What is Simon Toyne reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Simon Toyne, author of The Black Highway.

His entry begins:

I just this second finished reading Fatherland by Robert Harris.

Harris is always dependable and is back in the limelight again recently after the success of Conclave, which weaves a taut thriller around the selection of a new Pope.

Fatherland was his first novel, written after a successful career in journalism, and is speculative fiction that follows the investigation of a senior Nazi official after the end of the Second World war after Germany won, Hitler is about to celebrate his seventieth birthday, Europe is United under the swastika, and the president of the United States, Joseph Kennedy (JFK’s dad), is about to visit the country to cement friendly ties between the two nations.

It’s a brilliant book, so well thought out and going into just enough detail about how things work post-war that you totally understand the repressive world you are in without ever losing sight of the central mystery, which involves...[read on]

About The Black Highway, from the publisher:

Laughton Rees is back in the latest novel from the bestselling author of the Sanctus trilogy—this time, with a case that hits uncomfortably close to home and threatens the thing Laughton values most: her daughter.

Forensic specialist Laughton Rees is not ashamed of her checkered past—after all, her youthful indiscretions led to the birth of her daughter Gracie, the person she loves most in the world—but when Gracie’s father unexpectedly turns up in their lives again, Laughton is automatically wary.

Shelby Facer is a dangerous man, formerly imprisoned for his involvement in an international drug trafficking ring, and no matter what Laughton once felt for him, she doesn’t want him anywhere near Gracie. But when Shelby claims that he has information about an especially difficult murder case she is working, she can’t turn him down.

A body with no head or hands has recently turned up in the river Thames, and the police are at a loss until Shelby identifies the man. The victim was part of a highly secretive smuggling ring Shelby was involved with during his and Laughton’s youth—which Laughton’s father, former commissioner for the Metropolitan police, was investigating before he died.

Laughton throws herself into her father’s old files to try to trace the connections between past and present, but as she and DCI Tannahill Khan circle closer to the truth, the case becomes dangerously personal. When another body turns up, mutilated just like the first, the victim is no stranger to Laughton. She’ll have to face the darkest parts of her past to find the man behind the murders—before he takes away everything she loves.

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--Marshal Zeringue