Mark Timlin is a British author best known for his series of novels featuring Nick Sharman, a former Metropolitan Police officer who takes up the profession of private investigator in South London. He is also a renowned book reviewer and literary commentator. His most recent work is REAP THE WHIRLWIND. In his early years he did various jobs including work as a member of the road crew for THE WHO, including working backstage at Woodstock in the 1960s on the lighting cranes
More info > http://wwwshotsmagcouk.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-return-of-nick-sharman.html
This one sends us off to Stoke-On-Trent. Not the most glamorous location. Cold, wet and miserable by all accounts. But when you’re one of the top hundred influential people in the city as is Ms Sherratt, then maybe it’s Stoke-On-Moet&Chandon. Whoopee-do!
Life as a fictional cop in Stoke is pretty par for the course. Never ending shifts, wives, husbands, brothers, sisters, who don’t understand the job. Senior officers breathing down your neck to get results. Hours of boredom sitting in under-serviced cars where the heater doesn’t work, and the windscreen wipers screech, smelling of urine, faeces, McDonalds, Chinese, Indian, pizza and chips. Perm any from the above. Then there’s reluctant witnesses, no comment interviews, stress, stress, stress.
Liar Liar starts with a toddler falling from the first floor of a block of flats, and ending up seriously ill in hospital. But did he fall, or was he pushed or dropped? There’s some bad people living in the place. Detective-Sergeant Grace Allendale was first responder, being on the estate on other matters, and she gets the case with her partner Detective-Constable Frankie Higgins.
The enquiry brings to light drug dealing, extortion, assault, even murder. You name it, it’s there, in all its nasty glory.
The novel boogies along nicely, keeping the pages turning, and the interest in the cases in the present, and one character’s secrets from the past alive, making it a compulsive read, with twists and turns and red herrings enough for anyone, until a rambunctious ending brings everything to a satisfactory conclusion.
I guess Sherratt is looking at TV with this series. Could work. Something between Vera and Fifty Five Degrees North if you can remember that far back.
I imagine if police procedurals were taking their GCSE’s, Liar Liar would get an A*
That’s an A star folks.
