Cut

by P.R. Burrell

1942: Three girls are operating a pair of narrow boats on the Grand Union Canal from London to Birmingham as war-work. Then a girl is raped and murdered near the canal…
2005: DC Max Eden transfers from the Metropolitan Police in London to the Warwickshire Police at Nuneaton, a sleepy town in 'Middle England', after a messy affair that has resulted in disciplinary proceedings. Then a body is found buried in a shallow grave by the canal near Nuneaton…
The stories of these two deaths are intertwined and lead to further deaths...

452 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 27, 2013

About the author

Born in Reading, England, I grew up in what was then a small town but not too far from London. From an early age I was a 'story teller' (liar?) and I read widely both fiction (of almost all genres) and non-fiction (having an intense interest in engineering). At school, essay writing was never a chore to me - it just enabled for my imagination let rip. In my teens I wrote a lot of poetry (pubescence being what it is) and some short stories but it wasn't until I had a small book shop in Holywood (the one near Belfast) that I began writing full-length novels. I was also lecturing in Engineering, part-time, at the same time as I had the shop so I've always had this 'split-personality' of arts and sciences.
After a varied career in industry and education I have now retired and my wife and I split our time between our home in Belfast, Northern Ireland and our apartment overlooking Lake Como, Italy so I've had more time to write.

Though there was some interest from well-known publishers in my early books none of the conventional publishers 'bit the bullet' to offer a deal to publish my books so when Kindle came along I made the decision to self-publish some of the books as eBooks as this also gave me control over the whole creative writing process, which also appealed to me; being something of a control freak.

The first book I published as an Amazon Kindle eBook was the crime novel 'CUT' which became the first part of a series of the 'Max Eden Crime' series, set in Middle England. Each book has a crime theme described by the one word title and features the unconventional, black, lesbian, detective, Max Eden as she rises through the ranks, experiencing professional and personal problems due to taking on difficult and complex cases, sometimes complicated further by her unconventional love-life. Currently there are seven books in the Eden Crime series: CUT, BLAG, THROTTLE, BURNT, MISSING, SHOT and RECKLESS.

My other fiction books are the thrillers Stormy Monday and Sword of Fire with the latter drawing on my experiences as an engineer and manager in the defence industry and the former is an ode to blues music and the era I grew up in with a noir twist.

My non-fiction books are published under my full name: Paul Burrell and are the accounts of two long distance, 1,000 miles plus, cycling trips, mainly along the the rivers and canals of France. These books are Paul's Mille Miglia and Paul's Mille Miglia (Part Deux).

All the above mentioned books are available as Kindle eBooks.

Reviews

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

First in a series; the story moves between the present day investigation into a body found in a shallow grave and the travels of a young woman working on a narrow boat in world war two. A clever plot with precise descriptions of the canal journey.