My fictional detective, DI Andy Horton, is based in Portsmouth and the Solent area on the South Coast of England. The Solent is the busiest waterway in Europe and one of the busiest in the world with around one million commercial and naval shipping movements and in excess of 10 million pleasure craft movements per year, so it's a brilliant area in which to set a series of crime novels, with plenty of inspiration and lots of activity.

The DI Horton marine mystery crime novels…

Getting the right name for characters in my crime fiction novels can be a tricky business. Sometimes they come to me completely out of the blue, as I am creating a character, other times I will struggle to find the name that best suits that particular character and until I do the personality refuses to come fully alive. The name has to fit. If it's not right then the character isn't right. The name also needs to fit with the age and nationality although you can have…

I'm back from a very successful mini tour of the North East of England where I was invited to give two talks.

This is the third time in three years that I have given talks to readers in the North East of England and I shall once again be in the area in April 2013 taking part in CSI Gateshead at Gateshead Library, a mini version of CSI Portsmouth, which I help to organise every year as part of Portsmouth…

Crime authors Stephen Booth, Ann Cleeves, Matt Hilton and Pauline Rowson, and crime experts from Hampshire Police, the University of Portsmouth and the University of Surrey kept a packed audience enthralled at CSI Portsmouth on Saturday 3…

Death Lies Beneath, which was published in the UK in July, has now been published in hardcover in the USA by Severn House and is also now available as an e book on Kindle, Nook and Kobo.

Death Lies…