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There's a certain comfort about coming back to familiar characters in a long running series. For most authors that is; with David Mark it's a mixture of emotions. You know that you're going to read another superlative crime thriller featuring his wonderful and warm human characters, you just don't know what horrors the author is going to put them through this time. As book 10 in his DS McAvoy series , you probably know that it's likely to be a case that no-one is going to get an easy ride or come out unmarked. Un-David Marked. Sometimes I'm not sure even the criminals deserve what they get in his books... Take for example the unfortunate individual at the start of Blind Justice . We don't know exactly what has gone wrong, just that he and a friend were attempting a house robbery, one that should have been a doddle, but he now finds himself lying in mud in the dark, while his friend is screaming in agony. As he feels half his leg being ripped off by a bear tr...

‘ Guns don’t kill people, people kill people ’ tends to be an excuse made by apologists for the right to bear arms, but having a gun certainly gives people more options for killing, particularly when it falls into the wrong hands. Take Owen Lee, a hard-bitten journalist (aren’t they all?) based in Hull in David Mark’s latest DS McAvoy thriller. Journalists might hold long grudges and undoubtedly have very good reasons to hold them but they don’t go around killing people who might have upset them or screwed them over, particularly not journalists in Hull. Imagine they had unexpected access to a gun though; would they behave any differently? Well, the answer is no, probably not. If that was the case then Darkness Falls wouldn’t have much potential as a crime thriller but maybe there are other reasons why Owen Lee might resort to violence, and if there is a valid reason you can be sure that David Mark will probe every dark corner of the human psyche to find it. Maybe if Owen Lee was alre...

Like the last DS McAvoy case, Scorched Earth , there’s a lot of joining up of dots to be done in Cold Bones . Since we’re talking about the Humberside police here with Hull as a major shipping and fishing port, that means that those dots can travel to a lot of far-flung places that make them difficult to connect. There’s a particularly difficult geographical and historical connection to be made in the rather grim case (aren’t they all?) that DS Aector McAvoy and his boss Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh have to deal with in two separate locations. one in Hull and the other in Iceland, but that’s the least of the obstacles standing in their way. It’s Pharaoh who is doing the long-distance travelling this time, a highly sensitive matter whose details haven’t been shared with anyone on the Humberside force – not her closest friend, colleague and confidante, McAvoy and not even Area Commander David Slattery. A body has been found in a frozen bay that has connections to a suspected se...

Although many of the basic impulses and methods remain the same - lust, greed, power, revenge - the nature of crime changes all the time. You’ll know that if you watch the news on any given evening, but there aren’t as many variations of the subject in crime fiction as you might think. David Mark on the other hand seems to be more creative with the world of crime in the modern age in his DS McAvoy series, and perhaps the setting of Hull and the investigations of the Humberside Police have something to do with it. What is clear however is that Mark is often as strong on the mindsets and motivations of his main characters as he is on the criminals they run up against. That originality in purpose and style is immediately apparent in David Mark’s latest DS McAvoy book, Scorched Earth . The book opens with the seemingly motiveless killing of a Sudanese refugee at the Jungle camp near Calais by another asylum seeker from Mozambique, followed by a kidnapping in rural Lincolnshire on a horse r...

David Mark doesn't do 'normal' or straightforward crime fiction, does he? That much is evident from the far from typical nature of his main characters and their location in the Humberside Police Force. There's Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy, a red-headed Scotsman of formidable height and build, fiercely determined with a firm moral outlook, but he's also polite, unwilling to offend and a highly sensitive individual. He has the deepest respect and admiration for his tough and uncompromising boss, Trish Pharaoh, who - as we've most recently seen in Dead Pretty , Mark's previous DS McAvoy novel - has something of an unconventional background and complicated family life herself. McAvoy also dotes on his wife, Roisin - a tiny firebrand of Irish Traveller heritage - and his baby daughter. It's that deep, all-consuming love for his wife that gets McAvoy involved in another case that is far from conventional, but also one that turns out to be a challenge as de...

Leaving aside the US variety for the moment (a different breed entirely), it's fairly evident that all the best continuing UK criminal investigator series have a charismatic lead character and their own particular patch to work on; a cityscape that usually feeds in to a large extent to make the characters who they are. You have all that in Ian Rankin's John Rebus, Denise Mina's Alex Morrow, Val McDermid's Tony Hill and Mark Billingham's Tom Thorne novels. Those books need a little more than that however, and - aside from the nature of their investigations (by no means the least important element) - it helps when there is a good team built up around them. David Mark's DS McAvoy series also clearly has what it takes, even if none of those elements fit the template in the conventional way. Take also the setting of Mark's crime fiction series. It's not London, Glasgow or Edinburgh, it's Hull, but Mark's writing and descriptions of the setting noneth...