Bad Boy
Series: Jason Davey Mysteries #5
Author: Winona Kent
Genre: International Mystery
Setting: England
Release Date: September 26, 2024, by Winona Kent/Blue Devil Books
Pages: 278
Summary:
Fresh from a 34-day, 18-city tour of England, professional musician and amateur sleuth Jason Davey accepts an invitation from a fan, Marcus Merritt, to meet at Level 72 of The Shard to sign one of his band’s programs. Marcus hands him the booklet, then leaps to his death from the open viewing platform. Thus begins a week-long quest, during which Jason is tasked with retrieving a stolen collection of scores by England’s most famous composer, Sir Edward Elgar.
Marcus shared Elgar’s love of eccentric puzzles and games, and the challenging clues he’s assembled for Jason seem to mirror the 14 themes in Elgar’s renowned Enigma Variations. Jason’s journey takes him to Derbyshire and then back to London, and a four-hour walking tour of Soho’s lost music venues where, in Denmark Street, he faces a life-threatening battle with two adversaries: a treacherous Russian gangster who is also hunting for the stolen collection, and Marcus’s sister—who holds the key to a decades-old mystery involving a notorious London crime lord’s missing daughter.
Bad Boy is the fifth book in Winona Kent’s mystery series featuring jazz musican-turned-amateur sleuth Jason Davey.
Excerpt
Chapter Four
I didn’t end up needing my phone alarm. My brain snapped me awake after about forty minutes. And I wasn’t quite sure where I was.
“We’ve just passed Kettering,” said the young lady who was wheeling a trolley of snacks down the aisle. She handed me a packet of biscuits and a cup of tea. “And we’ll be in Leicester in about ten minutes. Milk? Sugar?”
“Both, please,” I said. “Thanks.”
I felt like I’d tumbled down a rabbit hole. It was surreal. How the hell had I ended up on a train hurtling through the East Midlands? I could barely remember getting up that morning. A taxi ride. A vague recollection of the Lower Arcade at St Pancras and Elton John’s piano. And, strangely, a vivid memory of buying a bright green bottle of Radox shower gel.
I still had that slip of paper. The scrawled blue pen note from Marcus Merritt. I read it again.
Judy
Wensley Manor
Market Street
Newlydale
I put the note back in my bag, and watched through the window as the train glided past Leicester’s outlying neighbourhoods, big box stores, and storage facilities and parking lots, and then, rows of houses.
The station. A one-minute stop while passengers got on and off. And we were away again.
Ten minutes later, Derby.
I picked up my bag, disembarked, and consulted the indicator boards. And then I made my way over to a quiet secondary platform where the regional shuttle would take me up to Matlock.
Emotionally, I was completely at sea.
Physically, I felt like I’d flown halfway around the world and woken up during the afternoon rush while my half-asleep body was screaming that it was still the middle of the night at home.
The little diesel shuttle had two cars and one class of service. I sat down in a group of four seats with a table between them. I put my bag on the seat beside me, but I needn’t have worried. There were only about a dozen other passengers on the entire train, and none of them wanted anything to do with me. I hadn’t showered when I’d left my flat in London, and I hadn’t bothered to shave. I was the poster boy for anti-social.
The little railway ran north from Derby, meandering to and fro over the River Derwent, stopping at stations with lovely imaginative-sounding names…Duffield, Belper, Ambergate. After Whatstandwell, the track ran alongside a stretch of the historic little Cromford Canal. It then disappeared into a series of tunnels, emerging at Matlock Bath (which had a curious aerial tramway going up to the top of a nearby hill), before it reached the end of the line at Matlock itself.
It was a quiet little stone block station, opened during Queen Victoria’s reign in 1850, with canopy trim and columns painted in EMR’s distinctive cream and dark red livery.
Jason Davey Mysteries Series
About the Author
Winona Kent is an award-winning author who was born in London, England and grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan, where she completed her BA in English at the University of Regina. After moving to Vancouver, she graduated from UBC with an MFA in Creative Writing and a diploma in Writing for Screen and TV from Vancouver Film School.
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 debut novel Skywatcher was a finalist in the Seal Books First Novel Award and was published by Bantam Books 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 and fourth books in Winona’s Jason Davey Mystery series, Lost Time and Ticket to Ride, were published in 2020 and 2022. Her fifth Jason Davey Mystery, Bad Boy, was published in 2024.
Winona also writes short fiction. Her story “Salty Dog Blues” appeared in Sisters in Crime-Canada West’s anthology Crime Wave in October 2020 and was nominated as a finalist in Crime Writers of Canada’s Awards of Excellence for Best Crime Novella in April 2021. “Blue Devil Blues” was one of the four entries in the anthology Last Shot, published in June 2021, and “Terminal Lucidity” appeared in the Sisters in Crime-Canada West anthology, Women of a Certain Age (October 2022). “On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog”, will appear in the upcoming Sisters in Crime-Canada West anthology, Dangerous Games (October 2024).
A collection of Winona’s short stories, Ten Stories That Worried My Mother, was published in 2023.
Winona has been a temporary secretary, a travel agent , a screenwriter and the Managing Editor of a literary magazine. She’s currently the national Vice-Chair and the BC/YT rep for the Crime Writers of Canada and is also an active member of Sisters in Crime – Canada West
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Giveaway
Prize: All five Jason Davey Mysteries in ebook format (ePub or PDF).
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