Review of Into the Killer Sphere by Stefania Mattana

Into the Killer Sphere by Stefania Mattana
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Chase Williams, is a detective who worked at Scotland Yard, until continuing mishaps forced him to give up his career. He now works in Ernesto Ceccarelli’s cashmere company in Tursenia, Italy. He has a few welcome days off and plans a nice quiet vacation, but instead gets a call from his friend Angelo Alunni, an Inspector in the Tursenian police force. Angelo asks for Chase’s help in solving a rather unusual case. The two men arrive at a villa owned by the wealthy Galli family. They are shown upstairs to a room where the body of Piero Galli lies under a large chandelier that has fallen from the ceiling and killed him. Was it an unfortunate accident or something more sinister? Chase’s formidable detection skills are put to the test as many of the family members could have committed the crime, but he soon discovers the guilty party.

I struggled to connect with the characters, I felt that the character of Chase was weak and calling Angelo ‘mate’ was irritating. It is not a term I think a person in Chase’s position would call his friend; it’s more a term you would expect from a couple of friends meeting down the pub!

It is a great skill if you can build several books around a particular character and the author has discovered a character in Chase that will allow her to do so. I hope that Chase becomes the sort of person I can relate to in further books.

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Guest Post – Simon Hall

Simon Hall is the BBC’s Crime Correspondent for the South West of England and author of The TV Detective Novels. He talks about the excitement of writing and publishing his new book – Shadows of Justice.
It sounds like a joke, I know, but I can think of no better way of expressing the emotion – What can you do time after time after time, but never lose an atom of excitement about? The answer –for me, anyway – is to have a book published. The sixth in my tvdetective series, Shadows of Justice, is released on May 1st and I’m jittery with the anticipation. I’m just as abuzz and aflutter as when the first was published, some five years ago now. It’s tricky to describe exactly what it feels like, the culmination of all the work that goes into a book. I sometimes say it’s like being a child on Christmas morning, or an expectant father waiting for the moment of birth. But, some scoff – it’s just a book.
They don’t know writers! They don’t appreciate all the endeavour that goes into a book, but more importantly the feelings we invest in the things. To us, it’s not just words – it’s heart and soul.
I’m sometimes reminded of a quotation from the great Bill Shankly, former manager of Liverpool Football Club. ‘Some people believe football is a matter of life and death; I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that’. He was half-joking, as am I when I talk about the feeling of a novel being published. But it’s certainly not just a book. Not to the person who created it! When I give talks about my writing, I often find people are surprised by the amount of effort that goes into producing a novel.
I worked on Shadows of Justice for about four years in total. From the germ of the idea, to building it up and polishing it, then planning it; from the writing to re-writing to re-re writing and so on, not to mention the editing with my agent and publishers….And for all of that time, you live with the book. You go to sleep and wake up with it in mind. You’re thinking about how to improve it. How the characters behave. Whether the plot is interesting enough. How real the settings feel. No wonder you get wowed by the day of publication.
As for the book itself, the tvdetective series is about a television reporter who covers crimes and gets so involved in the cases that he ends up helping the police to solve them, often using the power and influence of TV to assist.
The theme of Shadows is justice. Not society’s version, with the police and courts and lawyers, but an individual’s belief. It’s about a group of people who have suffered grievous wrongs which were never properly acknowledged, understood and righted, and the actions that leads them to take. It’s about the extraordinary lengths that victims are sometimes forced to when justice fails them.
And although I’ve enjoyed it, writing this guest blog has just gone and stirred up all that pre-publication excitement again…
Yours, breathlessly, like a child on Christmas Morning!

Simon can be found on http://www.thetvdetective.com Twitter: @thetvdetective