Book review: Blood Red

Published on Saturday 16 January 2010 10:41

Blood Red by Quintin Jardine is published by Headline, priced £12.99

Crime writer Quintin Jardine has a recurring nightmare. Not a scary blood-soaked nighttime imagining – no-one is knifed or has their head caved in, unlike the victims in his best-selling novels.

"In my nightmare, my alarm goes off at 6:30am and I get up, shower and shave, put on my suit and tie, get in the car and drive into Edinburgh and go to the office," explains Jardine. "Then I wake up and realise that it was only a bad dream. Every so often I get it and I wake up in a sweat."

Luckily for the Motherwell-born writer, who divides his time between Gullane and L'Escala, on the Spanish Costa Brava, his days working in PR are long gone. These days he moves no further than his computer, where he turns out "a couple of thousand" words a day. Blood Red, his 30th novel, is launched this week at Musselburgh Library. It's the latest in the Primavera Blackstone series, and sees the feisty widow enjoying the quiet life in an idyllic village on the Catalan coast of Spain when she finds herself in the frame for murder.

The 64-year-old, whose first novel, Skinner's Rules, was published in 1993, says: "One of the great things about doing what I do is coming up with characters.

"I just hope everybody enjoys the book."

• Jardine signs Blood Red today at Kesley's Bookshop, Haddington (11:30am); WHSmith, the Gyle (1:30pm); Waterstone's, The Elements, Livingston (3:30pm); and tomorrow at Waterstone's, the Kingsgate, Dunfermline (2pm).