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Dead Already
What if someone you accidentally killed came back to haunt you?
When the perfect crime results in the kidnap and murder of Megan, his only child, East End villain Mickey Speight is grief-stricken. But now, nearly thirty years later, Megan sends a message to her father, gone-to-ground in present-day Margate.
As the messages from his dead daughter keep coming, Mickey teams up with a young American female therapist to discover whether this really is a voice from beyond the grave, or if somebody has loomed out of Mickey’s past wanting revenge. Someone is fingering Mickey's collar and Mickey doesn't like it.
Mickey realises that he must haunt the old East End boozers, betting shops and strip clubs of his youth if he's to find out what really happened to his daughter.
DEAD ALREADY is a psychological thriller that splices the ever-popular East End gangster genre with a ghost story; a cross between revenge thriller YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE and supernatural horror DON’T LOOK NOW.
When the perfect crime results in the kidnap and murder of Megan, his only child, East End villain Mickey Speight is grief-stricken. But now, nearly thirty years later, Megan sends a message to her father, gone-to-ground in present-day Margate.
As the messages from his dead daughter keep coming, Mickey teams up with a young American female therapist to discover whether this really is a voice from beyond the grave, or if somebody has loomed out of Mickey’s past wanting revenge. Someone is fingering Mickey's collar and Mickey doesn't like it.
Mickey realises that he must haunt the old East End boozers, betting shops and strip clubs of his youth if he's to find out what really happened to his daughter.
DEAD ALREADY is a psychological thriller that splices the ever-popular East End gangster genre with a ghost story; a cross between revenge thriller YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE and supernatural horror DON’T LOOK NOW.
Paperback
Published November 19, 2020
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14 people want to read
About the author
Tim Adler
12 books52 followersTim Adler is an author and journalist who has written three nonfiction books for publishers including Bloomsbury.
The Week said that Tim writes “with brio” while the Daily Mail has described his work as “dazzling” while The Sunday Times called it “compulsively readable”.
He is a former commissioning editor on The Daily Telegraph, who has also written for the Financial Times and The Times.
Tim has written four thrillers, including his debut SLOW BLEED, which ranked #1 on the Kindle medical thriller chart, and HOLD STILL, which bestselling crime author Peter James said, “hooked me from the beginning”.
He is former London editor of Hollywood entertainment news website Deadline and, more recently, the website he now edits was named as a top blog covering the coronavirus pandemic by journalist trade magazine Press Gazette alongside the BBC, Guardian and the Telegraph.
In his spare time, Tim enjoys playing bridge, jogging, yoga and trying to gain the upper hand in his running battle with his pet chihuahua.
The Week said that Tim writes “with brio” while the Daily Mail has described his work as “dazzling” while The Sunday Times called it “compulsively readable”.
He is a former commissioning editor on The Daily Telegraph, who has also written for the Financial Times and The Times.
Tim has written four thrillers, including his debut SLOW BLEED, which ranked #1 on the Kindle medical thriller chart, and HOLD STILL, which bestselling crime author Peter James said, “hooked me from the beginning”.
He is former London editor of Hollywood entertainment news website Deadline and, more recently, the website he now edits was named as a top blog covering the coronavirus pandemic by journalist trade magazine Press Gazette alongside the BBC, Guardian and the Telegraph.
In his spare time, Tim enjoys playing bridge, jogging, yoga and trying to gain the upper hand in his running battle with his pet chihuahua.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
November 23, 2020
I love books that are set in places I’ve been to – I was in Margate in the summer as well as a couple of years ago. I think it’s a great place, with a great atmosphere and the Turner Contemporary is amazing. Not the kind of place you would find Mickey Speight though. He’s more the strip joint type. An old East End lag.
I love the way Mickey’s parts of the book (we also hear from Taybor and others) is written in his ‘voice’ even when he is not speaking as such. It’s a great story-telling technique, one I often try to imitate. Now I am no judge of East End villains never having met one, but the way Mickey ‘tells’ the story seems very authentic.
