Synopsis/blurb......
A collection of original British short stories in the crime genre.
I'm currently on a freebie trial of Kindle Unlimited and the author has been shouting about his books over on Facebook, so I thought I'd have a look see at some of his short stories.
The collection would have benefited from having a table of contents listing the stories in the set, but that's a minor niggle. In the collection we have the following...
Snitch
Invasion of Privacy
Jarrold Give a Hand (1894)
The Wife Killer
Now You See Her....
How Daphne Bagged a Villain
That One Special Image
Jarrold and the Case of High Spirits (1896)
I enjoyed the two Jarrold stories a bit more than I was expecting to as I'm not really a massive fan of fiction set in the Victorian period. Jarrold is a recurring character for the author and I believe he has written at least one novel which features the Victorian copper from Great Yarmouth. Here our intrepid policeman snares a couple of insurance fraudsters and an illusionist-cum-spiritualist-cum-charlatan gets warned off, in-between enjoying cups of tea at the station and pints in the local hostelries. I might actually be tempted to rethink my reservations about the period.
Pick of the bunch was Invasion of Privacy, a small village setting and an unlikely harbinger of death. Someone likes her village exactly the way it is and tolerance of strangers is in short supply.
Snitch was enjoyable, if a little predictable. Nicholson writes contemporary times well and not just Ye Olde stuff.
Now You See Her.... I was enjoying, until the end when the denouement really left me scratching my head. The whole thing made no real sense unless the perpetrator had some kind of figurative death-wish which if it was the case it hadn't been alluded to during the earlier story set-up.
The rest of the collection I enjoyed, particularly The Wife Killer.
Overall - quite enjoyable, even if Now You See Her.... troubled me.
There's worse ways of spending a couple of hours reading time.
3.5 from 5Ron Nicholson - I can't find a website for him, but there's a link to his Amazon page with a bit of a biography and details of all his books - here.
Read in December, 2017
Published - 2016
Page count - 89
Source - Kindle Unlimited
Format - Kindle
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