Murder on Page One

The body lay on the floor, as warm as the blood that seeped through the plush Wilton carpet or trickled down the white walls. Glassy-eyed, brain-dead, finished, Lorraine McNeill’s high-achieving life was over. Her black skirt had bunched up round her hips, revealing long, shapely legs – legs to die for. Like a butcher arranging the shop window, the killer lifted a slender ankle and put underneath it a sheet of plain A4 paper. One character had been typed at the foot: the numeral 1. ‘Well, you wanted a murder on page one,’ the killer whispered, then left to be absorbed into the anonymous crowd.

A serial killer is targeting London literary agents... Led by the old-fashioned and slobbish ‘Inspector No’ and aided by crime author Lavinia Lenehan, DS Flick Fortune and DC Bagawath Chandavarkar (‘Baggo’) narrow down their suspects, all entrants in the Debut Dagger crime writing competition.

As the detectives work through their bizarre list of wannabe authors, literary agents continue to meet grisly ends. Sinister Russians and a Polish prostitute muddy the waters. As Baggo, who has fallen for one of the suspects, is left behind in London, he makes progress on his own. The other characters have gathered at a writers’ retreat in Pitlochry. The body count continues to rise as the story reaches its climax at an historic beauty spot, The Soldier’s Leap...

Ian Simpson is inspired by a number of authors, including PG?Wodehouse, John Mortimer and William Boyd. His writing style is comparable to Christopher Brookmyre. Murder on Page One is a pacey whodunit with a dash of humour that will appeal to crime fiction fans.