The Mercy Chair
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Description
'Mesmerising, macabre and magnificent. The Mercy Chair is truly terrifying, laugh-out-loud funny, and impossibly clever. Poe and Tilly are unstoppable' Chris Whitaker
'Washington Poe is a brilliant creation, from one of the finest and most inventive crime writers of today' Peter James
----
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin . . .
Washington Poe has a story to tell.
And he needs you to listen.
You'll hear how it started with the robber birds. Crows. Dozens of them. Enough for a murder . . .
He'll tell you about a man who was tied to a tree and stoned to death, a man who had tattooed himself with a code so obscure, even the gifted analyst Tilly Bradshaw struggled to break it. He'll tell you how the man's murder was connected to a tragedy that happened fifteen years earlier when a young girl massacred her entire family.
And finally, he'll tell you about the mercy chair. And why people would rather kill themselves than talk about it . . .
Poe hopes you've been paying attention. Because in this story, nothing is as it seems . . .
----
'Craven renders the darkness of the human condition with immense skill, ratcheting the tension to a nails-on-chalkboard pitch. Don't turn out the lights.' Vaseem Khan
MORE PRAISE FOR MW CRAVEN:
'The kind of novel that inspired me to write fiction in the first place. A guaranteed great time.' Chris Brookmyre
'Darkly entertaining' The Telegraph
'If you haven't read any M.W. Craven yet, fix that immediately' S. A. Cosby
'I've been following M.W. Craven's Poe/Tilly series from the very beginning, and it just gets better and better' Peter Robinson
'Poe and Tilly books are a joy' Steve Cavanagh
'In Tilly and Poe, M.W. Craven has created a stand-out duo who are two of the most compelling characters in crime fiction in recent years' Fiona Cummins
'Darkly comic . . . Thrilling' The Independent
'Clever, sophisticated, utterly gripping thriller from one of the best writers around' Mari Hannah
'Craven has unleashed Ben Koenig into the thriller world. Long may he raise hell in the pages. A superb thriller that will have everyone talking, and gasping.'¿David Baldacci
'Paging Lee and Andrew Child: you've got company' The Times
Book Information
Posts
Masterclass in Crime Fiction!
I thought ‘The Botanist’ had topped it all in the Washington Poe universe, but ‘The Mercy Chair’ somehow manages to raise the bar even higher. This series gets better and better and not boring at all. Chapeau! To keep readers hooked, M. W. Craven plays around with non-linear narrational structure in this book and it works brilliantly. It didn’t feel experimentally at all. The story development is no walk in the park…not for the reader and certainly not for Poe as the main character. The darkest Poe novel yet is nothing for the faint-hearted! What began as a solid police procedural has now evolved into a full-blown thriller series, rich with psychological depth and quite graphical depiction of human abysses. In contrast to this, what was hinted at the closing chapters of the previous book has now come to pass: We get to know a whole new, more vulnerable side of the gruff Cumbrian detective. I enjoyed this character development, but missed Tilly a bit in this book.
Description
'Mesmerising, macabre and magnificent. The Mercy Chair is truly terrifying, laugh-out-loud funny, and impossibly clever. Poe and Tilly are unstoppable' Chris Whitaker
'Washington Poe is a brilliant creation, from one of the finest and most inventive crime writers of today' Peter James
----
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin . . .
Washington Poe has a story to tell.
And he needs you to listen.
You'll hear how it started with the robber birds. Crows. Dozens of them. Enough for a murder . . .
He'll tell you about a man who was tied to a tree and stoned to death, a man who had tattooed himself with a code so obscure, even the gifted analyst Tilly Bradshaw struggled to break it. He'll tell you how the man's murder was connected to a tragedy that happened fifteen years earlier when a young girl massacred her entire family.
And finally, he'll tell you about the mercy chair. And why people would rather kill themselves than talk about it . . .
Poe hopes you've been paying attention. Because in this story, nothing is as it seems . . .
----
'Craven renders the darkness of the human condition with immense skill, ratcheting the tension to a nails-on-chalkboard pitch. Don't turn out the lights.' Vaseem Khan
MORE PRAISE FOR MW CRAVEN:
'The kind of novel that inspired me to write fiction in the first place. A guaranteed great time.' Chris Brookmyre
'Darkly entertaining' The Telegraph
'If you haven't read any M.W. Craven yet, fix that immediately' S. A. Cosby
'I've been following M.W. Craven's Poe/Tilly series from the very beginning, and it just gets better and better' Peter Robinson
'Poe and Tilly books are a joy' Steve Cavanagh
'In Tilly and Poe, M.W. Craven has created a stand-out duo who are two of the most compelling characters in crime fiction in recent years' Fiona Cummins
'Darkly comic . . . Thrilling' The Independent
'Clever, sophisticated, utterly gripping thriller from one of the best writers around' Mari Hannah
'Craven has unleashed Ben Koenig into the thriller world. Long may he raise hell in the pages. A superb thriller that will have everyone talking, and gasping.'¿David Baldacci
'Paging Lee and Andrew Child: you've got company' The Times
Book Information
Posts
Masterclass in Crime Fiction!
I thought ‘The Botanist’ had topped it all in the Washington Poe universe, but ‘The Mercy Chair’ somehow manages to raise the bar even higher. This series gets better and better and not boring at all. Chapeau! To keep readers hooked, M. W. Craven plays around with non-linear narrational structure in this book and it works brilliantly. It didn’t feel experimentally at all. The story development is no walk in the park…not for the reader and certainly not for Poe as the main character. The darkest Poe novel yet is nothing for the faint-hearted! What began as a solid police procedural has now evolved into a full-blown thriller series, rich with psychological depth and quite graphical depiction of human abysses. In contrast to this, what was hinted at the closing chapters of the previous book has now come to pass: We get to know a whole new, more vulnerable side of the gruff Cumbrian detective. I enjoyed this character development, but missed Tilly a bit in this book.