'Twas Christmas Eve in the writing room, and the author had murder in mind..

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There are things you do as a crime reader of the bloody variety (as opposed to the soft and cosy sort)…and things you don’t do.

?One of the things you should do involves throwing caution to the wind and reading about things you know, things you don’t know, things you’d like to know more about, and things that sometimes scare the shit out of you.

?Another involves unlocking all the doors open in the rooms between your ears, and letting any interesting gales blow through.

?Another involves exercising the muscles in your hippocampus…winding up the exciting bits of your amygdala…and telling all those pesky uninspired bits to go to hell in a handbasket.

?Oh…and don’t forget to grab the nearest strong black coffee, curl up in a comfy chair, and forget the rest of the world.

?Now…

?One of the things you DON’T do involves holding back when you feel like reading about murdering one or more victims. For whatever reason.

?Giving in to your darker, bloodier side (in theory) is good for the literary soul.

?It can also be fun.

?Oh, and by the way…

?One of the things you DEFINITELY SHOULD DO involves reading about a team of damned clever people who hunt serial killers for a living (even if one of the them isn’t technically flesh and blood).

?And one of the things you VERY DEFINITELY SHOULD DO is get yourself a copy of my debut crime novel A Time for Dying.

?It’s dark, it’s gritty, it’s bloody, it’s intelligent, it’s humorous in a serious way. It’s everything you want in a crime novel and it’s not like any crime novel you’ve ever read. The only problem is…once you pick it up, you won’t want to put it down again until the killing stops and they’ve caught the guy that nobody has been able to catch…until now

?A Time for Dying is published and available from my publisher Northodox Press, and available from Amazon, and most good bricks & mortar bookshops.

?Happy Christmas to all of you…from all of us.