Kerry Costello | Updates

A Murder Mystery Rooted in the Miners’ Strike: Why That Matters

Kerry Costello — Fri, 7 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The miners’ strike of 1984 and 1985 was one of the defining events of twentieth-century British life. Statistics barely capture what it did to communities: 9,808 arrests, over 10,000 charges, three murder charges, and a fracture in the solidarity of the mining communities that never fully healed. Families fell out. Friends became enemies. Men who had trusted each other with their lives underground found themselves on opposite sides of a line that nobody had drawn.

Kerry Costello’s The Long Game takes this history seriously — not as political statement, but as the soil in which murder grows.

The Strike as Motive

At the centre of The Long Game is a group of men who grew up together in Regent Park West, Pendlebury — a gang of five, as they called themselves in childhood, who became miners and remained friends into adulthood. The strike tested that friendship to destruction. And someone, somewhere, has been avenging the consequences ever since.

Detective Sergeant Gibson, investigating what appears at first to be a natural death in 1990, gradually uncovers a pattern of killings that reaches back through the strike and further still. The murders are quiet, methodical, made to look like accidents or natural causes. The killer has been playing the long game — and they are very nearly finished.

A World That Feels True

What gives The Long Game its particular weight is that the miners’ strike is not used as dramatic backdrop. It is used as dramatic cause. The novel understands what the strike actually did to communities like Swinton and Pendlebury: the friendships destroyed, the loyalties tested, the resentments that formed and calcified. One miner killed by another. A conviction many believe to have been wrong. And the question that hangs over everything: if he didn’t do it, who did?

For readers who lived through that period, or who know its history, the novel will carry an additional resonance. For those who don’t, it is an extraordinarily vivid account of what it felt like to live through one of the most divisive episodes in modern British history — told through the intimate lens of a single community.

History as Crime Fiction

The best historical crime fiction doesn’t use its period as decoration. It uses it to show how the crimes could only have happened in that time, in that place, to those people. The Long Game is historical crime fiction of that kind. The murders are inseparable from the strike, from the colliery accident of 1958, from the bombing raids of 1942.

This is crime fiction for readers who want to understand the world the crimes happened in, not just find out who committed them.

[Get The Long Game on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]

— Kerry Costello is the author of The Long Game. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.

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Why the Best Murder Mysteries Are Always About the Past

Kerry Costello — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The greatest murder mysteries share a particular structure, one that Christie understood instinctively and which the best crime writers in every generation have returned to: the crime happens in the present, but its roots reach back into the past. The detective’s job is not merely to identify a killer, but to excavate a history that someone has been desperate to keep buried.

Kerry Costello’s The Long Game takes that structure and extends it to its logical extreme. The murders Detective Sergeant Gibson is investigating in 1990 were set in motion decades earlier. The killer has been patient in a way that defies easy comprehension. And the truth, when Gibson finally assembles it, encompasses events stretching from the Second World War to the Thatcher years.

The Archaeology of Crime

What Gibson slowly uncovers is nothing less than the archaeology of a community. He is not just solving murders; he is excavating the history of a particular street, a particular colliery, a particular cluster of men who grew up together, worked together and, in ways they may never fully have understood, wronged someone badly enough to set consequences in motion that would outlast most of them.

This kind of investigation — where each discovery opens into a deeper layer of the past rather than a cleaner present-day explanation — is one of the great pleasures of crime fiction at its most ambitious. It is what separates the genre from entertainment and makes it, at its best, something closer to literature.

The Second World War, the Pits, the Strike

Three events run through The Long Game like geological strata. A German bombing raid on Regent Park West in 1942, which destroyed a house and killed a family. A colliery accident at Agecroft in 1958, which cost lives and left a man unable to work again. And the miners’ strike of 1984/85, which tore communities apart with a ferocity that the news coverage at the time could barely capture.

These are not background details. They are the architecture of the novel. Each one is a potential motive, a potential source of the kind of lasting grievance that turns into revenge. Gibson has to work his way through all three before the full picture emerges.

For Readers Who Like Their Mysteries Deep

The Long Game is not for readers who want a fast, superficial thriller. It is for readers who understand that the best mysteries reward patience — that the pleasure of a well-constructed whodunnit is inseparable from the pleasure of spending time in a well-drawn world with a detective who earns every conclusion he reaches.

If that description matches your taste in crime fiction, The Long Game will meet you exactly where you are.

[Get The Long Game on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]

— Kerry Costello is the author of The Long Game. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.

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The Mining Communities of the North West: Crime Fiction’s Most Overlooked Setting

Kerry Costello — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most British crime fiction finds its settings in familiar territory: the English village, the cathedral city, the Edinburgh backstreet, the London borough. There is nothing wrong with any of these — the best writers have drawn extraordinary fiction from all of them. But there is a world that crime fiction has largely ignored, and it happens to be one of the most dramatically fertile settings imaginable.

The industrial North West of England in the second half of the twentieth century — the mining towns of Swinton and Pendlebury, the terraced streets of Regent Park West, the communities built around Agecroft Colliery — is the setting for Kerry Costello’s The Long Game. And it turns out to be a perfect crime fiction setting.

