Welcome to another Weekend Read. My featured book this week is the crime thriller Hunted by D.E. Beckler. Grab yourself a cuppa, get cosy and let’s find out more about the book and the author.
Blurb
When a homeless man’s body is found in a derelict school, appearing to have died of an overdose, Victor Mitchum knows it wasn’t an accident. He knew Sawney from his own days on the streets. Sawney was clean, scared, and being hunted by dangerous people.
Working with private investigators Kasper and Zofia Dąbrowski, and aided by his dog, Oscar, Victor traces the events that led to Sawney’s death. His search leads him into Manchester’s hidden places—disused buildings, private security firms, and communities forced to live in the margins.
But as he closes in on the truth, Victor finds himself caught between powerful interests, a grieving crime family, and a city willing to look the other way.
Someone wanted his old friend silenced. Can Victor find out why before he meets a similar fate?
https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Hunted-Audiobook/B0FSMSVPJK
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/hunted-d-e-beckler/1148028441
Welcome to my blog, David. You’re multi-published but this is your first book as DE Beckler. What made you write this story?
One of the best pieces of advice I got as an author is to write a book you’d like to read. I enjoy books with compelling characters, but I also like these characters to do something interesting. My view is that a novel should entertain and make one think. I hope that the books in my latest series, The City Streets Mysteries, do both.
I get most of my ideas for novels by letting my mind wander during walks around my home city, Manchester, and this was no different. Like many British cities, we have too many homeless people. I’d got to know a few homeless people and writing a story with a homeless protagonist was something I’d long considered.
My writer’s brain is always asking how someone got where they are, whether they’re a successful chief executive or someone who’s lost everything. In addition, so few novels have homeless characters in them, let alone a protagonist, and I felt that was a gap I could and should fill.
I needed a hook to set the framework of the story on, and an idea for a novel about a private eye gave me that hook. Homeless people are almost invisible, and my protagonist would be perfect to carry out surveillance. Enthused by the idea, I jumped into writing the first draft. Once I got into the first few chapters, I feared I was making the story too depressing.
I didn’t want to sugarcoat the experience of homelessness, but people read for enjoyment, so when a friend suggested I give Victor, my main character, a dog, I agreed. Oscar was born and quickly developed a personality. Early on, I decided he should talk to Victor—but only to Victor. This would give the scenes where they were together a dynamism and offer opportunities to inject more humour into the manuscript. Oscar was a much-pampered family pet, and isn’t impressed by his new status, and this comes out in his exchanges with Victor.
Another “character” I wanted to include in the novel was Manchester, the city which has been my home for over forty years. I knew it well not only from living in the suburbs and visiting the centre but also from my years as a firefighter, where I got to know parts of the city most people don’t go to.
Victor’s situation informs his view of the city. He isn’t a local, so his knowledge of Manchester is limited to his experience of it from the streets. It meant I had to look at my home city from a new perspective. See it as an exotic and sometimes threatening location. An interesting challenge.
I hope readers will look at the homeless with fresh eyes after reading the books. In the meantime, I want them to enjoy a series of entertaining and thrilling mysteries with a range of lovable, and some not so lovable, characters.
This sounds intriguing, David, with a really unique protagonist. Wishing you lots of success with it.
Meet the author
Author Bio
I’m a crime thriller writer based in South Manchester. My seventh novel, Hunted, will be published on 15th April under DE Beckler. It features homeless private eye Victor and his disgruntled dog Oscar solving crimes on the streets of Manchester. It’s the first of three novels featuring the duo, all of which will come out this year.
Contact links
Amazon Author Page David Beckler
Amazon Author Page D.E. Beckler
More Books by David Beckler
Karen King 