I did struggle a bit with the bad language (and I’m not just talking about the ‘f’ word) I have to admit – it’s the second book in two weeks where I’ve had to put my feelings aside – but I guess it was normal to them. Or maybe I’m just a prude when it comes to swearing.
Mickey and his wife Linda run the St George’s pub in Margate. It’s basically a lap dancing club. It’s Mickey’s pride and joy. There is no funny business or drugs or hard porn – he doesn’t approve – and he takes care of his ‘dancers’. Again I’m out of my depth. We don’t see that kind of thing in Cheltenham – except during Cheltenham Races when we get mobile lap dancing venues. I jest not.
But Mickey has an enemy, Mr Khan, a property developer, who will go to any lengths to get Mickey to sell up so he can build houses on the land. Again, you need to understand that some of the ‘racist’ language used here (I’m not going to say what as I know Amazon won’t approve my review) is how the old villains spoke to each other. Again, the author is being authentic. It’s a bit like showing everyone smoking in a 1970s cop show on TV. People are offended and complain, but they did it.
Detective Chief Inspector June Taybor, a week off retirement, is the police officer who led the original investigation into the disappearance of Mickey’s daughter Megan, and here she is again, facing her nemesis.
Mickey is not a very likeable character, but there is just enough sympathy there to make you want to keep him alive. Only just. It goes without saying that the story is very good, but for me it was the final third that really gripped me. This is where it all started to change. The twist was such a shock – even if you guessed one bit of it, the truth was much cleverer. Poor Mickey – he never knew what hit him (metaphorically speaking). The whole outcome was just brilliant and a bit sad to be honest.
And the lesson to be learnt. It may be the East End way but never take the law into your own hands. It just doesn’t pay.
Many thanks to @damppebbles for inviting me to be part of #damppebblesblogtours
I love the way Mickey’s parts of the book (we also hear from Taybor and others) is written in his ‘voice’ even when he is not speaking as such. It’s a great story-telling technique, one I often try to imitate. Now I am no judge of East End villains never having met one, but the way Mickey ‘tells’ the story seems very authentic.
I did struggle a bit with the bad language (and I’m not just talking about the ‘f’ word) I have to admit – it’s the second book in two weeks where I’ve had to put my feelings aside – but I guess it was normal to them. Or maybe I’m just a prude when it comes to swearing.
Mickey and his wife Linda run the St George’s pub in Margate. It’s basically a lap dancing club. It’s Mickey’s pride and joy. There is no funny business or drugs or hard porn – he doesn’t approve – and he takes care of his ‘dancers’. Again I’m out of my depth. We don’t see that kind of thing in Cheltenham – except during Cheltenham Races when we get mobile lap dancing venues. I jest not.
But Mickey has an enemy, Mr Khan, a property developer, who will go to any lengths to get Mickey to sell up so he can build houses on the land. Again, you need to understand that some of the ‘racist’ language used here (I’m not going to say what as I know Amazon won’t approve my review) is how the old villains spoke to each other. Again, the author is being authentic. It’s a bit like showing everyone smoking in a 1970s cop show on TV. People are offended and complain, but they did it.
Detective Chief Inspector June Taybor, a week off retirement, is the police officer who led the original investigation into the disappearance of Mickey’s daughter Megan, and here she is again, facing her nemesis.
Mickey is not a very likeable character, but there is just enough sympathy there to make you want to keep him alive. Only just. It goes without saying that the story is very good, but for me it was the final third that really gripped me. This is where it all started to change. The twist was such a shock – even if you guessed one bit of it, the truth was much cleverer. Poor Mickey – he never knew what hit him (metaphorically speaking). The whole outcome was just brilliant and a bit sad to be honest.
And the lesson to be learnt. It may be the East End way but never take the law into your own hands. It just doesn’t pay.
