…for a moment the silence was blissful. Then the screaming started…
Writing team Leo and Mike Johnson have their day disturbed when a body turns up near their house.

Leo and Mike would have quite liked to forget the body in the river, and the teenagers with the weird women, but life wasn’t going to let them do that.
The first intimation of this came when they had a visit from a very smooth operator with an educated Transatlantic accent rendered oddly theatrical by more than a whiff of trailer trash in his vowels. He looked like everyone’s mental image of the archetypal WASP from his smooth blonde hair to his horn-rimmed spectacles, and his Brooks Brothers brogues. He introduced himself as the Reverend Amos Summersby, and stated his reason for visiting was to thank them for their care of the girls. But it didn’t ring true. While he drank tea and ate Ro’s excellent fruit cake Mike could feel him watching her from the corners of his eyes. It was a feeling she didn’t much relish. It wasn’t to go on for long, though, because Leo put a stop to it with uncompromising savagery.
‘Keep your eyes off my woman’ he snarled ‘or I’ll pull them out and make you eat them.’
Summersby recoiled in genuine surprise. ‘That is not what I have come to expect from an English gentleman’ he said in a voice of gentle reproof. Leo was scathing.
‘I’m neither English nor a gentleman. And I don’t make idle threats. So just say whatever it is you came here to say and leave while you still have the use of your legs.’
Summersby’s fear appeared to Mike to be the first genuine thing in his visit; all the colour left his cheeks and he floundered about in a morass of half-sentences.
‘Hurry up, man. You are wearing my patience thin.’
‘Very well. I was simply instructed to find out what those naughty little girls may have said about their school.’
‘To us. Nothing’ Leo bit the words off sharply. ‘We noticed they didn’t much care for their keepers but that was just ordinary observation.’
‘And yet the police wouldn’t let the girls return to school in the minibus?’
‘I would suspect that is standard procedure. They had, after all, just discovered themselves to be swimming with a dead body. I’m sure that’s exactly what a group of teenage girls needs to make a camping trip complete.’ Leo’s sarcasm was biting.
The ‘reverend’ stared into Leo’s angry eyes, then sighed. ‘I fear we have been misinformed. Will you accept my apology?’
Leo looked at Mike, who shook her head. ‘No. Now we’d very much appreciate the air you are using.’
Ro appeared as if she had been listening at the door (which she probably had) and escorted the uninvited visitor to where his car waited in the street.

From Shall we gather at the river? a hard hitting murder mystery thriller by Jane Jago which is available for 0.99.

No one knew where Mad Mungo Munroe had come from, but everyone knew where he was going – straight to hell in a coffin lined with playing cards and stinking of whiskey.
But not today. Today he was where he’d always be found – at a table in the Sideways Saloon playing poker and winning.
“You’re a cheat!”
The whole bar froze as the loser drew a gun, finger tightening.
Munroe stared him down
“Never cheated at cards in my life, fella.”
“You’re a dirty liar, I’ll…”
Munroe’s gun fired under the table and the man folded.
“I just cheat at life…”

