Cold Christmas

Author/Guide: Alastair Gunn

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: ‘Tis the season for dead bodies

ISBN: 978-1405923224
Genre: Crime

Comment

What you need to know before your trail

Nobody remembers the young men entering the abandoned London flat a few weeks ago. Nobody cares if they left.

Until the unbearable smell of decay.

DCI Antonia Hawkins is called in to view the dead men; three, lying neat in a row. There’s no damage to the bodies, no obvious cause of death. Is this a suicide pact? Or is that just how it’s meant to look?

If there is a link between the three very different men then Hawkins needs to find it, and fast. Because unless she does, more are going to die. And they might not all be strangers.

Locations

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Travel Guide

London

Not the side to the city you’d want to visit in real life, and you certainly would be wary of unwrapping anything in Brixton or Streatham after this novel! The crime scenes are grim and the police investigation takes you around some dark parts of the city and a life which exists in plain sight, yet hidden from the many workers, tourists and locals.

The author used to work in motor journalism. In the mid-Noughties, he wrote for Auto Express, Car, What Car, and various modified car magazines which leads nicely into the themes in this book with Streatham Car dealers being part of the dark puzzle.

The city is evoked as a grim trail to follow from Brixton, Camberwell, Streatham and more but is really only a backdrop for what plays out on its dark dingy streets

Thundridge

A quaint little village which might not seem the usual place for a London Based police procedural to go, but then this is no ordinary investigation. There is a Cold Christmas Church and Lane in the area – and if you believe the plot, something very different about the church and the way it faces, not to mention the fact it was partly demolished in 1853..and why it’s deemed to be unsafe now….

Booktrailer Review

Susan: @thebooktrailer

A meaty and gritty thriller which takes you into some dark places in and around the city. For it’s Christmas connotations, this makes things all the more grim and the poor police seemed to have more than their fair share of problems. Whilst solid and good on police detail, there were some added points of interest such as the jaunt out of the city to the mystery of Thundridge which I found a nice change from the usual police procedurals. That the author has found a village which sounds very much like it should be a name of a novel and moulded a mystery from it, really appealed to me. I couldn’t believe it when i found it was a real place. Don’t know why but that just added a frisson of mystery to it right there.

The mystery unfolds in a nice pace with solid investigation and some cracking red herrings and mysteries that don’t seem to link up to the case. But of course, they do, although not as you imagine.

A neat and solid police procedural this one with an added dose of village mystery