Over the last five or more years I’ve become used to
watching box sets of drama. I’ve sat through The Wire (not prepared to say how
many times), The Sopranos, Deadwood, Boardwalk Empire and many others. Recently
I had my arm twisted and started to watch Game of Thrones. These fictional worlds have enthralled me and
I have found myself thinking about them, the characters and the situations, in between
times of watching.
A bit like reading a
book then.
What I enjoyed was being with characters over a period of
time, seeing them in a variety of situations. There was always a story arc and
it was engrossing to see the characters change or show different facets of
their personality (Tony Soprano, for example).
A few years ago I decided that I wanted to write a box set
of my own. A Book Box Set. Of course writers of fiction have been doing this
for a long time. I’ve recently been reading The Cazalet Chronicals by Elizabeth
Jane Howard and of course crime friction has loads of wonderful series; CJ
Sansom’s Shardlake books, Ian Rankin’s
Rebus and I’ve just discovered Ann Cleeves’ Shetland books.
I wanted to write a series for teenagers that had a
beginning, middle and end. So it was not to be ‘ongoing’. A finite story that
started with a mystery and ended with a solution. I wanted to do this over four
books. Bloomsbury commissioned this series THE MURDER NOTEBOOKS.
In these books the two main characters, Rose and Joshua try
to find out what happened to their parents, police officers, who disappeared
five years before.
The first book DEAD TIME came out in 2012 to cautious
reviews. Of course it had to work as a stand-alone (as all series books do) and
it had to open up the mystery of what happened to Rose and Joshua’s parents.
Some readers found this frustrating. The second book KILLING RACHEL also had to
work as a stand-alone mystery but unravelled the enigma of the parents’
disappearance further, asking more and more questions about their roles as
police officers. This book was
shortlisted for the Red House Book Award while at the same time gaining the
opprobrium of Kirkus which described it as ‘A limp murder mystery needlessly
prolonged’ (you can’t please everyone). The third and fourth books, BUTTERFLY
GRAVE and DEAD AND BURIED have now been published and early reviews for the
series as a whole are good.
It is slow. It unwinds bit by bit. There are red herrings
and associated murders. At its heart the series asks the question IS MURDER
EVER RIGHT? A series isn’t for everyone. I had always hoped though that readers
would enjoy the teasing mystery and also relish the bitter sweet ending.
Take it or leave it. My Book Box Set THE MURDER NOTEBOOKS is
there for you to read.
2 comments:
We have the first two in my library, where they're doing quite well. I didn't know it was now a boxed set. :-)
No, I'm speaking metaphorically. It comes as four separate books!
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