The UK mass-market paperback of The Shadows of London, my latest Marwood and Lovett novel, is published this month. The story turns on the power politics that underlay Charles II’s seduction of a young Frenchwoman. Oh, and there’s a murder too, and Cat and Marwood also make an interesting personal discovery. You can read a piece I wrote about the book for The Times Crime Club – click here.
The hardback was a Top Twenty bestseller and a Sunday Times Book of the Year. According to the Financial Times, it features ‘Taylor at his unassailable best’. The Guardian said the book is ‘well up to standard in a series that has set a benchmark for historical mystery fiction’. The Times reviewer thought my ‘storytelling brio’ was ‘on full display’. The Literary Review called it ‘masterly… This novel has all the charm of earlier titles in the series but with added substance.’ They say that good reviews no longer sell books in the way they once did, but they certainly bring comfort and joy to neurotic authors.
Finally, a glimpse of the future: I’ve nearly finished the first draft of my next novel. This is a standalone whodunit set in 1945. If that sounds traditional I can assure you that it’s anything but orthodox. After that, and all being well, I shall be returning to James Marwood and Cat Lovett, as their lives move into the turmoil of the later seventeenth century. I can’t wait…
Andrew Taylor Author 