Harry Riley

As an unashamed admirer of Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, and Roald Dahl’s quirky tales I have added a touch of my own black humour to this collection of short stories. My earliest childhood memories of blood curdling yarns on the radio, spoken by a man with a dark sepulchral voice, have left me with a lifetime’s passion for what were once known (long before my time I might add) as ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ or American Dime Novels: lurid tales of mysterious mayhem designed to deliciously shock and horrify our impressionable young minds. Science can explain away so many mysteries but it is often the creepy-unexpected that trips you up and opens the door to superstitious dread. However where my tales have a ghostly theme running through them they will often have a perfectly rational explanation. Occasionally they may even raise a smile or two. Modern lives are driven at such a fast pace with all the demands on our time and leisure that we often try and fit twenty-five hours into every working day, thus leaving very little space to absorb and do justice to the full length novel. This is why I believe the ‘Ten-Minute-Tale’ has a place to lift us out of the mundane. I hope you enjoy these offerings as you ‘cherry-pick’ your path along life’s crooked highway. Book reviews online: PublishedBestsellers website.

Captain Damnation and Other Strange Tales

Derek Rosser

Steve Morris

Peter Hodgson

James McCarthy

Neal James

Peter Good

Annie Coyle Martin

Julius Falconer

Andrew Malloy

Murder comes in all shapes and sizes. It also comes at inconvenient times. Christmas, for example. This anthology has all the classic motives: blackmail, revenge, lust, greed, anger… Murder by meat-hook, piano-wire, scarf, knife, hammer, golf-club, bullet, syringe … It’s all here, at your elbow. And there’s more! Humour, intrigue, suspense…

An Anthology of Christmas Murders - Terror, Tinsel and Turkey

The cover title: Chasing Fleeting shadows in the Wind, is taken from Andy Walker's most important, life changing case, and the one in which his own life hung by a thread. It was the 1960 'Chase Murder' and it all went belly up!Now having retired from the East Midlands Force, ex police inspector Andy Walker has decided to write up his memoirs. He has always been a private man, with only one or two really close friends and one of these is Osborn Lucky. During a discussion of the form his memoirs should take, It is Andy's wife, his second wife Hazel who, being a lover of detective novels herself, suggests Andy would do well to emulate the tried and tested methods of her favourite authors and should collaborate with a friend of likewise detecting interests. They both shout out the same name: Osborn Lucky, known to his friends as 'Born Lucky.' Andy and Osborn, had been pals since the 1960's when Osborn had been kicked out of the police force. An expensive and time-consuming special operation had gone very wrong and a scapegoat was required to take the blame.It had been Osborn who had been chosen to take the fall. Andy had empathised with Osborn and the two had become close lifelong friends. Now Osborn had also retired from his work as a private detective and in this novel they both present their chosen case records, often quirky, with more than a hint of the paranormal, sometimes dangerous, and all, hopefully thought-provokingly different.

Chasing Fleeting Shadows in the Wind

It is 1964, Leonard McFadden - a brash young cockney reporter for a national newspaper is dispatched by his editor to the Scottish Borders, to follow up on the strange case of Doctor James Parker. Along with a party of other journalists he attends a midnight vigil in a rain-sodden churchyard by the River Tweed. Returning to the graveside in the early morning sunlight, he staggers and leans on a tombstone for support and there stumbles onto a mystery that will change his life forever. Unbeknown to him – the storm clouds of fate are gathering; dark forces, already contriving to play havoc with his future. An enigmatic churchman asks his name and upon hearing it, remarks how Scotsmen from all over the world, often return to their place of birth, just as salmon return home, to spawn and die. Leonard humorously replies that he is not yet ready to spawn and die, but these and many more questions go tumbling through his brain as he ponders on life’s mysteries. Is he really who he thinks he is? Growing up in wartime Britain and with a surname like McFadden, is it possible he could have Scottish ancestry? Feeling a chill coming on, and inwardly reflecting that the Scottish Borders, for all its seductive beauty, may well be the death of him, the reporter is unaware that the cold hand of death may be lurking nearby… Book reviews online: PublishedBestsellers website.

Harry Riley

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