The Intel: Lee Weeks

I do believe we reviewed the page-turner Cold As Ice by Lee Weeks earlier in the week. As you know, we like writers here, and we’re keen to learn from them, and Lee has kindly agreed to allow us to take the temperature on her writing process.

Lee spent seven years working her way around Europe and South East Asia. She returned to settle in London, marry and raise two children. She’s  worked as an English teacher and personal fitness trainer and her Sunday Times bestselling books include the DI Johnny Mann series and her new DC Ebony Willis series. She now lives in Devon.

What’s your writing process? What comes first – plot or character?

Definitely plot for me. I think of the ending first. I tend to visualize things in a filmic way: scenes rather than chapters.

Take us through a typical writing day for you.

I’m up and showered between 7-8am. I check my emails first then I start writing. I write basically till I go to bed about eleven, but I will stop during the day to walk my dogs and to go to the gym.  When I stop to watch telly in the evening I will continue working on my Ipad.

Who are the authors you love and why?  

I find this such a tricky question because I don’t have particular favourites. I like John Burdett, Elmore Leonard, Jo Nesbo, Lee Child. So many people are good at certain things but not good at others. I think being an author has spoilt my enjoyment of reading.

What’s the hardest lesson you ever had to learn about writing?

When I tried to let a story grow organically – big mistake. I have too many ideas in my head! I need to stick to a strong outline and refer to it constantly. It’s another case of knowing your strengths and recognising your weaknesses.

How do you deal with feedback?’

If it’s constructive  I learn from it and welcome it. After all, I am striving to be the best I can be.

How have your own experiences shaped your writing?

I don’t think that I am even aware of the extent that they shape it. I have a massive resource library of emotions and physical experiences that I can call on. It is invaluable.

Give me some advice about writing.

Think of your book as a product rather than a baby.

What’s your best advice for an author looking to get into the marketplace?

Don’t wait to write whole books – send agents a well thought out synopsis and  few first chapters.

What’s next for you?

I have a contract with Simon and Schuster for at least two more Willis/Carter books. During which time I will resurrect Johnny Mann 😉

Cold As Ice – Lee Weeks

Cold As Ice by Lee Weeks is the second novel by Lee Weeks about DC Ebony Willis and DI Dan Carter and the North London MIT. You had better wrap up warm for the blurb:

There’s a time to love, a time to hate, a time to heal …and a time to kill. On a freezing cold winter’s day, the body of a young woman is pulled from an icy canal in London. To D.I. Dan Carter it looks like a tragic accident rather than the work of a murderer. But D.C. Ebony Willis is not so sure. Why has the woman’s face been painted with garish make-up and wrapped in a plastic bag?

Meanwhile cosmetics saleswoman Tracy Collins receives a phonecall. It’s been twenty years since she gave up her daughter for adoption, so when Danielle gets in touch, she hesitantly begins to kindle a relationship with her and her grandson Jackson. But when Danielle suddenly disappears, Tracy is plunged into the middle of a living nightmare.

With the discovery of another body, it becomes clear that Danielle is in grave danger. There is no time to lose and Ebony Willis must take on the most challenging assignment of her career – to play the role of the killer’s next victim.

The time of year is fast-approaching where I’ll be going into gorge-mode. I’ll be eating a lot of Quality Street, a lot of satsumas, walnuts and trifle. All at the same time, most probably. I’ll also be lounging about indolently, and consuming a lot of calorific plot and narrative.

Cold As Ice is as good a way of getting into the swing of things as any. It’s the type of crime novel you’ll probably find yourself gorging yourself on in one or two sittings.

The plot is a familiar one – investigators race to stop a killer before he claims his next victim – but there’s a lot to get your teeth into. Weeks provides a good-sized wedge of narrative, a number of dodgy suspects, some grotesque imagery, and an interesting set of investigators. There’s a good sense of momentum to the whole thing – the pages fly by – ending in a gloriously over-the-top climax.

I really like the team of investigators – Willis, Carter, Robbo an the rest – and Weeks juggles them all well. I like the way she doesn’t frontload the narrative with a lot of backstory about them. Instead, the early pages are very much told from the point-of-view of a middle-aged woman, Tracy Collins, who unexpectedly finds herself caught up in the investigation.

Tracy – all hair and make-up – is a lovely character, and her attempts to make contact with the daughter she gave away when she was just fifteen are touching. Her bewildered attempts to cope with her daughter’s subsequent disappearance, as the responsibility of looking after her special needs grandson is thrust upon her, provides the emotional core of the first half of the book.

Sadly, Tracy takes a backseat in the second half when Cold As Ice becomes more procedural. Instead, Willis shakes up the narrative by sending her damaged protagonist Willis undercover. The climax descends into some commonplace melodramatic business. The finale is as camp as egg nog – the prancing killer has a ton of affectations and props – but Weeks builds to it nicely, and it’s undeniably very satisfying.

Cold As Ice lacks a bit of logic in the way it unfolds, coincidences abound, and the author switches point-of-view without a care in the world – furthermore, the typos in the text are maddening – but it has a verve and energy. I like the books I read to be full of story and full of dangled questions, and Weeks provides plenty of both.

