– ‘The Magic of Wor(l)ds’ blog is a hobby, reviews and other bookish stuff on this site are done for free. –
Today I’m on the ‘Family Business’ blogtour, organised by Random Things Tours.
To promote this book I have an excerpt, but b
About the Author :
It took until I was 57 to finally fulfil my dream to become a published author but seeing my work in print was far from a new experience.
Sunbeam, my debut novel, was self-published in November 2019 and was followed by Family Business on June 3 this year. Both are fast-moving, plot-twisting contemporary thrillers which use the city of my birth, Sheffield, as their backdrop, though Family Business is also part-set in my current home city, Derby.
My writing background is a career as a newspaper journalist, starting out as a trainee reporter with the South Yorkshire Times in 1984 before, three years later, joining the sports desk of the Derby Telegraph, where I have been ever since.
Most of that time in Derby has been as the newspaper’s cricket writer, a role that brought national recognition in the 2012 and 2013 England and Wales Cricket Board awards. I have also been a contributor for the last nine years to the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack and have had many articles published in national magazines, annuals and newspapers.
The hefty workload of writing as a profession meant writing for pleasure was largely left on the back burner but changed priorities at work made it possible – essential, even – to pick up the threads of one of the many half-formed novels in my computer files and, this time, see it through to publication.
Sunbeam was the result but it was never the intention to stop there. Family Business was well on the way by the time Sunbeam was published and a third novel, possibly the start of a series, is already well into the planning stage.
I was born in Sheffield and have lived in Derby since 1988 with my partner, Sue. We have two sons.
Synopsis :
Family historian Graham Hasselhoff thought there were no skeletons in his cupboard. That is, until the day he met the son he never knew he had.Getting to know Andreas, who is now the boss of a road haulage firm, soon leads him to a trail of arson, beatings, mysterious warnings – and murder. Can his son really be behind this deadly business? Graham has to quickly work out if Andreas is an impetuous eccentric – or a dangerously ruthless criminal.
Excerpt :
The noise jolted him out of his deep sleep with the violence of an explosion. Five mini-explosions. He sat upright with a shocked gasp and attempted to calibrate his addled senses in the unrevealing darkness of an unfamiliar bedroom but could not even be certain if he was suddenly awake or remained locked in the false reality of a panicked dream.
There were the noises again. Five loud bangs. They came from below and this time there was a voice, shouting, demanding.
‘Open the door!’
Graham fumbled on the bedside cabinet for his glasses and tried to focus on the digital figures of the alarm clock. 3:58.
‘Graham! What is it? What’s that noise?’ Janet was sitting up now and had grabbed his arm.
‘I don’t know. It’s the middle of the night.’
What the hell could it be? It sounded like the noise was coming from the front door.
Five more bangs.
‘Open the door! Last chance, open the door!’
‘God, Gray – who is it?’ She was almost hysterical, frantic, frightened.
‘I don’t …Christ, what the …Jeez.’
He shot to his feet and stumbled towards the bedroom light, switching it on and instinctively looking around for anything he could grab as a weapon to defend himself against whoever was announcing themselves with such undisguised threat. He stood blinking, in his baggy t-shirt and loose cotton shorts, moving only in sharp, jerky twitches and feeling like his heart was about to burst out of his throat, struggling to make any sense of this nightmarish awakening.
There was another noise, heavier and louder than the others, a thud against the door which shook the whole house. Two seconds later and there was another.
‘Gray! They’re breaking in! They’re trying to break the door down! They’re coming in for us!’
The Magic of Wor(l)ds
Chris Chalmers was born in Lancashire and lives in south-west London. He’s been the understudy on Mastermind, visited 40 countries and swum with marine iguanas. His first novel, ‘Five To One’, was winner of a debut novel competition and nominated for the Polari First Book Prize; his latest, ‘The Last Lemming’, is out now in paperback and ebook. He has written a diary for 42 years and never missed a night.
TV naturalist ‘Prof Leo’ Sanders makes it to his deathbed without a whiff of scandal — then confesses his career-defining wildlife discovery was a hoax.
Francis Carsac, a pseudonym for the world-renowned French scientist, geologist, and archaeologist Francois Bordes, wrote and published six novels during the golden age of science fiction.
The first English translation of the celebrated Golden Age Science Fiction Classic.
