Author with links to Anglesey publishes two new crime novels

Brick and its follow-up, Shadows, published through Bloodhound Books, are Conrad Jones’ 16th and 17th books and an 18th is already in production.

The writer is originally from Tarbock Green, near Liverpool, but spent a number of years living in Holyhead, which he says he still calls home.

In Brick, a teenager is the victim of an unprovoked attack while walking his dog and a murder investigation begins. A cruel twist of fate then makes his innocent family the target of a campaign of terror.

Shadows, meanwhile, follows a hijacked drug deal which has resulted in murder and an eye witness goes missing. When victims are discovered strung up from the rafters of an abandoned fish factory, on the Anglesey coastline, the police are baffled as to what went on but a deserted trawler found at the scene helps put the pieces together. Jones, 50, has also produced two biographies, nine writing guides, 20 audio books and translations into five languages.

In March 1993, he was a restaurant manager in Warrington when two IRA bombs exploded in the street outside, resulting in the deaths of three-year-old Johnathan Ball and 12-year-old Tim Parry along with injuries to more than 50 other people.

“Deeply affected by the attack, it led to a long-term interest in the motivation and mind set of criminal gangs,” Jones said.

Because of that experience, his early novels follow the adventures of an elite counter terrorist unit, The Terrorist Task Force, and its leader, John Tankersley, or ‘Tank’.

In 2007, Jones travelled to America, around the time that Madeleine McCann disappeared.

Then, following a burglary at his home and subsequently finding himself – unemployed – on a beach in Clearwater, Florida, he started on his first book,
Soft Target.

Hearing the news reports about Madeleine McCann while he was in America would inspire his later work, The Child Taker.

And Shadows, he says, “would have happened but for that burglary and my experiences in Warrington”.