E.M. Swift-Hook

“Jessica! Jess!”
Roald. She could not see him but his voice was close by. It did not sound like an: ‘I’ve just spotted you’ attention grabbing shout, more of a call in the hope that she might hear and answer.
“Jessica! I know you are going to be frightened, but it’s alright. I can protect you. Come to me, my princess, I’ll keep you safe.”
It was strange though, that his voice carried over the noise of the fairground music, the sirens that wailed about the start and end of the rides, the thunder of the machinery itself and the cheerful shrieks of the crowd. But despite the noise, his voice sounded clear to her. Almost as if she was wearing an earpiece. Then he was there. Right in front of her and she froze.
His skin looked grey in the stroboscopic brilliance and his eyes were sunk deep into his skull, mere points of reflected light, flickering like a candle just before it might gutter and blow out. And his skull itself seemed to be barely covered by flesh at all. The soft parts of the face, like the cheeks which connected the jaw to the rest of the skull, were fallen in. The outline of his teeth could be seen. His lips had blackened and looked withered, his nose sharp and beak-like. Only his hair seemed to retain its magnificence, long and lustrous.
Jessica felt her mouth open into a silent O. The same sense of paralysis that had gripped her when she encountered the youths by their fire, now seemed to seize her again. As if knowing she would not move, Annis let go of her hand and stepped in front of her. For a moment she thought Roald was actually recoiling from the child. Then he seemed to gather himself and stood his ground.
“There is a human woman here, she is mine. Have you seen her?”
Annis shook her head.
“Not yours.
“Well, she’s not much use to you, is she?” Roald sounded almost contemptuous. “This place is very clever, I’ll give you that.But -”
“You go. Old One smell you. Blood Eater comes.”
Roald looked sharply to one side as if he had heard a specific sound over the noise of the fairground rides. Then he laughed, only it sounded more like the grating of sandpaper than his usual rich baritone laugh.
“You are lying. That thing is just a myth to scare the neonates. The Old Ones are long gone, or hiding deep in the earth. And you have seen the woman I can smell her on you. She is not what she seems – don’t be fooled by her looks, she has an ancient power rooted in her soul, enough to flambe you and your unfunny friends here.”
It was obvious, then, to Jess that in this dream, she was invisible to Roald. It made no sense, but then what dreamlogic ever did?
“Then why you want?” Annis was asking.
The creature called Roald smiled and a row of shark-sharp fangs could be seen as the withered. Black lips pulled back.
“I have an old debt to repay,” he said, the breath condensing from his mouth as if it was clouding into freezing air. One bony hand reached out and grabbed at Annis.“Now, tell me where – “
The cats had not been there and then they were, ears flattened, low growls and calls. Roald stepped back quickly.
“I don’t need your help anyway. She’s only human, she can’t hide in a place like this for long.”
“You go,” Annis said again, almost sounding urgent, as if she truly feared for him. “Old One find you. Blood Eater comes.”
“There is no -”
Somewhere below the earth something moved. Jessica could feel it through her feet, like a shock wave passing up through her body.
“No!” Roald said again, only this time in a very different tone, like a man waking from nightmare to find he’d dreamed true.
Then the world erupted around her and Jessica found herself falling.

From Maybe by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook

Jenry chuckled a fat chuckle that went with his snowy beard and generous belly.
“Sup big man?”
“Them lot is looking for aliens. Again.”
“But they don’t see us?”
“They ain’t yet and we been here since before they crawled out of the fragging water.”
Jenry’s wife put aside her knitting. “Do we want them to notice us?”
“Well… I guess…”
“It’d be a lot of work, calling home planet and all that stuff, and I haven’t nearly finished this jumper.”
“You’re right missis. Better to be thought of as garden gnomes than to communicate with the horrid pink things.”

Jane Jago

What happens when the hunter becomes the hunted…

When the final invitee eventually arrived it was not a face familiar to Grim, but he had a feeling it probably should have been. She was a woman in late middle age with the precision presentation of someone used to living her life perpetually exposed to media scrutiny and in the ferocious glare of public life. Grim could see her as the kind of person who always went about pre-armed with a deadly sound-bite, ready to deliver it to camera at a moment’s notice. In other words: a politician.
Jecks greeted her with something a shade or two more familiar than pure formality. They might not be friends, Grim decided, but they were obviously used to working together. Once she had taken her seat beside Jecks the lighting shifted slightly and it was finally show time.
Sitting back in his seat, Grim started wondering why he had been included. For him to be given an invite to this kind of high-powered party, there had to be some tie in somewhere to his past cases, his present skill-set or his known interests. So, as much as taking in the information, he was sifting through it for clues as to why he was here.
He knew the two people they were being told about. Chola and Baldrik. Well, he knew of them. Anyone who had lived or operated in or around the milieu of Thuringen’s Starcity — the criminal capital so infamous it was just ‘the ‘City’ — in recent years would have heard of them. These were both men you’d have found in a ‘City listing for the criminal aristocracy, if such a thing had ever existed.
One was a crime syndicate leader, or what they called a Name in the ‘City. A powermonger, controlling the wealth and lives of those who lived and worked in the geographical area he claimed for his own. The other was his Head of Security, the man he employed to do violence on his behalf — usually not so much the general of his armies as the terroriser of his troops.
Theirs were the two faces placed on either side of the images of the horrific murder. Genuine ‘City celebrities. Except that Grim was not into romanticising such things or giving criminals any slight hint of status. To him, the ‘City was a sewer and these two were rats. One was a sly, manipulative, criminal ringleader and the other, a particularly vicious and dangerous thug.
After the initial shock of the mutilated body, they were shown a large number of historical images and the data nerd droned on. It was depressingly vague as usual. All the important stuff like names, places, dates and details were flashed up beside the images so fast no one could absorb it all. Fortunately, it would all no doubt be tagged onto some document cluttering up the inbox of his work link-profile, together with reams of statistics on everything from the two men’s social networks to their eating patterns, so he would have to spend the next few days trying to unscramble all that into something he could actually make sense of and use.
The data chasers seemed convinced that any kind of analysis — indeed anything other than the most basic of facts — would be simply beyond the wit of regular CSF operatives like himself. The information was so dumbed down that it became an effort to focus on the droning voice to see if there was anything he didn’t already know being offered in the narration.
“Durban Chola. Arrived in the ‘City four years ago. No previous record. Not so surprising as he came from an ultra low-tech non-Coalition, Periphery world, which is presently under a cultural protection order. The day he arrived, he moved in on the Shame Cullen group, the largest and most successful of the criminal organisations then operating in the ‘City. Chola shut that down almost immediately, then soon after outmanoeuvred and replaced Sarnai Altan, one of the two Cullen successors, taking over her holdings.”
How? No one bothered explaining. They were more concerned with the what than the why. But random strangers didn’t just arrive in the ‘City and overthrow the existing order. That was bizarre. And the place he came from? Grim could think of somewhere he knew that would fit that description. And for a lot of very personal reasons, he hoped he was wrong.

