Painted In Blood Publication Day
Added at 09:39 on 19 January 2023
It’s publication day for the second book in the DI Buchan series, PAINTED IN BLOOD.
This was written in the autumn of 2021, while my agent was about to start trawling the crime editors of the world to see if they might be interested in the BUCHAN series. (Reader, they never were.) He asked at the start of the trawl process that I put together a quick synopsis of the second book. Since I’m not a plotter by nature, I find synopses of books that I haven’t written yet incredibly difficult. I started writing the book just to get my head into it, to see if I could formulate an idea out of the basic art world storyline I intended to use.
Then Kevin, my agent, got hit by a car and put out of action for a month or two, and by the time he was back in the saddle I’d finished writing the entire book. I was, realistically, always finishing the book as soon as I started it. So Kevin being knocked off his bike was just a shitty thing that happened, rather than being one of those chance events that helps lead to artistic greatness.
Yes, artistic greatness. Not my words, but the words of Professor Malcolm Connery of the Glasgow Institute of Special Things. ‘Some people are saying Painted In Blood is a work of artistic greatness,’ said Professor Connery, when he spoke to the BBC this morning from his 5th floor corner office in the heart of the city’s Latin Quarter, ‘but I’ve not read it yet, so I can’t say.’
Here’s the blurb:
It’s been a bad few months for Buchan and his team, little going right. They need a win. What they don’t need is a murder victim, the naked corpse of the young woman posed on a park bench, erotically summoning viewers to the scene of her death. Then a week later, a second victim.
Out of nowhere, a woman finds Buchan in the Winter Moon, claiming the posing of the corpses was based on two paintings by a little known Spanish artist. And she brings ill news; there’s a third painting in the series, and she herself will be the victim.
It is so unexpected, and so alien to everything they’ve investigated so far, suddenly it seems Buchan is carrying out an entirely new line of inquiry. However, as he gets closer to the heart of darkness, it becomes evident the two strands of the investigation are linked, the threat is imminent, and that the re-enactment of the third painting is close to being realised…
The third book in the Buchan series, THE LONELY AND THE DEAD – currently going through the final stages of the special effects and polishing process at the Centre For Excellence In Literature and Pantomime in Palo Alto, California – will be published on 16th March 2023.
Meanwhile, click here to read Painted In Blood, the book the critics are already calling “tomorrow’s digital fish supper paper.”