Brian Price

Publication Date: 4 November 2025
Publisher: Hobeck Books
SYNOPSIS
Pleasure or murder?
Was journalist Jenny Pike seeking extreme pleasure or was she murdered? Mexton police and her partner are suspicious. Things just don’t add up. Who would want Jenny killed and why? If she was murdered, then why was there no trace of the killer?
Deadly weapons
A mystery gunman is injured as his weapon blows up in his face. Someone is making blank weapons lethal. Mexton police are baffled. Meanwhile, a ruthless gangster is after a stolen laptop, and he will stop at nothing to get it back. What is on that laptop?
A dangerous turf war
Soon Mexton is in turmoil with illegal firearms, a vengeful crime boss and an impossible crime to solve. A turf war between drug dealers looms and the police seem powerless to stop it. Can DC Mel Cotton and her colleagues solve the riddles facing them without getting killed? Can a lethal conflict be prevented, before someone gets seriously hurt?
MY REVIEW
If you are in need of a new crime thriller series, you need to read Brian’s ‘Fatal’ series centred around the very capable and very brave DC Mel Cotton. She gets herself into, and out of, a lot of very dangerous situations.
I have read and thoroughly enjoyed 5 of the 6 in the series and I must buy and read the one I’m missing.
So this is book 6 in the series and is mainly about two rival drug gang leaders and an increasingly dangerous turf war. There are also a few other crimes cleverly weaved in to the narrative. So many murders for a small police force to investigate.
The dead bodies pile up. The tension builds and builds. The action does not let up for a second. I stayed awake until after 1am on two consecutive nights as I couldn’t put it down!
The whole story reads as very authentic thanks to Brian’s own experience and his meticulous research.
Must say, I can’t get a certain Bananarama song out of my head now!
I very highly recommend this addictive series. Love the characters, the setting, the action, the tension. It really doesn’t get better than this!
Many thanks for Rebecca at Hobeck for my spot on the tour.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian Price is a chemist and biologist who retired from the Environment Agency in 2016. He is the author of Crime Writing: How to write the science and runs a website offering tips on science for crime writers (www.crimewriterscience.co.uk). He taught science and technology courses for the Open University for 26 years. He has advised number of leading crime writers on scientific aspects of crime.
Brian’s first crime novel, Fatal Trade, was published, as an ebook and paperback, by Hobeck Books on 14th September 2021. A free novella, Fatal Beginnings, is available from Hobeck Books at http://www.hobeck.net. The sequel, Fatal Hate, was published in April 2022 and third novel in the series, Fatal Dose, came out on 31st January 2023. Fatal Blow, the fourth book, is due out on 17th October.
Several of his short stories appear in the anthologies Cuckoo, Lock and Key and Seventy Three, produced by the writing group Writers in Stone, and he has had stories published in the charity anthologies, The Dark Side of Christmas and Cooking the Books (published by Hobeck). His short story The Scent of an Ending appeared in the Crime Writers Association collection Music of the Night.
Find out more about Brian at http://www.brianpriceauthor.co.uk





















