Neil White is a criminal lawyer and crime writer who lives in the North of England. His Jack Garrett series was previously published by HarperCollins, with Cold Kill spending four weeks at the top of the charts, with the Parker Brothers trilogy being published by Little Brown in 2013. The final book in his Dan Grant/Jayne Brett legal thriller trilogy, The Innocent Ones, will be published by Hera on 24th April 2019.
Tell me about your latest book and why we should read it?
The Innocent Ones is the third in the series involving Dan Grant and Jayne Brett, a defence lawyer and a private investigator. As a lawyer myself, I like to make the books authentic, but as a lover of crime fiction I want them to be exhilarating, page-turning and a little bit chilling. In The Innocent Ones, Dan is defending a man accused of bludgeoning a journalist to death, and all seems straightforward until the victim’s mother offers to help, because she thinks the killer is still out there, and it is all connected to the murders of two children twenty years ago.
If you like legal thrillers fast and exciting, with twists and turns aplenty, you’ll like The Innocent Ones.
If someone was to write your life story what would the title be?
Getting Away With It
As a lifelong reader of crime fiction, I know I’m lucky to have had twelve books published. One day, someone is going to say, “hang on a minute ….”
What’s the strangest fan question or request you’ve received?
This is unusual more in the fact that it’s asked so often, and it’s “Can I be killed in one of your books?” It’s not so much that the people who ask want to be in a book, but that it’s they never want to be the lead detective, or even a bit-part, like someone in a shop. It’s always, “kill me, and make it hurt!” So I oblige.
If you could co-write with anyone in the world (alive or dead) who would it be?
WP Kinsella.
He died recently and wasn’t a crime fiction author. He wrote Shoeless Joe, one of my favourite books, a whimsical tale of an Iowa farmer who heard a voice tell him to build a baseball field on his farm so that the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson could play baseball. It was made into a film with Kevin Costner, Field of Dreams, a very good man-weepie. His style is very poetic, like being caressed, and it would be great to combine it with a dead body here and there.
Tell me something nobody else knows about you (yet!).
When I was around fourteen, in our art class at school, we were told to paint a poster about bike theft and they would all be entered into some big competition. I painted a large hand coming down to steal a small bike, with the words “STOP” above it. I won the competition, county-wide I think, and I had to go to the Town Hall to collect my prize from local dignitaries and the Chief Constable.
I never let on that as it was part of a school lesson I hadn’t taken it seriously, and I’d just painted a poster I had noticed on Z-Cars the week before.
Finally please recommend 3 books that you have recently read and tell me why you’ve chosen these.
The Force by Don Winslow
I was a bit late to the party, but I took it on holiday last year, along with about ten others, and I enjoyed it so much I wanted to bring it back with me just so I could lend it out. Gritty, compelling, just fantastic.
The Wolf Road by Beth Lewis
I loved the voice, superbly written, and more people should be turned on to Beth’s books, because she’s a great writer.
Into The Woods by John Yorke
It’s a “how to” book, explaining how to set out plots and approach the whole plotting thing. It was recommended to me by Erin Kelly and she’s right, it’s a book that should be read once a year by every writer.
The Innocent Ones is published by Hera Books and available to download now: (affiliate link:)
About the book:
Three lives cut short. Two decades of silence. One evil secret.
By day, the park rings with the sound of children’s excited laughter. But in the early hours of the morning, the isolated playground is cloaked in shadows – the perfect hiding place to conceal a brutal murder.
When London journalist, Mark Roberts, is found battered to death, the police quickly arrest petty thief, Nick Connor. Criminal defence lawyer, Dan Grant, along with investigator Jayne Brett, are called to represent him – but with bloody footprints and a stolen wallet linking him to the scene, this is one case they’re unlikely to win.
Until help comes from an unlikely source…when the murder victim’s mother says that Connor is innocent, begging Dan and Jayne to find the real perpetrator.
Unravelling the complex case means finding the connection between Mark’s death and a series of child murders in Yorkshire over twenty years ago. Father of two, Rodney Walker, has spent years in prison after being convicted of killing of 6-year-old William and 7-year-old Ruby back in 1997.
