Bøker av Mark Timlin

In this shamelessly personal view of the best television crime series, Mark Timlin has taken the straightforward approach of including any crime show that he's enjoyed since he was small. Fortunately, that encompasses an enormous range of shows, from the good, to the bad, to the plain bizarre. Classics range from Z-Cars to Hill Street Blues, The Professionals, The Bill, and Callan, but Mark also includes 77 Sunset Strip, Highway Patrol, and Johnny Staccato from the late 1950s, the Birmingham-based Gangsters from the mid-70s and the more recent 55 Degrees North--and of course lots more. The first 90 are in no particular order, the top 10 in order of preference. Packed with information and curious facts, there is nostalgia aplenty, sharp opinions, and surely plenty to disagree with and dispute--and of course, that's the point. Amuse your friends, irritate your enemies, and enter into the debate--this book is the perfect jumping off point for sorting out your own personal Top Ten.

Nick Sharman is nobody's favourite person. Ex-cop, ex-doper, invalided out of the Met after a stray bullet in the foot saved him from an investigation into the missing evidence from a drugs haul. The cops don't like him. The villains don't like him. Sharman is unemployable. So he's hired himself an office and set up shop as a private...

Family trouble! Growing old quietly was never really an option for Nick Sharman. When he takes on a job for a prosperous Manchester businessman looking for his runaway teenage daughter, Meena, he should, perhaps, have known better. He finds himself in a race against time to save he girl from the kind of trouble that gives families a bad name. Trying to do the right thing, Nick swaps sides and ends up starring in his own version of a Straw Dogs shoot out with family and friends, where nobody comes out the winner.

Nick Sharman's daughter Judith has returned to Scotland and nothing will tempt him back into the business again--unless it's Ray Miller. Miller, a lottery rollover double-jackpot winner, wants to find the wife who left him. This should be a simple task for Sharman, giving him easy money and evidence for Judith that he's trying to get his life together. When Miller's wife, Sharon, turns out to be a whore addicted to heroin supplied by her pimp, Sharman's fate appears to be sealed. The news of Miller's newfound wealth has brought out south London's worst villains, the most unpleasant of whom--Adult Baby Albert and Mr. Freeze--decide the best way to get what they want is to use Sharon to prise it from Miller. And Sharman, the patsy, is primed to take the fall.

Sharman's ninth finds him asked to clear an unfairly convicted man's name Nick Sharman stumbles home with two exotic dancers, Sandi and Mandi (aka Tracey and Dawn), which is fun for him until he gets a phone call from the past that ruins everything. Sailor Grant has just been released from prison, doing hard time for a crime he didn't commit. A police officer's daughter had been found raped and murdered. Someone had to be found, so Sailor Grant the local sex offender was sent down. Sharman always had his doubts, but that part of his life is over. Sailor keeps phoning and wants Sharman to help get justice, Nick tells him to leave him alone. The next day Sailor is dead and has left Sharman a note. The coppers Millar and Collier invite him to read the note, and then they beat him half to death. Lying in hospital, Nick realizes that he must solve it before those close to him are killed. So with a little help from his friends Charlie, Chas, and Monkey (a burglar, who can break into anything), Sharman must find the truth about the events from his past.

Sharman is coerced into assisting the drug squad in the seventh in the series Life as a private detective has proved too much for Nick Sharman, and when a chance run-in with a couple of young thugs secures him a job as a part-time barman, it looks as if he's found a promising new occupation. Unfortunately the drug squad has other plans. With two coppers slaughtered in as many weeks, Sharman finds himself being coerced into helping track down the killers. All too soon he is working alongside a ponytailed Detective Sergeant with unexpected sexual tastes, and consorting even more closely with a beautiful high-class whore who likes to be spanked--never mind some dangerously unpredictable big-spending villains. The perils of playing pig-in-the-middle certainly add excitement to life, but Sharman is now mixing with some very bad company, and even he cannot predict the scale of the bloodbath that will follow.