Thank you for reading The Innocent Ones. It is always a great pleasure to finally send a book out into the world after so many months of work and revisions.
The Innocent Ones is the final book in the Dan Grant and Jayne Brett trilogy, the first two being From The Shadows and The Darkness Around Her, both also available from Hera.
When I first started writing the trilogy, my intention was to write a legal drama that was different in setting to most legal thrillers, which tend to go for the glamour and the glitz of the big city. I have been a solicitor specialising in criminal law for over twenty years, first as a defence lawyer and then as a prosecutor, and I wanted the books to represent the legal world I moved in: small northern towns.
Although my legal work does take me to the grit and noise of Manchester, most often it is spent in the small northern towns along the Leeds–Liverpool canal, where cotton was king and the towns hung heavy with the clatter of looms and the valleys filled with smoke. That is my legal world in the main, and I wanted to reflect that in the books, the life as a small-town lawyer. Highford is the setting, a fictional town that draws on many of the towns I work in.
My main inspiration for the series was in fact a television series from the seventies, Petrocelli. I used to love them, and what I remembered was the old grizzled investigator used by the defence firm. I wanted someone to have that role, but I wanted it to be a young woman, someone who would spark off Dan.
For those who don’t know the first two books, Jayne is a former client of Dan’s who was accused of murdering her boyfriend, when he was stabbed to death with a large knife that she was holding. Dan secured her acquittal but suggested that she moved to Highford, Dan’s town, to work, to avoid the threats being made by her boyfriend’s family. She changed her name to Jayne Brett and set herself up as a private investigator.
This final book in the trilogy sees Dan and Jayne reunite, after having left Highford to begin again in Manchester, but things hadn’t quite worked as planned. Dan needs her help when a murder case he is working on takes an unexpected turn.
The story involves a little journey into my own past. The story is set partly in a Yorkshire seaside town called Brampton, based on Bridlington, a town I lived in for ten years, during my teens and beyond, and where I still have family. Wakefield makes an appearance too, which I regard as my home town. I can share a secret: the address that appears, 19 Rockley Drive, is the house I grew up in before we moved to Bridlington.
Throughout my writing career, I have always been immensely grateful to the blogging community. They have always been supportive of me, and for a community to exist just so that it can spread the word about books is a good measure of how special the crime fiction world is. I might be a writer, but that’s because I’m a reader most of all, a lover of books, and in the blogging community are the people who share my love.
I hope you enjoy The Innocent Ones. Reviews are great to read and I am grateful for the time you spend writing them. If you want to know more about me, my website is www.neilwhite.net
I am active on social media and I can be found at the following places:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/neilwhite1965
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Neil White