Deadly Christmas, I have to admit, is a bit of a blip.

When I wrote the DI Zoe Finch series, I always intended for it to have six books. And in book six, Deadly Fallout, I brought the police corruption series arc to a close.

So why write a seventh book?

Well, the answer is kind of that I was put up to it.

In November 2021, I was interviewed by Sacha Black of the Rebel Author Podcast. She and I talked about my two series so far (Dorset Crime and Zoe Finch) and about my plans for the future.

And then she asked me a very sensible question.

(Bear in mind that it was November.)

“Your Zoe Finch books,” she said, “they’re all called Deadly Something. Why don’t you write a Christmas book? You should call it Deadly Christmas.”

Now, crime fiction isn’t like romance, or even cosy mystery. Christmas books aren’t really a thing.

But Deadly Christmas? I couldn’t really resist. And so I got to thinking about a Christmas story for Zoe.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t simply write Deadly Christmas on a whim. And there’s more to it than just a Christmas-themed case for Zoe. It links to the next set of Zoe books in the Cumbria Crime series and introduces some new Birmingham characters who just might appear in a future spinoff series.

But there’s an aspect of Birmingham at Christmas that I just knew would be a perfect setting for a murder investigation, and that’s the Frankfurt Christmas market.

The Christmas market is a Birmingham institution. It runs from early November to a few days before Christmas every year, and has been doing so since 1997. And, as I write in the opening chapters of Deadly Christmas, it divides Brummies.

There are those that love it, and those that hate it.

Those that love it see it as a fundamental element of Christmas in Birmingham, something the city wouldn’t be without. They love the crowds, the lights, the cheesy music and bad wine... everything about it.

Those that hate it, on the other hand, see it as a nuisance. They hate having to push their way through crowds to get through the city centre. They hate the kitsch tackiness of it all. And they hate the mess, and the crowds, and the drunkenness.

I’ve sat in both camps. I’ve had years when my kids were small and we loved the lights and the noise and the chance to ride the carousel and whizz down the helter-skelter. Another year, when I lived in the city centre and got heartily fed up of pushing through crowds to get home, not to mention being woken in the small hours by revellers who’d had one too many steins of beer. And last year, when the lovely Sally and I rode the carousel with our kids and then embarrassed them by dancing to the tunes of the ‘singing’ reindeer at the gluhwein stall.

So I can see both sides. Unlike the lovely Sally, who is a committed fan (she sees the good in everything, it’s one of the things I love about her). And unlike poor Wendy, who we meet in the opening chapter of Deadly Christmas.

Wendy is a street cleaner. I got the idea for her character on a Sunday morning in December 2021, when I got up at 7am to do some location research and found myself the only person at the market... except for the poor buggers cleaning up last night’s mess.

But Wendy finds more than the usual discarded currywursts and foul pavement pizzas. Behind a little wooden cabin housing one of the market stalls, she and her colleague Manjit find a body.

At first, the police think it’s a homeless man, dead of overexposure. His clothes and the fact he doesn’t seem to have washed for some time certainly point at that.

But then they realise that this man was more than first impressions would indicate. Someone with political importance, and someone whose death is looking more and more suspicious...