In the run-up to the 2004 Beijing Olympics, great swathes of the city were demolished by armies of hammer-wielding workmen, transforming the capital in the space of little more than twelve months into a bustling modern metropolis, with little sign of the history and hutongs that had been so apparent when I first arrived. The Beijing police department is baffled by the motive, and as the story progresses with the investigation by Campbell and Yan, the readers find that something sinister is afoot, and not just a few people but the entire country is under threat. The Enzo Files Books I didn’t know of his death for over a year. Joe had worked and lived in London, Ontario, in Canada, for 23 years before retiring in 1996 from the University of Western Ontario to become Professor Emeritus in Genetics. I had not been in touch with him since completing my research for the book “ Coffin Road”, about bees and neonicotinoids – a book inspired by Joe’s relentless search for answers to the mystery of the world’s disappearing bees. He had, at that time, been on dialysis, but I’d had no idea that death was so close. Peter said: “The helipcopters or eVTOLS that I use in the book are all in development at the moment. They are amazing and very recently I read somewhere that the Olympic Games in Paris will have eVTOLS fly passengers from Charles de Gaulle to the centre of Paris, so these things are coming onstream and they will be the norm in the future and transatlantic flying may be something of the past. I had my first mobile phone, a Sony ‘Mars bar’ as they called them then, and it was very hard to get a signal anywhere!”

I am not often moved to blog about things I read in the tabloid press, but I was incensed by this ignorant, poorly researched piece of trash “journalism” perpetrated by a pompous columnist called Richard Godwin in a rag called the London Evening Standard. Since I was very much around in the seventies when this was all happening, working as a journalist in Glasgow, I felt that it was a project worth a donation. I, along with others, provided the cash that has enabled Felipe to bring the project to a conclusion. And the Glasgow Film Festival has now invited “ Nae Pasaran” for a screening at its closing night gala on March 4th, when it will have it’s world première. Events run at independent bookstores are an absolute pleasure. Talks and Q&A sessions take place in an intimate environment, with chairs crammed into small spaces between canyons of books. The bookstore owners know their customers and encourage them to come along to listen to and meet authors who are new to them. Fans get the chance to mingle and talk with authors and other readers. And after the fans have gone home, the author stays on at the bookstore to sign piles of books that the owner then goes on to hand-sell, marketing via newsletters to readers further afield, or who couldn’t come along that night. And I’d like to thank my readers around the world for their continued – and growing – support. I met many hundreds of you in person at book events all over the UK, in France and in Italy, but I was very disappointed to have to cancel the US and Canada tour in 2015 because of unexpectedly having to go into hospital for surgery. The good news is that I’m fully recovered and I hope to make it over to North America later in 2016.And so we return to Luskentyre beach on the Isle of Harris, and a to man who is washed up without memory or reason… He is also the only Westerner to have been an honorary member of the Chinese Crime Writers Association’s Beijing Chapter. With numerous other awards and honors, May has some way of captivating readers and scratching their itch for an intriguing murder mystery. Wu He Peng had been appointed to this job as reward for catching four notorious criminals who had been robbing museums of priceless artefacts and smuggling them out of the country. One of the first things he did in his new job was make an eight-hour drama based on that investigation. He wrote it, produced it, and starred in it as himself, bringing him instant fame throughout China where the average nightly television audience is 500 million.

And it was the French version that was read by the book scout for award-winning young publishing house Quercus – a UK publisher that had not even existed when the book was first offered to British publishers. They immediately stepped in to buy the English language rights and were the ones to commission a further two books to create what has become known as The Lewis Trilogy. When Sime arrives, it is only to discover that the wife of the victim, and prime suspect in his murder, is unaccountably familiar to him, even although they have never met… Campbell gets in a road accident with Li Yan, and while she assumes that Li does not speak English, Li scolds her in perfect English. Getting off the wrong foot is how the two characters meet for the first time, and then it all goes downhill for both. When I got there the office was empty, except for bureau chief Mike Chinoy and an assistant provided by the Chinese government. But, of course, without power it was impossible to view the footage, and although I was able to sit and chat to Mike about the events of two years before, I always wondered if it was more than coincidence that prevented me from seeing that video. In doing so he conveyed to me the horrors of this process, and all the dangers that were, and are, being ignored by the biotech giants who are forcing their technologies upon us in relentless pursuit of profit, and with scant regard for the dangers to the environment and the human race. This very much shaped the story I told in my book.

So I wrestled with the idea of how would I write about this in a way that would draw attention to it.