By day Eric Lewis is a PhD research chemist weathering the latest rounds of mergers and layoffs and still trying to remember how to be a person again long after surviving grad school. In addition to subjecting his writing to one rejection after another, he can be found gathering to himself as many different sharp and pointies as possible and searching for the perfect hiking trail, archery range of single malt Scotch. Don’t ask where, because he’s never lived anywhere for longer than five years.
After a warlord slaughters her patients, Sister Alessia quits the cloister and strikes out on her own to heal the victims of a brutal dynastic conflict. Her roaming forest camp unwittingly becomes the center of a vengeful peasant insurgency, raiding the forces of both sides to survive. Alessia struggles to temper their fury as well as tend wounds, consenting to ever greater violence to keep her new charges safe. When they uncover proof of a foreign conspiracy prolonging the bloodshed, Alessia risks the very lives she’s saved to expose the truth and bring the war to an end.
Robert Mitchell Evans was born in North Caroline but split his early life between that state and sunny Florida before brief and ultimately unsuccessful tour in the United States Navy.
Jason Kessler doesn’t fit in the society of Nocturnia, the sole colony that survived the Earth’s destruction. Between the colony’s dedication to a distorted vision of mid-twentieth century Americana, its sexually repressive culture, and the expectation that his most important duty is marriage and children Jason rebels, throwing himself into an illicit and dangerous affair with Pamela Guest, but Pamela harbors a secret. Soon the lovers are engaged in a lethal game of cat and mouse with the colony’s underworld head and the secrets Jason unlocks upend everything he knew, exposing dangers far beyond Nocturnia and its obsessions.
Sylvia Topp has worked in publishing since college, starting as a copy editor on medical journals, then moving to freelance editing at major literary publishing houses. She was the long-time wife and partner of Tuli Kupferberg, a Beat poet who later was a co-founder, in 1964, of the Fugs, a legendary rock and roll band. Together Sylvia and Tuli wrote, edited, and designed over thirty books and magazines, including As They Were, 1001 Ways to Live Without Working, and Yeah! magazine. Sylvia joined the staff at The Soho Weekly News and later The Village Voice, before finishing her publishing career at Vanity Fair. Eileen is her first book. She lives in Kingston, Ontario.
In 1934, Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s futuristic poem, ‘End of the Century, 1984′, was published. The next year, she would meet George Orwell, then known as Eric Blair, at a party. “Now,’ he remarked that night, ‘that’s the kind of girl I would like to marry.’ Years later, Orwell would name his greatest work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, in homage to the memory of Eileen, the woman who shaped his life and his art in ways that have never been acknowledged by history, until now.
Maria Frankland’s life began at 40 when she escaped an unhappy marriage and began making a living from her own writing and becoming a teacher of creative writing.
Do you listen to your mother? Even after she’s dead?
Nathalie Abi-Ezzi was born in Beirut, and has lived in Lebanon, Austria and the UK.
It is the summer of 2006, and nineteen-year-old London music student, Layla, returns home for the holidays to a now peaceful Lebanon. When she arrives, though, she finds that her troubled younger brother has gone missing. “Borrowing” her father’s car, she heads to Beirut to search for him, meeting a variety of people along the way. But her quest is cut short when, without warning, Beirut comes under heavy artillery fire. A new war has begun, and now she is trapped in the middle of it.
Beth Overmyer has authored several books—In a Pickle, a middle grade novella, and Circus in a Shot Glass, a women’s fiction novel, being among them. She’s in love with the fantasy genre, mysteries—especially when there’s tea and/or a quirky sleuth involved—, and wouldn’t say no to reading and writing in every genre but hardcore horror and erotica. Influencers to her writing include J.R.R. Tolkien and Brandon Sanderson, though Douglas Adams may be lurking in there somewhere.
In a land where magic’s feared, a rare magical kind exists: the Blest, products of the Goblets Immortal. Aidan’s a Blest on the run, forced to return home. He made his family vanish decades ago, but believes there’s a way to bring them back.
Born in the San Francisco bay area and raised in Napa, California, Michael R. Johnston grew up steeped in everything Science Fiction and Fantasy from Asimov to Zelazny, as well as endless terrible SF TV shows he still has a slightly embarrassed fondness for.
The sequel to The Widening Gyre, praised by Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Library Journal and more!