From Iconoclast: Mistrust and Treason a Fortune’s Fools book by E.M. Swift-Hook – which is only 0.99 to buy for a limited period.

Spring was getting going which meant The Owners took longer walks so Bowzer and Bubbles could too.
Bowzer checked the peemails on the oaktree which he hadn’t got to visit since the end of summer.
“Ohhh, Daisy had another litter,” he told Bubbles.
“Anything from Old Pogle?”
Bowzer sniffed.
“Nothing in a while.”
“Guess that means…”
“Mebbe.”
They trotted on, lost in sad speculation. Pogle had lived the other side of Muddy Wood, they’d only met on long walk days.
“Pogle liked spring.”
“I’ll miss him.”
“Wait!”
Bowzer caught a familiar scent on the breeze and ran forward barking happily.

E.M. Swift-Hook

Murder Mystery Monday celebrates some of the best indie murder mystery fiction that we’ve found. This week we look at The Lakeland Murders by JJ Salkeld

The Lakeland Murders are set in Cumbria, the beautiful Lake District in the north west of England. But if the setting is wonderfully scenic the stories are hard-nosed and gripping.
They are police procedurals and have a very contemporary ‘of their time’ feel as the author reflects the issues of the day such as the squeeze on police funding and tackling such tricky topics as county lines (where children and young people are used by criminal gangs to sell drugs in small towns and villages).

To quote the author: ‘If plot is what piques our interest in a crime novel it’s the characters that keep us reading’. The real strength of this series – and indeed of all this author’s other series – lies in the characters. Characters such as:

DI Andy Hall – Andy is not a man of action and well into middle age (he is 48 at the start of the series), but he has a high EQ as well as a high IQ and that makes him able to both empathise and to deduce. He is known to be cleverer than his superiors and gets into trouble for being so.

Jane Francis – who joins the team at the beginning of the series from her previous career as a research scientist and is a counterpoint to Andy Hall. He works more on the classic ‘gut’ backed up by police work where Jane is trained in all the latest methods of crime-busting.

Ian Mann – ex-marine special forces, Ian is the tough guy who is from the same kind of background as most of the criminals he has to deal with but chose a very different path in life.

Sandy Smith – the go-to CSI for our Kendal cops who is best approached bearing coffee and doughnuts unless you want your head bitten off.

Abla Khan – who joins the series later on and has both an incisive mind and a fearless approach to getting into dangerous situations.

The books are a wonderful mix of mystery, action, human engagement and humour and you read on as much to follow the characters from book to book as to enjoy each case, all of which are complex, multilayered and thought-provoking.

The writing is not pristine. There are faults and flaws you might not find in books produced by a publisher. Typos occasionally creep on the page, now and then we hop heads and sometimes you wonder why when only two people are in a conversation they have to keep calling each other by name. But these are truly minor issues set against the sweep of the drama and mystery.

If you enjoy whodunnits and great characters this is a series you should take a closer look at.

You can start the series with any book, but the best introduction to the series is probably through the series prequel The Two Towns which is novella length, and reading them in order gives the full sweep of the characters’ stories as well.

