Dear Reader,
I’m so pleased you’ve decided to have a look at my latest Jason Davey mystery, Ticket to Ride! If you’re at all familiar with Jason, you’ll know he’s a professional musician and an amateur sleuth, which I think is quite unusual in the crime and mystery genre. He’s also quite different in that he doesn’t actually investigate murders. Although people do end up dead on his watch, his primary interest is finding lost people, lost objects, lost money, that sort of thing.
In my previous novel, Lost Time, Jason was rehearsing to go on tour with his mum’s band, Figgis Green while he was solving the mystery of a young woman who went missing in the 1970s. In Ticket to Ride, Jason’s now actually on tour with the band—while he embarks on a personal quest to solve the mystery of who his maternal grandfather really is. Unfortunately, he also discovers that someone following the tour seems to have a very personal grudge against him—and his mother!
I wrote this book for you because I wanted to share my love of family tree research, my ongoing interest in gargoyles and ghosts and fortune-tellers and guardian angels, my sense of fun when it comes to inventing a completely fictitious folky-pop band and sending them out on the road on a tour bus, and finally, my enthusiasm for Jason. He’s a very cool character with a dry sense of humor and a lot of vulnerabilities.
Jason didn’t actually start out intending to be an amateur sleuth! He started out as an entertainer on board a cruise ship, in a novel I wrote in 2012 called Cold Play. It wasn’t really a crime novel—at least, I didn’t write it as such—and I thought it would just be a one-off story. I went on to write three time travel novels with different characters, and then in 2017, my publisher suggested that I tackle mystery-writing and perhaps consider bringing Jason back in a very different role.
I came up with a story called Disturbing the Peace, which started out in England and ended up in northern Canada in the depths of a very cold winter as Jason tracked down a musician who seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth.
I discovered I was quite good at writing mysteries and that I really enjoyed it and, most of all, I was really comfortable inhabiting Jason’s persona once again.
The next book I wrote was Notes on a Missing G-String. It’s a clever title that people love, and it really came about as a joke with my publisher. The title stuck, and I wrote a story around it. I keep having to assure my readers it isn’t porn, even though it does involve a real missing G-string and some money stolen from a stripper’s locker.
After that came Lost Time, where Jason takes a leave of absence from his gig at the Blue Devil Club in Soho, and relocates to England’s south coast to begin rehearsals for a tour involving his mum’s old band. As usual, there’s a mystery to solve, and I had wonderful fun inventing original songs, reimagining real songs, and coming up with all kinds of band conflicts, issues and arguments.
And so, finally, here we are with Ticket to Ride. The band is on the road—and someone with a grudge really isn’t happy about that.
Brian Richardson (my publisher) and I have created a rather
clever Figgis Green website which gives you the look and feel of a real touring
band to go along with Ticket to Ride, the novel. Please do drop by and
visit:
Out of all the characters I’ve ever created, Jason Davey is my
all-time favorite. I really hope he becomes one of your favorites too! And I
hope you enjoy the ride!
Winona’s writing breakthrough came many years ago when she won First Prize in the Flare Magazine Fiction Contest with her short story about an all-night radio newsman, Tower of Power.
Her spy novel Skywatcher was a finalist in the Seal Books First Novel Competition and was published in 1989. This was followed by a sequel, The Cilla Rose Affair, and her first mystery, Cold Play, set aboard a cruise ship in Alaska.
After three time-travel romances (Persistence of Memory, In Loving Memory and Marianne’s Memory), Winona returned to mysteries with Disturbing the Peace, a novella, in 2017 and the novel Notes on a Missing G-String in 2019, both featuring the character she first introduced in Cold Play, professional jazz musician / amateur sleuth Jason Davey.
The third book in Winona’s Jason Davey Mystery series, Lost Time, was published in 2020.
Ticket to Ride is the fourth book in Winona’s Jason Davey Mysteries.
Winona has been a temporary secretary, a travel agent, a screenwriter and the Managing Editor of a literary magazine. She’s currently the BC/YK/NWT rep for the Crime Writers of Canada and is also an active member of Sisters n Crime – Canada West. She recently retired from her full-time admin job at UBC’s School of Population and Public Health, and is now happily embracing life as a full-time author.
You can visit her website at http://www.winonakent.com and connect with her on Twitter, Facebook and Goodreads.
But when a fortune-teller in Sheffield warns them of impending danger, the band is suddenly plagued by a series of seemingly-unrelated mishaps.
After Jason is attacked and nearly killed in Cambridge, and a fire alarm results in a very personal theft from Mandy’s hotel room, it becomes clear they’re being targeted by someone with a serious grudge.
And when Figgis Green plays a gig at a private estate in Tunbridge Wells, that person finally makes their deadly intentions known.
Jason must rely on his instincts, his Instagram “guardian angel,” and a wartime ghost who might possibly share his DNA, in order to survive.
Book Information
Release Date: March 26, 2022
Publisher: Blue Devil Books
Soft Cover: 978-1777329433; 230 pages; $15.70; E-Book, $3.93
Amazon: https://amzn.to/3i0xRqY
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