A career spent writing and directing for the screen turns out to be excellent training for crime fiction, and Tim Sullivan is the proof. Long before he wrote a word of the George Cross novels, the British screenwriter and director had built a substantial body of work in film and television, with credits including Jack and Sarah, A Handful of Dust, Letters to Juliet and Flushed Away, and, on the small screen, Cold Feet and Coronation Street.
He came to novels comparatively late and found his subject in DS George Cross, an autistic detective working in Bristol whose colleagues find him exasperating and whose suspects find him inescapable. Cross has no small talk, no interest in hunches and no tolerance for shortcuts. He simply keeps asking questions long after everyone else has decided the case is closed, and the series draws its considerable tension from that patience.
The books have topped the charts and sold more than a million copies worldwide, largely by word of mouth. Sullivan writes clean, dialogue-driven prose, which will surprise nobody, and treats his detective’s neurodivergence as method rather than quirk. He lives in north London.
9 hours and 51 minutes