Sometimes Cold As Ice is a bit like Tracy Collins on her beauty counter in the run up to Christmas, it’s all rush, rush, rush, but there’s no question it’s highly entertaining, the kind of grimly macabre story that reminds us why we all love this crazy genre in the first place. Since you’re asking, yes, I can quite imagine you with your feet up, a box of Cadbury’s Heroes wedged at your side, reading this over the Christmas holiday,

Thriller tip: The ticking clock. It’s the oldest trick in the book. When Danielle goes missing the team race against time to find her before she turns up dead. Adding a ticking clock gives immediacy and momentum to your story.

Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the review copy of Cold Of Ice.

Crime Thriller Book Log: Kerley, Abbott, Walsh & Weeks

Back in 1988 Jill Paton Walsh took on the task of completing the novel Dorothy L. Sayers abandoned. She completed the Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane book Thrones, Dominations. It all worked out rather well.

After that success Paton Walsh followed it with A Presumption Of Death based on more Sayers writings – and set during World War II – and then wrote a prequel about Wimsey’s first case called The Attenbury Emeralds.

Set in the 1950s, her latest Wimsey and Vane novel The Late Scholar is out tomorrow. Take a punt on the blurb:

Peter Wimsey is pleased to discover that along with a Dukedom he has inherited the duties of ‘visitor’ at an Oxford college. When the fellows appeal to him to resolve a dispute, he and Harriet set off happily to spend some time in Oxford.

But the dispute turns out to be embittered. The voting is evenly balanced between two passionate parties – evenly balanced, that is, until several of the fellows unexpectedly die.The Warden has a casting vote, but the Warden has disappeared.

And the causes of death of the deceased fellows bear an uncanny resemblance to the murder methods in Peter’s past cases – methods that Harriet has used in her published novels.

The Late Scholar is available in hardback and kindle slash e-reader.

J.A. Kerley is usually up writing before the crack of dawn –  I am informed that it is still dark at this time of the day – which is perhaps why he’s written no less than nine Carson Ryder novels, about a detective who investigates particularly nasty bits of business. Get this, Kerley’s wife ordered him to give up advertising to write his first novel. That’s the kind of wife you want. Anyway, here’s the blurb for his latest novel The Death Box.

Carson Ryder thought he’d seen everything …

A specialist in twisted crimes, Detective Carson Ryder thought he’d seen the lowest depths of human depravity. But he’s barely started his new job in Miami when called to a horrific scene: a concrete pillar built of human remains, their agony forever frozen in stone.

Finding the secret of the pillar drags him into the sordid world of human trafficking, where one terrified girl holds the key to unraveling a web of pain, prostitution and murder. There’s just one problem: Ryder’s not the only one chasing the girl.

And the others will kill to keep the secret safe.

The Death Box is in paperback and on the kindle type thing on Thursday.

After leaving the CIA, Jeff Abbott’s protagonist Sam Capra vowed to protect the innocent and helpless by opening up a series of bars around the world. The bar-owning thing must be working out for him because he’s now appearing in his third book called Downfall.

Capra may want to fix himself a stiff drink, because in Downfall he’s taking on the most powerful person in the world. Blurb, gentlemen, please:

‘Help me.’

When a young woman rushes into Sam Capra’s San Francisco bar and whispers these desperate words, Sam feels compelled to help. A moment later she is attacked by two killers. With Sam’s aid, she manages to overpower the men, saving his life in the process before vanishing into the night.

On discovering that one of the attackers is no mere thug, but, shockingly, one of the most powerful investors in America, Sam searches for the beguiling young woman who asked for help and unearths a deadly network run by some of the most powerful and influential people in the world…

Downfall is now available in paperback, as well as hardcover and on kindle.

Lee Weeks is someone else who gets up nice and early to write. Previously, Weeks wrote the Johnny Mann novels, about a Hong Kong detective, but her new series has relocated along the less-glamorous route of the 134 bus in North London.

Cold As Ice – anyone else got that Foreigner song looping endlessly in their head now? – is the second novel about DI Dan Carter and DC Ebony Willis, a follow up to Dead Of Winter.

You may have been waiting anxiously  for the blurb, in which case you may now relax:

There’s a time to love, a time to hate, a time to heal …and a time to kill. On a freezing cold winter’s day, the body of a young woman is pulled from an icy canal in London. To D.I. Dan Carter it looks like a tragic accident rather than the work of a murderer. But D.C. Ebony Willis is not so sure. Why has the woman’s face been painted with garish make-up and wrapped in a plastic bag?

Meanwhile cosmetics saleswoman Tracy Collins receives a phonecall. It’s been twenty years since she gave up her daughter for adoption, so when Danielle gets in touch, she hesitantly begins to kindle a relationship with her and her grandson Jackson. But when Danielle suddenly disappears, Tracy is plunged into the middle of a living nightmare. With the discovery of another body, it becomes clear that Danielle is in grave danger.

There is no time to lose and Ebony Willis must take on the most challenging assignment of her career – to play the role of the killer’s next victim. From the author of the bestselling Dead of Winter comes a page-turning new thriller that will have you hooked from start to finish.

Cold As Ice is out tomorrow – just like all the rest – in paperback.