Many thanks to @damppebbles for inviting me to be part of #damppebblesblogtours
June 14, 2025
Dead Already by Tim Adler is an interesting story that drew me towards it with it’s unusual mix of a genres. I have never read a story that is East End gangland related crossed with a supernatural thriller, so this definitely sparked my curiosity.
The story has been very well plotted and executed and through writing that is so vivid, brings everything to life perfectly. The characters have been created to be realistic and they are all believable in the roles they have been given to play.
This is the first book I have read from Tim Adler and it was a good one as an introduction to his work. The writing is engaging, the narrative is sharp and he definitely knows how to get and keep a readers attention.
All up, Dead Already is a thrilling read to lose yourself in. It is intense, gripping and will have you completely caught up in the drama of it all. I throughly enjoyed Dead Already and will be looking to read more from Tim Adler going forward.
The story has been very well plotted and executed and through writing that is so vivid, brings everything to life perfectly. The characters have been created to be realistic and they are all believable in the roles they have been given to play.
This is the first book I have read from Tim Adler and it was a good one as an introduction to his work. The writing is engaging, the narrative is sharp and he definitely knows how to get and keep a readers attention.
All up, Dead Already is a thrilling read to lose yourself in. It is intense, gripping and will have you completely caught up in the drama of it all. I throughly enjoyed Dead Already and will be looking to read more from Tim Adler going forward.
September 18, 2022
I think that the main problem with this book is that the characters are so unlikeable that, in the end, you really don't care what happens to them.
The story itself is quite reasonable and quite well plotted but, in the end, you feel as if you have been observing from afar and not interacted with the characters at all. By the end of it, I felt let down.
The story itself is quite reasonable and quite well plotted but, in the end, you feel as if you have been observing from afar and not interacted with the characters at all. By the end of it, I felt let down.
October 27, 2022
Review to follow
December 1, 2020
Thrillers tend to follow an set formula, but not Dead Already and that’s the reason I enjoyed it. You have the normal elements you would expect to see and then you have a ghostly, almost eerie feel to the story, that left me feeling quite unnerved.
The writer achieves this by taking us right into the mind of our ‘hero’ Micky, who has been haunted by the death of his daughter and wife for over thirty years. Yet suddenly he starts to receive text messages from her and the writer leads us down countless blind alleyways, which left me seriously questioning if she was alive or not. As Micky questions his sanity, I found myself questioning his grip on reality. One moment wondering if his troubled mind was conjuring up the ghosts of the past out of desperation to calm his grief. Or if the writer was playing games with me and his daughter was a ghost, haunting the man left behind to live a life half lived. It was a clever narrative to employ, because all the way through the book, I was left feeling uncertain, questioning my own judgment and that’s quite rare in more run of the mill thrillers. I liked how my perception of the story was pivoted on it’s axis, because that meant I was in the same place as Micky himself. He questions not only his past mistakes and current predicament and I felt I was doing the same.
The story itself is very intriguing, seamlessly joining events from the past to the present day, helping to explain why Mickey ended up lonely and open to possible manipulation, as well being engaged in a violent turf war with a merciless criminal. The writer showing us that the past has created a complicated present, with a web of never ending possible outcomes to the nightmare Mickey finds himself in. The result is that as readers we have to keep an open mind to the possible ending of the story, we can’t rest on our laurels and we can’t assume we know what will happen until the last few pages.
Micky as a character fits the story to perfection, in that he is flawed enough to make him interesting, but not so crooked that you don’t like him. The story works because despite knowing his past is full of criminal activities and his present not perfect, he is easy to care about. You feel his grief, you understand what drives him and your heart goes out to him, wanting his daughter to be alive and not his mind torturing him one final time.
It is a clever thriller with a dark heart and I felt by the end, the writer had delivered a first class tale.
