Tag: crime

Blog Tour/Guest Post: The Lost Children by Theresa Talbot

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‘Ideal for fans of Broadchurch’…how enticing is that? I’m delighted to be hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for The Lost Children by Theresa Talbot.  The book is the first in a new thriller series featuring investigative journalist, Oonagh O’Neil.  I have a wonderful guest post by Theresa for you all about her journey to becoming someone who can call themselves a ‘writer’.

Do check out the tour schedule at the bottom of this post to see the other great book bloggers taking part in the tour.  Visit them for reviews, interviews and book extracts.

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The Lost ChildrenAbout the Book

TV journalist and media darling, Oonagh O’Neil, can sense a sinister cover-up from the moment an elderly priest dies on the altar of his Glasgow church. His death comes as she is about to expose the shocking truth behind the closure of a Magdalene Institution. The Church has already tried to suppress the story. Is someone also covering their tracks?

DI Alec Davies is appointed to investigate the priest’s death. He and Oonagh go way back. Oonagh now faces the biggest decision of her life. But will it be hers to make? What secrets lie behind the derelict Institution’s doors? What sparked the infamous three-day riot that closed it? And what happened to the three Maggies who vowed to stay friends forever?

From Ireland to Scotland.  From life to death.

(The book was previously published under the title Penance.)

Format: ebook, paperback (466 pp.)    Publisher: Aria Fiction
Published: 1st April 2018                 Genre: Crime, Mystery

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Kobo ǀ Google Play ǀ iBooks
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Lost Children on Goodreads

Guest Post: ‘Hi, I’m Theresa Talbot – and I’m a writer’ by Theresa Talbot

I feel as though I should be standing up at a support group to utter that phrase as it’s taken me so long to say it out loud.

My day job is ‘broadcast journalist’. It sounds slightly grander than it is; basically it’s talking out loud on the wireless. I present the traffic & travel on BBC Radio Scotland and sometimes read the news. Several years ago, I also presented the weekly gardening programme but that was taken off-air and replaced with a programme about men hitting balls with sticks, or men kicking balls, or men swerving out of the way of balls…I can’t really remember which, but there were a lot of men and a lot of balls.

My writing journey has been as long and meandering as the road to Ballacheulish. It would be lovely to say I always had a burning ambition to write, that it’s part of my DNA and as a child I would sit for hours on my own scribbling furiously then pass my stories on to the other kids on the street in exchange for popularity. But in truth I was a listener rather than a teller. For me there was nothing more delicious than being told a story from a grown-up. One of those fabulously illicit tales of gore, ghost and ghouls that seemingly had no part in childhood. Scratch the surface of any fairy tale and there lies the most appalling horror of savage wolves, lost children in the woods and wicked witches on a killing frenzy armed with no more than a basket of poisoned apples.

I can’t remember when I decided I would like to become a writer, certainly not as a child, as to me being ‘a writer’ was something only posh people did. I never even considered it could be a job, and certainly not my job. I remember my sister having one of those portable typewriters – Petite I think was the brand name – it had its own blue carrying case and I was in awe as she battered out ‘the quick brown dog jumps over the lazy fox’ time and time again with lightening speed.

I fell into journalism after a range of jobs as diverse as Library Assistant, Pepsi Challenge Girl and Medical Rep, but somewhere along the line a seed must have been sown that compelled me to write. I went to a few writers’ groups, toyed with short stories, but they were never my thing and I never took myself seriously as a writer, which was fine as neither did anyone else.

Looking back I’ve actually written every day of my professional life for the past twenty two years as a radio journalist – and because I write for the spoken word, this helps enormously when it comes to writing dialogue. I was a freelance comedy writer too. I was listening to a show on BBC Radio Scotland and noticed that there was what seemed like a ton of writers at the end credits. I phoned up the production company that made the weekly programme and asked them where they got their material from. Basically writers just submitted jokes and that was that.  Seemed simple enough, then the following week I was in the hairdressers and a chap sat next to me was chatting away and told me he was a comedy writer for the very same programme. I sent him a joke and he told me to ‘try it, nothing to lose’. So I did and they used it. I did the same the following week, they used that joke too. Armed with my two jokes I went to a BBC producer and nagged her into reading a few other things, and before I knew it I had a weekly slot on another sketch show. I have to say writing a two minute sketch was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It took me almost the whole week to get it right. Like short stories, short sketches just weren’t my thing. But, I’d started on road to becoming a writer and by this time had the bit between my teeth.

When I decided to actually write a book I confess I didn’t have a clue. The main thing that prompted me to get started was that I had a P.C. No longer would I succumb to the noxious fumes of tipex – as typing was not, and still isn’t, my strong point. I had no plan, no structure, just an idea which I started writing. I was inspired by two things – an early ghost story my Dad had told of a priest dying on the altar, and Glasgow’s Magdalene Institution which closed down after a three day riot in 1958.

