J.M. Northup: Brian L. Porter's New Release All Saints: Murder on the Mersey

Author WIPs and New Releases

1) Tell us about your New Release…

Ø What is the story about?

AllSaints, Murder on the Mersey is the second of my Mersey Mystery series of books, following on from the successful A Mersey Killing.

When the body of Matthew Remington is found, horribly mutilated in the graveyard of St. Matthew’s church, it is only the first in a series of horrific murders that shake even the hardened police officers of Liverpool’s murder investigation unit. Within 24 hours the body of Mark Proctor is found, similarly dispatched, in St. Mark’s churchyard. Detective Chief Inspector and Sergeant Izzie Drake must lead their team in a race against time to prevent further atrocities, but what links the dead men with an old mental hospital, now an orphanage, and the scarcely reported suicide of a teenage girl? Somehow, all clues seem to point towards the enigmatic priest, Father Gerald Byrne, recently returned to the city of his birth. Can it be possible that the events that took place thirty years ago in Speke Hill Orphanage, a converted and reputedly haunted Victorian mental asylum are connected to the murders, and why does the killer remove a certain part of each victim’s anatomy, leaving it in their mouths for the police to find? All Saints, Murder on the Mersey is a chilling, modern murder mystery that focuses on very adult themes and is not for the faint-hearted!

Ø Who is the main character?

The main characters, plural rather than singular, are Detective Inspector Andy Ross and Detective Sergeant Clarissa, (Izzie) Drake, who first appeared in A Mersey Killing. Having worked together for a number of years, the two detectives share a strong bond that almost allows them to visualize one another’s thoughts, and a feature of the Mersey Mysteries is the easy going banter that takes place between the pair, always ready to share a joke or a laugh together in the midst of some of the horrors they encounter in their day to day work. Ross is happily married and in the course of All Saints, we see the burgeoning relationship between Izzie and Peter Foster, the head receptionist at the city mortuary, with Izzie slowly falling in love. The rest of the murder squad are regular members of the ensemble cast of characters with whom regular readers will soon become familiar as they read the series of books.

2) What inspired this tale?

Ø How did the story come to you?

Over the years, a number of stories have been highlighted in the press relating to unsolved or unprosecuted cases of varying degrees of sex crimes. With a close relative having at one time been a victim of such a crime, I wondered how such victims must feel and how they would (theoretically) react to what they must perceive as a great injustice.

Ø Did you have to research for this novel and if so, why?

Yes, I always do a great deal of research for my novels and All Saints was no exception. I’ve always felt it important when writing fiction that the background to such tales should contain as much factual information as possible. Without going into great technical detail, I try to make sure the medical and forensic details contained in my stories as real and accurate as possible. In the case of AllSaints, for example, I needed to know how a profiler would approach such a case and so, much research went into the way a criminal psychologies would approach the task of preparing a profile of the potential perpetrator of such a crime.

Ø If you did research, what do you think surprised you most to learn and why?

Perhaps the biggest surprise came when I discovered just how many sex crimes are unsolved each year, and how many are estimated to go unreported.

3) Do you relate to your character(s)?

Ø Is your protagonist anything like you personally?

Yes, Andy Ross is very much like me.

Ø If yes, then how?

I based his background and heritage very much on my own. He comes from a mixed-race background with English/Portuguese/Indian blood in his family and his personality is a sort of composite of my own and that of my father. He’s a music loving soccer fan and has a strong sense of right and wrong and takes the subject of crime and punishment very seriously. He possesses great patience, but, when riled, he can display a strong temper and hates injustice and bullying in any form. There’s also a lot of one of my cousins in Liverpool in his character too, and that part of him is reflected in his humor and his ability to relate to those around him in a way that puts people at their ease in his company.

Ø What made you write this character; what made them important to you or made you want to tell their story?

Over the years, I always promised myself that one day I’d ‘go back to my roots’ and set one of my books in my ancestral home town of Liverpool. Why I waited so long to do it, I really can’t say, but last year I decided to finally do it and A Mersey Killing was the result. All the central characters in the series are based on friends or family members from my youth and one of the characters in the first book is actually a direct copy of me at the age of seventeen. As a lover of sixties pop music, and as it was the era I grew up in, I wanted to tell the story of what it was like growing up at the time of the overnight ‘explosion’ of the Mersey beat sound that emanated from Liverpool in the early sixties and eventually reverberated around the world thanks to The Beatles, Gerry and The Pacemakers, The Searchers, Cilla Black and so on. Having created a cast of characters that make up Ross’s team, I suddenly realized that there was potential to carry on using them in a series of books and so AllSaints was born and will soon be followed by A Mersey Maiden, A Mersey Mariner, and A Mersey Ferry Tale.

4) Is there anything you specific want readers to know about this piece of work?

All Saints, Murder on the Mersey contains some graphic violence, and a scene depicting sexual sadism so is not one for the faint hearted. These scenes are essential to the plot and are necessary in order to show how far someone may go to seek revenge. In essence, All Saints is in fact a homage to the suffering of the victims of rape and sexual assault, so I make no apologies for telling it like it is.

5) When will the novel be available for purchase?

The book was released on 1^st February in its Kindle edition and the paperback version will be released in a couple of weeks.

Ø Where can readers find All Saints? Do you have a link available for buying it?

Readers from other countries can find the book at their nearest Amazon website by following this universal link which will automatically take them to their nearest Amazon website: http://getbook.at/AllSaints

For those who may wish to read the first book in the series, here’s a universal link that will take readers to A Mersey Killing: http://getbook.at/merseykilling

CLICK ON THE BOOK COVER

to be redirected to my REVIEW of book 1 in the series!