Visit my website at www.rowmark.co.uk for details of all my crime novels

Dead Man's Wharf , the fourth in the marine mystery crime series featuring my flawed and rugged detective, Inspector Andy Horton, is officially published in hardcover this week (although it's been on sale on Amazon for a while). I've posted a video on my You Tube channel , where you can listen to me reading an extract from the novel ( as well as listen to and view all my interviews to date) or you can click on to my web site and listen to the video interviews there. You can read a longer extract from chapter one of Dead Man's Wharf on my official web site at http://www.rowmark.co.uk/ Below you can listen to me reading an extract from chapter one of Dead Man's Wharf . Hope you enjoy it.

This is DI Andy Horton's patch, Portsmouth CID and the Solent, the setting for my marine mystery crime novels. Horton is a brave earthy character, fearless with a desperate need to belong and yet always just on the outside. He’s never quite able to trust or let go of the enforced control that’s protected him throughout his tough childhood. A boy from the streets of Portsmouth, he’s been raised with the rough, the evil, the manipulative, the selfish and the vulnerable. He seeks justice and doesn’t much care how he gets it, just as long as the villains get caught. And here is Old Portsmouth and the Spinnaker Tower at Gunwharf Quays -Oyster Quays in my novels. Horton is joined in Portsmouth CID by Sergeant Barney Cantelli, half English, half Italian a family man married to Charlotte with five children. Cantelli stood by Horton during his suspension following the rape allegation. Laid back, easy-going, dark-haired and wiry, Cantelli has a great sense of humour and a strong...

England on a summer's day - sultry, sunny and still - I think not! Wet, windy and wild is more like it. Where has our summer gone? Is this the product of global warming or just a typical British summer? Whatever - crossing on the tiny ferry from Hayling Island to Portsmouth this morning was a bit of an adventure. Picture a small flat bottomed landing craft traversing the narrow stretch of Langstone Harbour in a Force Nine gale on a raging tide, the boat bucketing and dipping like one of those rides at the funfair with a bit of sea spray thrown in and you won't be far off the mark. The boat in the picture below is the Harbour Master's and not the Hayling Ferry, I hasten to add. And there whilst crossing, on my starboard side, was the concrete structure of the Mulberry, in the picture on the left ( the sea was definitely not this colour this morning). It was one of the floating harbours for the D-Day invasion which didn't make it out of the harbour, and which is the setti...