Sunday 10 December 2017

RON NICHOLSON - SNITCH: AND OTHER CRIME STORIES (2016)


Synopsis/blurb......

A collection of original British short stories in the crime genre.

I'm currently on a freebie trial of Kindle Unlimited and the author has been shouting about his books over on Facebook, so I thought I'd have a look see at some of his short stories.

The collection would have benefited from having a table of contents listing the stories in the set, but that's a minor niggle. In the collection we have the following...

Snitch

Invasion of Privacy

Jarrold Give a Hand (1894)

The Wife Killer

Now You See Her....

How Daphne Bagged a Villain

That One Special Image

Jarrold and the Case of High Spirits (1896)

I enjoyed the two Jarrold stories a bit more than I was expecting to as I'm not really a massive fan of fiction set in the Victorian period. Jarrold is a recurring character for the author and I believe he has written at least one novel which features the Victorian copper from Great Yarmouth. Here our intrepid policeman snares a couple of insurance fraudsters and an illusionist-cum-spiritualist-cum-charlatan gets warned off, in-between enjoying cups of tea at the station and pints in the local hostelries. I might actually be tempted to rethink my reservations about the period.

Pick of the bunch was Invasion of Privacy, a small village setting and an unlikely harbinger of death. Someone likes her village exactly the way it is and tolerance of strangers is in short supply.

Snitch was enjoyable, if a little predictable. Nicholson writes contemporary times well and not just Ye Olde stuff.

Now You See Her.... I was enjoying, until the end when the denouement really left me scratching my head. The whole thing made no real sense unless the perpetrator had some kind of figurative death-wish which if it was the case it hadn't been alluded to during the earlier story set-up.

The rest of the collection I enjoyed, particularly The Wife Killer.

Overall - quite enjoyable, even if Now You See Her.... troubled me.
There's worse ways of spending a couple of hours reading time.

3.5 from 5

Ron Nicholson -  I can't find a website for him, but there's a link to his Amazon page with a bit of a biography and details of all his books - here.


Read in December, 2017
Published - 2016
Page count - 89
Source - Kindle Unlimited
Format - Kindle




6 comments:

  1. That's the thing about those collections, Col. They can be a bit uneven. Still, I'm glad you found a lot to like among the stories.

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    1. More to like than dislike, just the one story which bumped me out of my vibe. Usually every set has at least one that disagrees.

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  2. I just don't get on with short stories, which is a pity. he sounds like a reasonable writer.

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    1. You might like his longer Jarrold books, probably more your thing than mine.

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  3. This does sound good, but I am overloaded with short story books, and not making much progress on them.

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