The writer achieves this by taking us right into the mind of our ‘hero’ Micky, who has been haunted by the death of his daughter and wife for over thirty years. Yet suddenly he starts to receive text messages from her and the writer leads us down countless blind alleyways, which left me seriously questioning if she was alive or not. As Micky questions his sanity, I found myself questioning his grip on reality. One moment wondering if his troubled mind was conjuring up the ghosts of the past out of desperation to calm his grief. Or if the writer was playing games with me and his daughter was a ghost, haunting the man left behind to live a life half lived. It was a clever narrative to employ, because all the way through the book, I was left feeling uncertain, questioning my own judgment and that’s quite rare in more run of the mill thrillers. I liked how my perception of the story was pivoted on it’s axis, because that meant I was in the same place as Micky himself. He questions not only his past mistakes and current predicament and I felt I was doing the same.
The story itself is very intriguing, seamlessly joining events from the past to the present day, helping to explain why Mickey ended up lonely and open to possible manipulation, as well being engaged in a violent turf war with a merciless criminal. The writer showing us that the past has created a complicated present, with a web of never ending possible outcomes to the nightmare Mickey finds himself in. The result is that as readers we have to keep an open mind to the possible ending of the story, we can’t rest on our laurels and we can’t assume we know what will happen until the last few pages.
Micky as a character fits the story to perfection, in that he is flawed enough to make him interesting, but not so crooked that you don’t like him. The story works because despite knowing his past is full of criminal activities and his present not perfect, he is easy to care about. You feel his grief, you understand what drives him and your heart goes out to him, wanting his daughter to be alive and not his mind torturing him one final time.
It is a clever thriller with a dark heart and I felt by the end, the writer had delivered a first class tale.
November 21, 2020
I have read a couple of Tim’s books now and those I have read, I have thoroughly enjoyed reading. I read the synopsis for ‘Dead Already’ and it certainly sounded like my kind of read- something a little different to the norm, that will hold my attention and which will keep me guessing. Well ‘Dead Already’ certainly ticked all those boxes and then some. I thoroughly enjoyed reading ‘Dead Already’ but more about that in a bit.
It took me no time at all to get into this book. In fact by the time I got to the end of the synopsis, I knew that I was going to be in for one hell of a read and I jumped straight in. To say that reading ‘Dead Already’ became addictive reading seems like a huge understatement. I was intrigued by the plot and by the characters. I was so intrigued about the story that I felt compelled (I mean that in the nicest possible way) to keep reading to see how the story panned out. I can’t say that I exactly took to both characters but at the same time I didn’t dislike them either. The more of this book I read, the more I wanted to read and the quicker the pages seemed to turn. My Kindle wasn’t exactly glued to my hand but it might as well have been because it travelled everywhere with me. I couldn’t bear to miss a single second of the story. I found ‘Dead Already’ to be a gripping read, which held my attention throughout, kept me guessing and kept me on the edge of my seat throughout.
‘Dead Already’ is part crime novel, part horror novel and part supernatural novel. The author certainly knows how to grab your attention from the start and draw you into the story. The story is written with different chapters being written from a specific character’s point of view. This way of telling the tale works well, the chapters interlink well and the story flows seamlessly as a result. I found ‘Dead Already’ to be a tightly plotted story guaranteed to keep your attention throughout. I loved the way in which there were so many twists and turns to this story. I didn’t see them coming. I became so wrapped up in the book that I felt as though I was part of the story myself.
In short, I thoroughly enjoyed reading ‘Dead Already’ and I would have no hesitation in recommending this book to other readers. I will certainly be reading more of Tim’s work in the future. The score on the Ginger Book Geek board is a very well deserved 5* out of 5*.
It took me no time at all to get into this book. In fact by the time I got to the end of the synopsis, I knew that I was going to be in for one hell of a read and I jumped straight in. To say that reading ‘Dead Already’ became addictive reading seems like a huge understatement. I was intrigued by the plot and by the characters. I was so intrigued about the story that I felt compelled (I mean that in the nicest possible way) to keep reading to see how the story panned out. I can’t say that I exactly took to both characters but at the same time I didn’t dislike them either. The more of this book I read, the more I wanted to read and the quicker the pages seemed to turn. My Kindle wasn’t exactly glued to my hand but it might as well have been because it travelled everywhere with me. I couldn’t bear to miss a single second of the story. I found ‘Dead Already’ to be a gripping read, which held my attention throughout, kept me guessing and kept me on the edge of my seat throughout.
