Thank you for joining me on the blog tour for The Blood Detective by Dan Waddell.
I have a great guest post by Dan Waddell to share with you today along with a chance to enter a giveaway to win an ecopy of the book. First of all though let's take a look at the description for the book...
The
BLOOD DETECTIVE
Genre:
Crime
Release
Date: 28/02/2017
Nominated
for the CWA New Blood Dagger in the UK and Macavity First Book award
in the USA, and winner of the Prix Cezam Littéraire.
As
dawn breaks over London, the body of a young man is discovered in a
Notting Hill churchyard. The killer has left DCI Grant Foster and his
team a grisly, cryptic clue. It's not until the clue is handed to
Nigel Barnes, a specialist in compiling family trees, that the full
message becomes spine-chillingly clear. It leads Barnes back more
than one hundred years – to the victim of a demented Victorian
serial killer. When a second body is discovered Foster needs Barnes's
skills more than ever. The murderer's clues appear to run along the
tangled bloodlines that lie between 1879 and now. And if Barnes is
right, the killing spree has only just begun . . .
BUY
LINKS
Guest Post
Genealogy
and crime fiction seemed like a natural blend when the idea of The
Blood Detective came to me that I suspected hundreds of authors had
been there before me. Turns out they hadn't, which surprised me.
Every genealogical search is a hunt, sifting through clues, whittling
down suspects, pinpointing the subject of your search using evidence
- it's the closest most of us will ever get to playing detective.
And
let's face it, like detective work, family history also involves
death, darkness and villainy - or at least it does when it's any
good. Therein lies the real attraction. Give me the skeletons in the
closet, the rogues, the black sheep over the virtuous and pure any
day. As I first trawled through my family's past, I was delighted
when I discovered both my grandmother and great grandmother - devout
Catholics - had married when they were four months pregnant. Fallen
women! Shotgun weddings! Manna from heaven (and Nanas in Heaven
feeling their halos slip, as their Godly guises were stripped
back...) In a previous life, I had been a tabloid journalist and the
thirst for salacious gossip never quite leaves you. But then I was
inexplicably crestfallen when I realised that was the sum total of
scandal in my entire family tree. Curse those moral do-gooders.
But
in the silent stories of the past lies a mass of plot lines and
ideas, and that's where the inspiration for The Blood Detective first
arose. Rooting through the indexes of Births, Marriages and Deaths,
you pass hundreds, thousands, millions of names of people now gone
and forgotten.
It
was after scouring these catalogues of the dead that the ideafor the
outline came to me. What if a body was found, and on it was carved
the reference to a death certificate of someone who had been murdered
on the same day, in the same place, but in the distant past? And to
help them solve the crime the police were forced to turn to a naive,
unworldly genealogist for help? All this came to me over several
pints of beer at a friends birthday drinks. Without a pen or paper to
hand, I texted the idea to myself.
Unlike
every other flash of drunken inspiration, the next morning it still
seemed like a good idea. I started to write it immediately, with one
aim: to make the genealogy as compulsive as it is when you're the
person poring over your ancestor's signature, or their cause of
death, or their description on a census return, or their army record,
or even their grave. The past falls away, the years vanish, and you
are faced with another human being like you, one that lived and loved
and aspired. Who, just like you will, ended up six feet under.
That's
another thing about genealogy - it helps put things in perspective.
Respect the dead. After all, we all end up joining their ranks.
With many thanks to Dan Waddell for this brilliant guest post.
Dan
Waddell is the award-winning author of more than 20 works of fiction
and non-fiction, among them the bestselling book which accompanied
the BBC TV series Who Do You Think You Are? His first crime novel,
the critically-acclaimed The Blood Detective, won the prestigious
Prix Cezam Littéraire in France and was nominated for debut
awards in the UK and USA. He lives in London with his family.
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/danwaddell
Goodreads
Author Page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/646165.Dan_Waddell
Website:
www.danwaddell.net
GIVEAWAY
An
ecopy of the book!
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