Tony Saunders

After a thirty five year career in the City as an Insurance Broker, I moved to rural Kent in retirement. Writing was not on the agenda until I had the opportunity to attend a local creative writing course held in one of the two village pubs. This sparked my interest and I later joined a local writers’ group which included four published authors, when we moved to a nearby historic town.

After a couple of very interesting years writing and critiquing short stories with the group, Lockdown happened. I took this enforced break to start my first novel, Publish and be Dead, which was finished in six months. This drew on my career work experiences and a dislike of property developers who build on green belt land against the wishes of local people. An investigative journalist looking into the developer is targeted by a hitman and the book introduced Detective Inspector Jim Trussell and his assistant, Detective Sergeant Jackie Joynton. The story was set in real and invented locations in Kent and the City, mainly because I couldn’t find towns that had everything I needed for the story.

After starting on the usual round of submissions to agents, I was accepted by a publisher, Andrew Sparke of APS Books in West Yorkshire. With his encouragement, I started on a second novel, Mortgaged to Death, featuring the same two detectives. This is set in the same fictional town of Woodchester and begins with the disappearance of the manager of the local branch of the fictional High Weald Building Society. It leads to the discovery of a mortgage fraud and the deaths of people involved in the crime…