The David Hidalgo series is the result of a lifelong desire to write - but having said that life got in the way for about 50 years. So now, the David Hidalgo crime / thriller series is a late career fulfilment.
It’s common advice to write what you know however my approach has been to take not just what I know but in fact almost all I know from a very varied career and pour that into the stories and characters.
Firstly, after an English degree at Edinburgh University, I worked, taught and managed in social work for the next ten or twelve years and that has given me insights into the British criminal justice system (I’ve been many times into all the central Scotland jails!), and into the complexity and unpredictability of human experience and bThe David Hidalgo series is the result of a lifelong desire to write - but having said that life got in the way for about 50 years. So now, the David Hidalgo crime / thriller series is a late career fulfilment.
It’s common advice to write what you know however my approach has been to take not just what I know but in fact almost all I know from a very varied career and pour that into the stories and characters.
Firstly, after an English degree at Edinburgh University, I worked, taught and managed in social work for the next ten or twelve years and that has given me insights into the British criminal justice system (I’ve been many times into all the central Scotland jails!), and into the complexity and unpredictability of human experience and behaviour. In my experience almost all motives are somewhat mixed and the light and dark co-exist in all of us.
Secondly, I have been in and around church my whole life and know its atmosphere and characters very well. So when I was thinking about a character and a genre, it seemed natural to bring these two worlds together.
Next, I started and ran my own software development business for ten years for which I needed skills in software, marketing and selling. More grist to the mill.
Finally, my wife and I spent seven years living and working in Spain from which we were able to gain an understanding of a different and fascinating culture and pick up a huge amount of detail that might be of interest to readers.
So, putting all of these things together - the result was David Hidalgo. David is an anglo-Spanish pastor who has spent most of his life working in drug and alcohol rehab in Spain before being catapulted back to his childhood home in Edinburgh as a result of a personal tragedy directly arising out of his ministry.
Hence, book one of the series - Benefit of the Doubt - deals significantly with David’s personal issues against the plot backdrop of the disappearance of the granddaughter of a church member. As the story unfolds we walk with David through his doubts and grief and initial reluctance to get involved in any more drug related issues after what he has just been through. However, his personality and strong moral compass makes ignoring the problem impossible. The issue then is how to find the missing girl - and face up to a host of personal demons.
Maybe unlike the majority of crime / thriller titles, however, I have also wanted to explore something a bit deeper about human nature. Specifically, I am very interested in how a decent human being with strong moral values behaves and responds to both the best and the worst the world has to offer. While generally wanting nothing more than a quiet life, David finds himself pulled time and again into wrongs that need to be righted and problems that need to be solved which he finds impossible to ignore. In that regard he is more of an “everyman” than a professional investigator which I hope readers will relate to.
So far David has had three major outings in books published by Lion Hudson with book IV due out in Oct 2020. Besides this books V and VI are already in the can, work is starting on book VII and there are a couple of mini-adventures available free to download on www.worldofdavidhidalgo.com...more
Sign in with Facebook
