General Fiction Books
A good life is a life well lived full of new adventures, meeting new people, and experiencing new things. On this criteria Angel Dare has had one of the best lives, she is always meeting new people and finding herself in new places, but not for the reasons she would want. From adult film star to...
Agatha Christie would have us believe that inter-War murder was cosy, taking place in a picturesque village or on a mode of transport whilst taking in the sites of the Grand Tour. Whilst Marple was eating muffins and Poirot was drinking Prosecco, most of us would have been thrown into the daily...
Puzzle me this. Whilst other kids were outside climbing trees or knocking a football around, you would often find me indoors or under a tree reading a book or doing puzzles. That has led to two lifelong consequences; a love of puzzles and a problem with weight. Puzzler was always my favourite,...
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
There are many reasons that an investigator in fiction gets involved in a case. Perhaps they are a Detective, and it is their job, or they are a Private Investigator getting paid. You may stumble across a body and suddenly find yourself drawn into a mystery. All these paths lead to a different...
I have read a few novels recently that have protagonists that seemingly have little control over their destiny, instead stepping into the stream of the narrative and being carried along. On occasion this is a flood and the character flails around with no impact on the wider story, but there is...
Your average heist movie ends in one of two ways; a cliffhanger or the job complete. You rarely get to see what happens to the criminals as they make it off with their ill-gotten gains, or when they are thrown into the slammer. Unless you are Oceans 11, then you just get a couple more heists a...
What do you do with an aging character? Some authors choose to pretend that their characters are immortal and never age. This is great for churning out the content, but it does hamstring you into writing the same type of story as you can never move on in fear of making the protagonist too old....
Christmas has many traditions from trees to strange men sneaking down the chimney in the dead of night. One tradition I like is the different genres that tackle the season. There is something spooky about the dark nights and folk traditions that make Christmas Ghost Stories so good, but it is...
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
Every summer is the same, inexperienced people think it would be a clever idea to do some wild swimming unaware that under the first foot of warm reservoir water, there are metres of icy water ready to send you into shock. When three members of the Fowler family disappear when out swimming, the...
Cozy crime comes in all sizes, but it still has an odd name. The characters may be eccentric, the setting twee, but when it comes down to it, there is still a dead person lying on the carpet. Marple had her village with its higher crime rate than Gotham, Poirot had various summer vacation spots,...
Some of the best speculative fiction starts with an idea that is not far removed from the normal, a simple nudge to reality can lead to many places. In the case of J. Michael Straczynski’s The Glass Box, this place is a psychiatric hospital. The reason for being sent there? New government...
When I finally get around to building that time machine, I made a note not to visit 14th century Europe. The continent was a hodgepodge of wars and battles. Even during times of peace you could still stumble across the wrong village, and they would kill you for your shoes. Not a century for...
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