‘Dead Already’ is part crime novel, part horror novel and part supernatural novel. The author certainly knows how to grab your attention from the start and draw you into the story. The story is written with different chapters being written from a specific character’s point of view. This way of telling the tale works well, the chapters interlink well and the story flows seamlessly as a result. I found ‘Dead Already’ to be a tightly plotted story guaranteed to keep your attention throughout. I loved the way in which there were so many twists and turns to this story. I didn’t see them coming. I became so wrapped up in the book that I felt as though I was part of the story myself.
In short, I thoroughly enjoyed reading ‘Dead Already’ and I would have no hesitation in recommending this book to other readers. I will certainly be reading more of Tim’s work in the future. The score on the Ginger Book Geek board is a very well deserved 5* out of 5*.
November 20, 2020
This is the first time I have read anything by this author and my first outing was a really intriguing read and one that caught me unawares initially. I had read the synopsis for this book a long time ago when I decided to sign up for the Blog Tour because I really liked the idea of this story. Then I sat down to read and found myself somewhat confused as I struggled to get to grips with the story. I then re-read the synopsis and suddenly things that I had read started to make a lot more sense!
Where do East End London gangsters go when they want to start over, well Margate of course. Mickey Speight is such a villain, he has had a hard life, he hasn’t many friends and 30 years ago he watched his daughter di. Why is he now getting messages from her?
I liked this story a lot, especially after I read the synopsis! It is a timeslip novel that flits back and forth and really easy to follow as well. The past is in italics and fills in the history for the present-day story. The past is something that haunts Mickey but tells of what he has done.
I liked the way the author tackled the layout for the story because the information the reader needs for the past is gradually drip-fed throughout. It makes it easy to digest and it has been worked really. well.
The messages from the grave give an eerie feel to the book, but not scary though, in some ways it has a more sinister feeling and adds a psychological feel to the thriller aspect of the story. It has good pacing as I followed Mickey and the author deeper into the mystery.
This was a story that nagged at me when I wasn’t reading it, it is unfortunate that readers also have lives to get on with and are not always able to sit and read a book in one go all the time. I think it would have easily been a one or two sitting read. It is a book for those who like a bit of old school gangster mixed in with a modern crime mystery feel. A good thriller with a psychological dimension that made for very interesting reading and one that I would be happy to recommend.
Where do East End London gangsters go when they want to start over, well Margate of course. Mickey Speight is such a villain, he has had a hard life, he hasn’t many friends and 30 years ago he watched his daughter di. Why is he now getting messages from her?
I liked this story a lot, especially after I read the synopsis! It is a timeslip novel that flits back and forth and really easy to follow as well. The past is in italics and fills in the history for the present-day story. The past is something that haunts Mickey but tells of what he has done.
I liked the way the author tackled the layout for the story because the information the reader needs for the past is gradually drip-fed throughout. It makes it easy to digest and it has been worked really. well.
The messages from the grave give an eerie feel to the book, but not scary though, in some ways it has a more sinister feeling and adds a psychological feel to the thriller aspect of the story. It has good pacing as I followed Mickey and the author deeper into the mystery.
This was a story that nagged at me when I wasn’t reading it, it is unfortunate that readers also have lives to get on with and are not always able to sit and read a book in one go all the time. I think it would have easily been a one or two sitting read. It is a book for those who like a bit of old school gangster mixed in with a modern crime mystery feel. A good thriller with a psychological dimension that made for very interesting reading and one that I would be happy to recommend.
November 28, 2020
Probably three-and-a-half stars. Good enough story, kept me interested, even sympathising a little with the villain whose story we follow. One or two annoying "as if" moments, especially at the end. But what annoyed me most was the number of typo errors that a good proof reader should have spotted. That and the lack of page numbers!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews