A short-term deal for The Strange Girl

Just a quick advisory note: The Strange Girl is on a short-term discount for the 31st October and 1st November, $0.99 or £0.99.

Here's an interesting fact: my last book, The Bleak, is a thriller, part of which is based on the fact that Russia continued exploring the use of chemical and biological weapons even after they, like the US and Britain, signed a pact banning them in 1972. My book uses their failure to act on the ban to explain the chief villain's actions towards the end of the book.

Well, I've just been reading in a history of the British Secret Service that it was believed that during the Cold War, the Russians had buried caches of Ebola, anthrax and psychotropic drugs at various places around the UK, near to reservoirs and our own biological weapons development facility at Porton Down. In case they wanted to attack us.

Whatever you make up, Real Life always trumps you!

Triumphant triumvirate - Lehane, Atkins, Sandford.

I've recently read three crime novels that remind me - if I needed it - why crime writing is such a vigorous genre.

First I read Dennis Lehane's The Drop, which is a novel based on an earlier short story and which has been made into a film starring Tom Hardy and the great James Gandolfini. Effectively, it's the old story about the worm turning - someone who is put-upon finally deciding that enough is enough and finding the strength to assert themselves. The difference here is that the hero, although quiet and unassuming, was once part of a gang that exercised a violent rule over a part of Boston.