Today I’m taking part in the blog tour for Unjust Bias. I’m sharing a guest post written by the author with thanks to Rachel Gilbey at Rachel’s Random Resources for inviting me on the blog tour and to Liz Mistry for writing her guest post!

Blurb:

UNJUST BIAS: Being Different could cost you your life.

(DI Gus McGuire #8)

A murdered boy disowned by his family.

A teen terrified his past will catch up with him.

A girl with nowhere to go.

Men with rage so visceral they will do anything.

With the unsolved murder of a homeless boy still preying on his mind, DI Gus McGuire is confronted with a similar murder, a missing teen and no clues.

Does the answer lie with an illegal dark web site where ‘slaves’ are auctioned off? Or with an online forum for teens?

How can Gus keep people safe when unjust bias rears its head and being different could cost you your life…?

Guest Post:

Liz Mistry writes about killing off a character:

Sometimes it hurts to kill off a character

You’d think after all the books I’ve written and all the folk I’ve killed off that I’d have grown immune to killing off characters, wouldn’t you?  Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Sometimes characters shuffle their way into your heart and before you know it, their suffering and experiences become yours. Their joys and highs and lows affect your own mood. You smile at their jokes, you grow indignant on their behalf, you want to punch their enemies and hug their protectors… so how the hell could I kill off some of the characters I loved best in Unjust Bias?  

Of course, it’s easy to kill off the bad characters in a book and mostly, I’ve no problem creating devious deaths for the most evil of characters (rubs hands in glee and gives evil laugh).  However, sometimes those that end up dead are the innocents and in Unjust Bias, I found myself topping a few characters that I really struggled to kill because I’d grown so close to them. I’d allowed them to wriggle under my defences like the nimble limboers they are and although I knew their fate early on, the inevitable ‘end moments’ were the most difficult parts of the book to write. 

I’m not going to name them because of spoilers – when you read the book, I reckon it’ll be easy to work out which of them I hated killing off. So, why kill them off, you ask? Why not change your storyline and save them?

Well that’s easy. For the purpose of the narrative, I had to make hard choices about the fate of some of my characters. In order to do justice to their stories, I had to bite the bullet and take the narrative to its logical conclusion, because I felt that their fate would have been similar if their lives were acted out on the streets of a city rather than in the pages of my book.

The bottom line is, I suppose, that when we write or read crime fiction, we’re taking real life experiences and fictionalising them in order to expose the circumstances around their lives. 

Crime fiction documents things that are happening in society and illuminates the worst things that humans do to one and other through compelling narratives that readers can read from the safety of their own homes. That’s what’s so compelling about the crime fiction genre and why so many readers are absorbed by it. It is real and sometimes visceral. It is thought provoking and informative. It is cerebral and engaging. So… I hope that, like me, you’ll shed a tear or two for the wonderful characters whose stories ended so abruptly within the pages of Unjust Bias, but know that when I killed them, I was gentle and did it in order to celebrate their lives. 

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Unjust Bias is available from Amazon.

You can follow the rest of the blog tour here: