Stig Abell’s debut novel “Death Under A Little Sky” (2023) was a rare beast, a crime genre novel that I wanted to read again as soon as I finished it.  I gave it a five star rating and it ended up in my Top 10 Books of 2023, describing it as “the best contemporary crime novel I’ve read this year.” No pressure then on Mr Abell with his second novel in his Jake Jackson series.

It arrives via the recently launched Hemlock Press, an imprint of Harper Collins with the brief to “intrigue the mind and thrill the senses” and this author certainly does both here.

You could read this as a stand-alone but I’d really suggest you go with “Little Sky” first to get the lowdown on recently retired policeman Jackson and his desire to get away from a lot of the trappings of modern existence in a house inherited from his uncle.  Jake is plunged back into the real world when a connection is discovered between two of the cold cases he had previously worked on which may suggest the existence of an organisation that can fulfil criminal fantasies at little risk for the right price.

A couple of new characters extend the appeal of this series and suggest that Jackson may very well encounter other criminal scenarios away from his immediate environment in the future.

This does feel more like traditional crime fiction fayre.  The debut had a freshness with its original slant of Jake’s escape from reality which certainly caught my attention in the post-Covid world.  Some readers did feel this was given too great a focus in the first novel- I’ve seen some reviews where readers found the lack of crime for a significant part of the novel a distraction, but I really liked it.  I think the balance is redressed here.  There’s a greater emphasis on criminal activity.  The author is a huge crime fiction fan and he’s exploring the different pathways crime writers use to befuddle, thrill and entertain us.  Here, there’s even a country house crime thread where we’re introduced to characters before we even meet them which feels reminiscent of something we’d encounter from the golden age of crime fiction.  (In his Acknowledgements Stig Abell states he’d planned this as the main focus of his work but was rightly dissuaded by his publishers.  As it is it provides a clever diversion which feels very much part of the plot of the novel).

In this second book the author has given us quite a bit of what I loved from the first, a couple of new characters with potential to flourish in further instalments and an involving plot which builds to some tense action sequences.  I haven’t got the same sense of “Wow!” I got last time round but I can really appreciate a very strong crime series settling in and bedding down and hopefully it will not be too long before the author gives us more from these characters.

“Death In A Lonely Place” is published on April 11^th 2024 by Hemlock Press.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.