the event that his billing with another somewhat lesser-known author was in order to give more exposure to the latter. However Stav Sherez is a very interesting chap and the excerpts he read sounded excellent so certainly another set of books get put on the crime list for me. His roots are as a journalist and as I have said before, there must be something I like about a journalistic style in crime fiction. I think I like the rich yet sparing prose of the journalist. However Stav is a bit more poetic than most - possibly as he was a journalist for a music paper - and I would strongly recommend following him on twitter (@stavsherez) since his poetry, music interests, and general attitude to life, make his contributions interesting and well-suited to the medium.
Stav's crime novels are: The Devil's Playground (2004), The Black Monastery (2009), and now A Dark Redemption (2012) which is the start of a series pairing of detectives "Carrigan and Miller".
Mark's next book is a Tom Thorne novel The Dying Hours and will be published on May 23rd 2013. This is deemed to be Thorne's twelfth outing and dealing with the ramifications of a major career change; apparently, readers of Rush of Blood will already know what that is. [Although the last Thorne novel was Good as Dead (2011), he has appeared peripherally in the two stand-alone novels In the Dark (2008) and Rush of Blood (2012).]
Posted by Christina at 11:31 PM. Category: Art and Culture