The biggers were behaving very oddly. None of them were leaving the homestead, and only the house biggers came into the garden. Even the cement pond shining bluely in the sunshine wasn’t attracting its usual crowd of screaming divers.
The gnomes wouldn’t have bothered, had not the small biggers come out into the garden and put paper masks on all their faces.
The head bigger laughed.
“Don’t want the little folks getting Covid 19.”
The next morning the biggers discovered the gnomes gathered together on the island in the middle of the duckpond.
Eric’s placard read.
“Social distancing. Keep away.”

Jane Jago

Roguing Thieves is a previously unpublished Fortune’s Fools story by E.M. Swift-Hook.

It was another cycle before Dekker made good on his offer. A cycle during which Pan kept herself focused on being what they wanted her to be. She realised that the pirates were not so very different from the freetraders they prayed upon. They lurched from payday to payday making enough to get by and always dreaming of the big one that would let them retire. But unlike most freetraders they didn’t mind killing to get there.
By half way through that second cycle, she was no longer watched by human eyes at least, but she did nothing untoward.
The upgrades on the interceptor were as good as she could get them and the burnt planet hopper had been repaired to space worthy status. Most ships were worth next to nothing to these pirates. Handling stolen vessels was a highly skilled trade. But Pan had been able to peel off this ship’s command ID and fit a masking one. It would need a specialist to finish the work, but Dekker was delighted as it meant they could sell it on for a better price than usual.
When he returned from doing so he was in such a good mood that he clapped Tolin and herself hard on the back.
“Go and have fun, children. Find us something worth hunting.”

Pan hadn’t realised it before, but she was beginning to feel at home in FTL space. It was safe. Nothing could reach into the womb of the ship to threaten her. Not even link communications could disturb her until they dropped out into the traffic stream of their destination world. And when they did, the first communication was from Jennay updating her with family news. Kiona was nearing the end of her time in education and looking to use her qualification in social-neurocology to make a career in public relations. The twins were reviewing their options whether or not to go into higher education and Jennay and her wife were expecting a baby. That last was the one thing that brought a genuine smile to Pan’s face. Having raised four children already, she was very sure Jennay would make a wonderful mother for a child of her own.
She had been sitting at the small table in the social area, eating a quick meal from the synth as she watched the message and glanced up as Tolin joined her.
“Good news?”
She shrugged and cancelled the screen, suddenly unwilling to share those she cared most about any longer with this man. A man with whom she was so intimate and yet had always been a total stranger. “Just family stuff.”
“You’re lucky to have them.”
He had told her he had no family. That he had inherited his ship from his grandfather, his father having vanished before he was born and his mother having died when he was young. But now Pan wasn’t sure any of that was true. It might well have been made up for her consumption. She no longer cared if it was or not.
“So what’s the plan?” she asked, to move the topic on.
“We do what we always did. Trade some ourselves, chat to the freetraders find out who is going where with what and when, and pass it on to Dek. He’ll maybe pick up one in eight of those we offer, but that’s his call. None of our business.” Tolin smiled and reached over the table to squeeze her hand.
A sudden wave of nausea choked in her throat and she pulled her hand sharply away, covering by faking a coughing fit. It worked that time, but she knew it wasn’t going to fool Tolin for long. He had already wondered why she was avoiding sex and she was running out of excuses.
She had to get away.
But that was easier said than done.
She could go to the CSF and tell them her story. If she was willing to give evidence against Dekker and his crew she might get off lightly herself. Maybe even completely. The problem was, just as she couldn’t send a hapless freetrader to certain doom, she couldn’t bring herself to do the same to Tolin and the others. She might despise them and want to stop them, but it was more than her conscience could bear to have their blood on her hands.
To have anyone’s blood on her hands.
Except if she didn’t stop them, the blood of every freetrader they ever ambushed would be. Ongoing.
It was an impossible dilemma and she resolved it by focusing on the most important first step: she had to get away.
If she didn’t then sooner or later she was going to betray herself and she had little doubt from what she had seen in Dekker’s eyes what that would mean. After she was free, she could think about the second part.

There will be more Roguing Thieves next Sunday…

This isn’t what you think it is
It isn’t an appeal
It doesn’t ask for anything
It’s really no big deal
But if you have a moment
Needs no penny in your purse
There might be better causes
But there are many worse
You could consider gifting
Or giving in charity
You could consider helping out
Or sharing what you see
You might even come to think
This matters just a bit
But not enough to give some more
Or precious time commit
So I’m not asking that you do
I’m only asking for
Two mouse clicks and an autofill
And simply nothing more.

E.M. Swift-Hook