I’m very excited to be on the blog tour for Needle Song by Russell Day and to have an extract to share with you. Firstly huge thanks to the lovely Emma for letting me change to an extract when my baby was very poorly and I was unable to read the book in time.
Needle Song is available now in paperback and ebook where it is currently only £1.99. You can purchase a copy of both here.
Before I share my extract with you here is a little bit about the book.
Book Synopsis:
Spending the night with a beautiful woman would be a good alibi, if the body in the next room wasn’t her husband. Doc Slidesmith has a habit of knowing things he shouldn’t. He knows the woman Chris Rudjer meets online is married. He knows the adult fun she’s looking for is likely to be short lived. And when her husband’s killed, he knows Chris Rudjer didn’t do it. Only trouble is the police disagree and no one wants to waste time investigating an open and shut case. No one except Doc. Using lies, blackmail and a loaded pack of Tarot cards, Doc sets about looking for the truth – but the more truth he finds, the less he thinks his friend is going to like it.
Extract:
At some point, I asked Doc if I could borrow some paper. I wanted to jot down the bare bones of the crime wall; he told me to look in the bedroom. In keeping with the rest of the flat, the room was stark. One wall was taken up with a fitted wardrobe. The other walls were lost to books, row upon row of them. The smell of old paper permeated the room.
The shelf set above the door was a depository for anything related to Harley-Davidson. The bottom shelves opposite the cot bed were a mix of art tombs and coffee table photography. The rest appeared random but I didn’t doubt there was a strict logic to their order. Knowing Doc, I didn’t bother trying to work it out. Stephen Hawking was shoulder to shoulder with books on the history of burlesque. Richard Dawkins and Ben Goldarce jostled for space with yellowing books on Voodoo. I recognised a few Miss Marple titles; these spouted multitudes of bookmarks and were sitting demurely alongside expensive looking texts on clinical psychology.
Aside from the bed – a metal framed foldaway thing, made up with a painfully white cotton sheet and a rolled up sleeping bag – the room’s only furniture was an ancient bureau. On it were a printer and a framed picture of Doc and Gina outside a registry office. I took some paper from the printer’s tray and went back to the living room. I said I’d been impressed with the library. Doc looked almost embarrassed.
“I keep meaning to have a clear out, but every time I throw a book away, I decide I want to re-read it, then I end up buying another copy. Cheaper to hold on to them.”
“The Miss Marples look like they’ve had a few readings.”
“Some men dream of glamorous movie stars. I dream of Miss Jane Marple.”
The single photograph in his bedroom told a different tale but I let it go.
“Okay, I’ll bite. Why the Miss Marple fetish?”
Doc switched off The Jive and gave me an apprising look. He was about to tell me something deeply personal.
“Miss Marple’s all about the villain’s mind. She gets her man by knowing what goes on in here.” He tapped his forehead. “Why put the body in the library? Why use poison? Why do it at half past three on New Year’s Eve? Why do it at all? People get into the how-it-was-done stuff, for me it’s always been the why of it. If you can see why something happened, you can work backwards to the how. You ever hear people bang on about motiveless crime?” I opened my mouth to reply but didn’t get time. “No such thing, all crimes have a motive. A lot of the time people lose sight of that because they get motive tangled up with reason. They think accepting someone had a motive means accepting they were justified, but that’s crap. The courts make that distinction all the time. Collecting the money is a motive for making a fake insurance claim; it’s not a justification. Three teenagers beat a stranger to death; there is no justification. But there will be a motive.” He got up again and went back to the wall. “That’s why these are niggling me.”
He’d lowered himself to his haunches to get level with the base layer of his wall. The layer with the question marks. He pulled a charcoal pencil from behind his ear and added another drawing of the lock knife, much larger than the one he’d put in the timeline. He worked quickly but executed a detailed piece of work. I let my attention lapse long enough to envy his talent. He finished with a question mark.
About The Author:
Russell Day was born in 1966 and grew up in Harlesden, NW10 – a geographic region searching for an alibi. From an early age it was clear the only things he cared about were motorcycles, tattoos and writing. At a later stage he added family life to his list of interests and now lives with his wife and two children. He’s still in London, but has moved south of the river for the milder climate.
Although he only writes crime fiction Russ doesn’t consider his work restricted. ‘As long as there have been people there has been crime, as long as there are people there will be crime.’ That attitude leaves a lot of scope for settings and characters. One of the first short stories he had published, The Second Rat and the Automatic Nun, was a double-cross story set in a world where the church had taken over policing. In his first novel, Needle Song, an amateur detective employs logic, psychology and a loaded pack of tarot cards to investigate a death.
His fiction has appeared in Writer’s Forum magazine (issues 193, 194, 198 and 201) and been included in the crime anthology, Noirville: Tales from the Dark Side. His short story, The Value of Vermin Control, won the CWA Margery Allingham Short Story Competition, (this is available to view at the CWA website) https://thecwa.co.uk/debuts/short-story-competition/ .
Not Talking Italics, a short story featuring Doc Slidesmith, the almost-hero of Needle Song, is available for free at Fahrenheit Press https://fahrenheit-press.myshopify.com/products/russell-day-not-talking-italics-ebook-kindle-version .
The second book in the Slidesmith series, Ink to Ashes, will be published later this year.
You can follow Russ on twitter: @RFDaze
or find him at his website: russelldaycriminalmind.com
Over The Rainbow Blog 
Thanks so much, Jo xx
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