The Vikström Papers: SHADOW TIDE Out Now In Paperback/ Ebook 12th Sep
Added at 15:23 on 10 September 2024
I spent a few days last week with my mum, in the old country. Scotland is as Scotland does. The rain fell, then the sun shone, and we lost at football.
Meanwhile, my mum has taken to watching The Romance Channel (Channel 52 on Freeview, for all your contrived romantic needs) ALL THE TIME.
It never ends. All day, a two-hour slot per movie, back-to-back films set in a fake version of America. Everything is wholesome and beautiful, and there are no guns, and no crime, and no fentanyl, and no Donald Trump, and all the plots are a regurgitation of The Sound of Music. Without the music. Or the nuns. Or the Nazis.
The Captain von Trapp figure ignores the kids. The Maria figure arrives. The kids hate Maria because she’s not their dead mum. Maria spends lots of money on the kids. The kids now love Maria, and want her to marry the captain. The Baroness figure, lurking in the background, realises the captain might have a thing for Maria, so she tells Maria that she and the captain are having wholesome sex, seven or eight times a day in the cupboard. Maria flees without explanation. The kids are sad. The captain is perplexed. Maria has an epiphany. She will fight for the captain. Maria returns. The captain is happy. They kiss. The kids are happy. The baroness is also phlegmatically happy, and gracefully throws in the towel. All the periphery characters are happy. Literally everyone on earth is happy, even all those whose loved ones have just been shot, lost their job, met Donald Trump, or died of a fentanyl overdose. The end.
Newsflash. Christmas season started on 5th September on the Romance Channel. It’s the most wonderful time of the year…
What, you’re wondering, does this have to do with The Vikström Papers: Shadow Tide, the gripping new private detective thriller out today from crack fiction writer Douglas Lindsay? Not a huge amount, to be honest, except there's a very minor thread in there about Hallmark Christmas movies, and there’s a completely separate Sound of Music reference, the usage of which I think is a solid analogy, though I couldn’t be bothered rewatching the movie – or, indeed, spending five minutes looking for the clip on YouTube – to see if it worked as well as I thought it did. But then, if it doesn’t work, that’s my first person character Vikström getting it wrong, and maybe that’s just who he is. He also gets a West Wing quote wrong, so can we trust any popular culture reference he makes?
So, here it is, The Vikström Papers: Shadow Tide. E-book available on 12th September, paperback available right now.
To quote Professor Malcolm Connery of the Glasgow Institute of Special Things, writing in this morning’s Scotsman, “I haven’t read any of this guy’s last fifteen novels, and this is without doubt one of the best.”
Here’s the blurb:
A flat calm. A low tide. A secret revealed…
One summer, fifteen years ago, Mark Cabot took four months off work and told his wife he was going to sail north from New England, to chart the elusive north-west passage. A solo voyage of grit and adventure. He returned a little over eight weeks later, with tales of high winds and polar bears, summer storms, crushing ice, and the sinking of his yacht somewhere amongst the islands and rocky outcrops of northern Canada.
There were others involved in his rescue to verify his tale. Why then, fifteen years later, has an historically low tide off the shores of Cape Ann in Massachusetts revealed Cabot’s vessel, buried, completely intact, in the sand?
Cabot’s wife wants answers. It’s not a question for the police, and so the case comes to Sam Vikström. But what Vikström at first assumes will be little more than a case of a husband’s lies, soon turns deadly, as more than one secret bleeds from the hull of the rediscovered ship…
Click here to share in the magic.
In other news: RESTORATION MAN in Amazon Kindle Deal
The great Amazon Computer - a cross between Deep Thought in Hitchhiker's Guide and Ava in Ex Machina - has turned its attention to The Vikström Papers, and made it part of its monthly Kindle Deal promotion. So, for the rest of September, book one in the series, RESTORATION MAN, will be available for the bargain price of 99p. Sadly, the deal is only available in the UK.
If you haven't met Sam Vikström yet, this would be a fine time to start. As Professor Connery said, "When Sam Vikström says, 'I think I'll have another glass of wine,' he speaks for us all.'
Click on the image. Deal ends, 30th September 2024.