A former Customs and Police Officer, Andrew Hill’s first book in a crime series set in the New Forest, where he lived for 30 years, will be published in Spring 2022. An avid reader across the crime genre and regular at crime writing festivals, he now lives in West Sussex and works in property.
PI Jack Shepherd is having a strange couple of days. He’s been threatened by a local gangster, the tortured body of an old client is discovered at low tide in the Severn Estuary and he has a new client in the shape of the enigmatic Deborah Thorne.
What quickly becomes apparent to Jack is the link between his former client the psychologist Philip Soames whose body was found on the estuary and the mystery of Deborah Thorne. It seems that Thorne was a client of Soames.
Jack still has contacts with the Police, in particular Superintendent Harvey Butler. Butler is a straight- arrow copper who is completely focused on the job and utterly believes in the system. This puts Jack and Harvey at odds for they work in the same field but from different angles, deploying different methods.
When a couple of heavies try and intimidate Jack, he knows that Deborah Thorne is involved in something dangerous and dark. Nothing is going to deflect him from the job in hand though the clues start to point back to events during the bloody war in Kosovo.
The author offers us a well-crafted story which has Bristol as its backdrop with excursions into the nearby Forest of Dean as well as venturing into Devon.
We are treated to glimpses of Jack’s family and friends, which help round him out as a person, and a tenacious investigator.
Dowson skilfully mixes in Serbian death squads, illegal dog fighting and people trafficking to deliver a story of sweep and substance in the first of this series of thrillers with Jack Shepherd Private Investigator.