That story eventually became The Lost Children and I’m thrilled to bits that Team Aria love it as much as I do. So with a book under my belt, can I now call myself a writer? Probably, but it’ll be years before I’m brave enough to utter the phrase…’I’m Theresa Talbot, and I’m an Author’.                                                                          © Theresa Talbot

Theresa TalbotAbout the Author

Theresa  Talbot  is  a  BBC  broadcaster  and  freelance  producer.  A  former  radio  news  editor,  she  also  hosted  The  Beechgrove  Potting  Shed  on  BBC  Radio  Scotland,  but  for many  she  will  be  most  familiar  as  the  voice  of  the  station’s  Traffic  &  Travel.  Late 2014  saw  the  publication  of  her  first  book,  This  Is  What  I  Look  Like,  a  humorous  memoir  covering  everything  from  working  with  Andy  Williams  to  rescuing  chickens  and  discovering  nuns  hidden  in  gardens.  She’s  much  in  demand  at  book  festivals,  both  as  an  author  and  as  a  chairperson.

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Extract: In The Cage Where Your Saviours Hide by Malcolm Mackay

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Mackay_In the Cage

In The Cage Where Your Saviours Hide by Malcolm McKay has been described as ‘a remarkable novel of crime and corruption…set in a brooding, rain-swept Scottish city burdened by a history that is compellingly different from the one we think we know.’

Intrigued?  Good because I have an extract from the book for you below.

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In the Cage where Your Saviours HideAbout the Book

The independent kingdom of Scotland flourished until the beginning of the last century. Its great trading port of Challaid, in the north west of the country, sent ships around the world and its merchants and bankers grew rich on their empire in Central America.

But Scotland is not what it was, and the docks of Challaid are almost silent. The huge infrastructure projects collapsed, like the dangerous railway tunnels under the city. And above ground the networks of power and corruption are all that survive of Challaid’s glorious past.

Darian Ross is a young private investigator whose father, an ex cop, is in prison for murder. He takes on a case brought to him by a charismatic woman, Maeve Campbell. Her partner has been stabbed; the police are not very curious about the death of a man who laundered money for the city’s criminals. Ross is drawn by his innate sense of justice and his fascination with Campbell into a world in which no-one can be trusted.

Praise for Malcolm Mackay and In The Cage Where Your Saviours Hide

‘Fascinating speculative fiction.’ The Bookseller
‘Mackay’s writing is clean and spare, with flashes of dark humour.’ The Herald
‘A real revelation, a real find for me.’ Kate Mosse
‘A really unique voice.’ Mark Billingham

Format: ebook, hardcover (276 pp.) Publisher: Apollo
Published: 5th April 2018                    Genre: Crime

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find In The Cage Where Your Saviours Hide on Goodreads

Extract from In The Cage Where Your Saviours Hide by Malcolm Mackay

Darian Ross might have been the only person who enjoyed the commute to work in Challaid, or at least admitted it. A short walk down to the crowded Bank Station, making his way through the bustle of bleary-eyed miserablists at half-eight. Onto the train and east through the tunnel, off at the next stop, which was Glendan Station. That was the closest stop to the tunnel where all those people were killed digging it, so they claimed they would name the station in honour of those lost. Their choice? The title of the company the dead men worked for, that had sent them to excavate in treacherous conditions with no thought for their safety. Apparently the people of influence who picked the name couldn’t understand why none of the families accepted their invitations to the opening. Anyway, that was also the closest stop to Darian’s work, and it was a twelve-minute walk through the morning to Cage Street. On a nice day, admittedly rare, the stroll through busy streets could be pleasant.

Here we’ll talk a little about what Darian did for a living. He was, in truth, a sort of private detective, but if you asked him about his job those would be the last two words that would fight their way through his lips. He worked for a man called Sholto Douglas, a former detective now running Douglas Independent Research. How Sholto had managed to last fifteen years as a detective was one of the great many mysteries he never solved, and he was relieved to get out of it. Now he was in a single-room office on the second floor of a building in need of repair on a narrow old street in the city centre, pretending his company limited itself to market research and credit checks.

When he started Darian asked Sholto about the fact he was a private detective dressed up as something else and nearly provoked an aneurysm. Sholto growled and said, ‘It is research, really, when you think about it. That’s what all of police work is, or detective work, or whatever you want to call it.’

Then the conversation would switch to who was to blame, and while Scotland hadn’t had a proper war with England since the Trade Wars of the eighteenth century, Sholto was all for kicking off another.

‘And the licences, and the restrictions, they’re all nonsense anyway, just there to stop you doing the work. They only did it because the English put the same stuff into law so they thought they had to copy it. Just copying another country because they couldn’t think of anything better to do with their time, that’s all it was. Bloody English. Bloody Scottish government. You look at the two laws; they’re almost identical except ours are harsher. Also, it’s Raven’s fault… Don’t get me started on Raven…’

Raven Investigators was a large firm of private detectives based in Edinburgh and with offices in our own fair city who were raking up more muck than a landscape gardener. Their respect for the law was considered inadequate, so the law was tightened hard and Raven Investigators shrank accordingly. Companies like Douglas Independent Research existed so that people who couldn’t afford the shiny corporate professionalism of Raven had someone to pester small-scale criminals for them, or that’s how Sholto liked to present it, anyway. So that was the not exactly noble world of half-truths and delusions that Darian walked into each morning, including this Saturday.

Malcolm MackayAbout the Author

Malcolm Mackay was born in Stornoway on Scotland’s Isle of Lewis. His Glasgow Trilogy has been nominated and shortlisted for several international prizes, including the Edgar Awards’ Best Paperback Original and the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger award. His second novel, How a Gunman Says Goodbye, won the Deanston Scottish Crime Book of the Year Award. Mackay still lives in Stornoway.

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