Andrew Martin’s brilliant railroad mystery series set in the Edwardian-era (1901-1910) and featuring detective Jim Stringer has been shortlisted for the Library Dagger in the UK’s most prestigious crime and thriller awards – the CWA / Duncan Lawrie Daggers 2008. The winners will be announced at the Awards Dinner to be held at the Four Seasons Hotel in London’s Park Lane on Thursday 10th July. Faber & Faber has just published the fifth Jim Stringer mystery, DEATH ON A BRANCH LINE which seems to be the most suspenseful and international so far, and Jim Stringer’s suffragette wife, Lydia, plays a bigger role in the story. I was completely absorbed by the previous book, MURDER AT DEVIATION JUNCTION, and I’m looking forward to reading DEATH ON A BRANCH LINE in a few weeks on the train north to Edinburgh! The Sunday Times just picked it as one of the 100 Best Holiday Reads (40 of which are fiction). Neri Pozza published the first book in Italy and Harcourt in the US. UK Sales are building and reviews have been increasingly strong with each title:
“The best sleuth that 200 years of the railways have ever produced.” Independent on Sunday
“Superior potboilers.” London Review of Books
“Crime narratives dispatched with a Dickensian relish…Delectable stuff.” Daily Express
“Unerringly sharp and pioneeringly original, it locks the reader in from start to finish.” Spectator
“Martin could be compared, in a way, to W.G. Sebald…He is possessed of a sense of humor quite missing in Sebald. But he does share that writer’s mood of alienated possession of the past. His is an original voice, and the historical novels are the best I have read this century.” Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Globe
