Sharman: The Early Years Omnibus

by Mark Timlin

The first three books in Mark Timlin's critically acclaimed Nick Sharman A Good Year for the Roses , Romeo's Tune and Gun Street Girl . Nick Sharman is nobody's favourite person. Ex-cop, ex-doper, invalided out of the Met after a stray bullet in the foot saved him from an investigation into the missing evidence from a drugs haul. The cops don't like him. The villains don't like him. Sharman is unemployable. So he's hired himself an office and set up shop as a private investigator in his south London patch. Divorces and debt-collecting were what he expected. What he gets is Patsy Bright, young, pretty and missing. Her father wants her back. She's a good girl, a model, and only a little bit into drugs. With Sharman's connections it should be a piece of cake. Only when he comes to with a split head, a pocketful of planted heroin, a dead girl and two policemen acting on a tip-off, does Sharman realise this case is different. And serious. And personal. 'The king of the British hard-boiled thriller' - Times

'The mean streets of South London need their heroes tough. Private eye Nick Sharman fits the bill' - Telegraph

'Few have come close to visualising the true blackness at the heart of crime - but Mark Timlin is one of them' - Sunday Sport

'Hard-boiled story-telling with attitude' - Daily Mail

'It is possible that South London contains some law abiding citizens in conventional relationships but they make no appearance in Timlin's immoral, wildly enjoyable books' - Times

'A pure pulp vision closer to Spillane than Chandler. The Sharman books are bloody romances of the South London badlands' - John Williams

'Nick Sharman is like black coffee at 4 o'clock in the very black, very bitter' - Derek Raymond

'Full of cars, girls, guns, strung out along the high sierras of Brixton and Battersea, the Elephant and the North Peckham Estate, all those jewels in the crown they call Sarf London' - Arena The next book in the series, Take the A-Train , is available now.

847 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 22, 2022

About the author

aka Johnny Angelo, Tony Williams, Jim Ballantyne, Lee Martin.

Mark Timlin lives in east London, has a Rolex and drives flash old American cars.