Page Updated: 23/04/99
Phil Lovesey
Phil Lovesey
Ploughing Potter's FieldPloughing Potter's Field New19 Apr 99
Death DutiesDeath Duties Newpbk 15 Mar 99
About the Author (Photo by Lucinda Lovesey)
Bibliography


New First British Edition HarperCollins (1999)
Ploughing Potter's Field
The tabloids called Frank Rattigan 'the Beast of East 16'. The authorities called him a dangerous sociopath. But one man called him the only possible road to redemption.
When Adrian Rawlings undertakes a series of interviews with an incarcerated killer, he cannot possibly realize that his encounters with the man who spent three days torturing, murdering then calmly dismembering a young air hostess 'for fun' in East London, will eat so deeply into his own psychological neuroses and inadequacies.
And as Rawlings struggles to find the vital threads to rationalize the horrifying crime, he finds himself drawn into a dark world of secret histories and hidden agendas which stretch far beyond the Beast himself.
But perhaps the answers Rawlings strives for lie buried within his own childhood - a place where vulnerable minds are always prey to the evil machinations of others...

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New Paperback - HarperCollins (1999)
First British Edition HarperCollins (1998)
Death Duties
See Review by Andrew Taylor
See Review by Val McDermid
Maldon, Essex, 1969 - two young policemen and a WPC listen intently as a seven-year-old girl calmly tells them why she's just killed her father.
Thirty years later, an old woman is discovered murdered in her flat, hideously daubed with cheap make-up. Police are baffled, searching for a motive to give any kind of clue as to the killer. The appearance of a second body, days later, sends the press into a frenzy, demanding answers to the gruesome mystery of the Christmas Killer.
It takes the combined talents of all three original officers to delve deeply into their own pasts and insecurities to solve the killings - a journey fraught with uncomfortable emotional discoveries and hidden secrets. It is only by unravelling the half-truths and deceptions of the past that a deranged killer's twisted intentions can be halted in the future.
Phil Lovesey's chilling novel combines all the excitement of a murder mystery with a depth of psychological insight into the areas of child manipulation and psychopathy that will fascinate and haunt the reader. Death Duties marks the debut of a remarkable new talent.
'Phil Lovesey's Death Duties is chilling and deviously plotted, an idiosyncratic marriage between the traditional English police procedural and the psychological thriller. Laced with black humour…it links past and present in a quirky tale tat demonstrates a real storyteller's gift' Val McDermid, The Times
'a dark tale of sordid crime in the Home Counties, it [Death duties] introduces a promising new, young British voice' Maxim Jakubowski, Time Out
'Ingenious, interesting debut novel' Philip Oakes, Literary Review
'Terrific plot and a name to watch' Frances Fyfield, Mail on Sunday
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About The Author
Phil Lovesey is the son of award-winning crime writer Peter Lovesey. Born in Essex in 1963, he was educated at Tiffin Boys School before taking a foundation course in art, leading to a degree in film and television studies, and a career as London's laziest copywriter at a succession of the capital's most desperate advertising agencies. He turned to 'proper' writing in 1994 with a series of short stories, and was runner-up in the prestigious MWA 50th Anniversary short-story competition in 1995.
He lives in Chelmsford with his wife and three young children. Ploughing Potter's Field is his second novel, his first, Death Duties, having been published to great acclaim in 1998.

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Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.

  • Ploughing Potter's Field (HarperCollins, 1999) New Apr 99
  • Death Duties (HarperCollins, 1998) New HarperCollins Pbk Mar 99

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