Just one more month ...

In just one month's time - August 19th - my third novel Cockerings is released. I've been waiting a long time to see this one in print. Believe it or not, this novel started life as an exam question for police officers. Back in the 1990s I shared an office at Hendon Police College with a mate called Chris Hale (to whom this book is dedicated). We were members of the Met Police's training and curriculum design team and part of our workload consisted of writing scenarios for mock police promotion exams so that prospective candidates could have a practice before they faced the real thing. These took the form of ‘Knowledge and Reasoning’ tests in which a policing situation was described in detail. The candidates would then have to prove their mettle by identifying which, if any, offences were being committed and by describing what course(s) of action they would take. We wrote a new K&R test, once a month, for several years and it was enjoyable work because it involved a c