Ben Mears

Ben, how long have you been writing and how did you get started?
I began writing around twenty-five years ago when I was composing far more songs than our band needed (I was in a band called Gethsemane Rose, at the time). To see song after song shelved became a frustration. I was also inspired around that time by several books I had read. These were Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness and its sequel, Piercing the Darkness, and the Cadfael novels by Ellis Peters.

'echoes of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, faced with a tangled web of plot and sub-plot in an imaginative post-apocalyptic society with a dash of the supernatural ... the mixture makes for an excellent read'

'I cannot wait for the next book in what is obviously going to become a series. Detectives, spooky goings on and dastardly conspiracies, mixed in with a society that is morally bankrupt and a hero who wants to bring change'

Of all the cases that linger in my mind from those early years it is, perhaps, this one that looms largest. I was still studying my trade, one demanding trial by fire or, to put it another way, learning on the job. My father taught me what he could, of course, before passing over, but there is simply no substitute for experience, whatever your elders say...