Why Mining Communities Work

The elements that make for great crime fiction are all here. Close-knit communities where everybody knows everybody else’s business, which means secrets that should be impossible to keep are kept for decades. Men who have spent their working lives in conditions of genuine danger, which creates bonds as strong as any in human experience — and betrayals that cut correspondingly deep. Hard economic lives that create grievances capable of lasting a lifetime. And a particular culture of solidarity and silence that makes the work of a detective both more complicated and more rewarding.

Add to this the specific history of the period — the Second World War, the pit accidents of the 1950s, the devastating miners’ strike of 1984 — and you have a world in which the past is never truly past. Scores are never entirely settled. And a killer with a very long memory can operate with extraordinary patience.

The World of The Long Game

Kerry Costello grew up knowing this world, and it shows on every page. The detail in The Long Game is not the detail of research; it is the detail of experience. The way men talked to each other down the mine, the social rituals of the terraced street, the whippet races on Sunday afternoons, the particular texture of working-class life in the North West across five decades — all of it has the ring of lived truth.

For readers who find that the best crime fiction is inseparable from its location, The Long Game offers something that the usual settings simply cannot: a world that most readers will not already know, rendered with the kind of specificity that makes it feel utterly real.

History as the Engine of Crime

The murders in The Long Game are not motivated by anything contemporary. They reach back through the miners’ strike, through a colliery accident in the 1950s, all the way to the Second World War. The killer has been waiting decades. The setting is not merely backdrop — it is the reason everything happens. Without this specific world, this specific history, these specific people, there would be no crimes to solve.

That is what the best crime fiction does: it makes the setting inevitable.

[Get The Long Game on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]

— Kerry Costello is the author of The Long Game. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.

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What Inspector Morse and DS Gibson Have in Common

Kerry Costello — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse endures because he is more interesting than the cases he solves. A man of fierce intelligence, personal difficulty and considerable stubbornness, operating in a setting — Oxford, its colleges and hierarchies — that he understands far better than it understands him. The crimes matter. Morse matters more.

Readers who love that combination — detective as character study, setting as active participant, plot as the mechanism that reveals the man — will find something very familiar in Kerry Costello’s The Long Game.

DS Gibson: A Proper Detective

Detective Sergeant Gibson is no Morse, in the sense that he is not operating at the level of Oxford University or classical music or crossword puzzles. He is a working detective in Swinton and Pendlebury, the industrial North West, driving between terraced streets and working men’s pubs and colliery records. But the quality of his mind, and the quality of the novel’s attention to that mind, is recognisably in the Morse tradition.

Gibson is a man who notices things. He is sceptical of easy explanations. He is prepared to follow a hunch deep into territory where it might come to nothing, and he does so with a quiet, dry persistence that has more in common with doggedness than brilliance — though the brilliance is there. He has a marriage that grounds him and a boss, the formidable DCI Watson, who simultaneously obstructs and inadvertently assists. The dynamic between them will be immediately familiar to anyone who has spent time with Morse and Sergeant Lewis.

A World as Precisely Drawn as Oxford

One of the great pleasures of the Morse novels is their Oxford — not the tourist version, but the real city, with its politics, its class tensions, its ancient corruption. The Long Game does something comparable with the mining communities of the North West.

Swinton and Pendlebury in the post-war decades are drawn with documentary care. The terraced streets, the colliery, the men who spent their working lives underground, the communities that formed around the pit — all of it is rendered so precisely that you can smell the coal dust. This is not generic industrial landscape. It is a specific, deeply observed world, and the crimes grow directly out of it.

Patient, Methodical, Satisfying

The Long Game moves at the pace of a real investigation. It does not hurry. It allows Gibson to make mistakes, to pursue wrong turns, to feel the frustration of an investigation that keeps almost coming together. For Morse readers, who are accustomed to a detective who earns his conclusions, this will feel exactly right.

If Morse is one of your touchstones in crime fiction, The Long Game deserves a place on that shelf.

[Get The Long Game on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]

— Kerry Costello is the author of The Long Game and the Frankie Armstrong series. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.

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Chandler Meets Christie — And Both Live in The Long Game

Kerry Costello — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Crime fiction has two great traditions, and they could hardly be more different. On one side: Agatha Christie, the puzzle, the closed circle of suspects, the detective who assembles truth from fragments and delivers it with quiet precision. On the other: Raymond Chandler, the hardboiled detective moving through a corrupt world, following a moral code the world around him has largely abandoned, narrating his way through the darkness with a sardonic wit that barely conceals his disgust.

Kerry Costello’s The Long Game draws on both. It is one of the things that makes it unusual — and unusually satisfying.

The Christie Inheritance: A Puzzle Worth Solving

Christie’s great gift to the genre was structural. The clues are present if you are paying attention. The killer is hiding in plain sight. The motive, when finally revealed, illuminates everything that came before it. And the detective — whether Poirot applying his little grey cells or Miss Marple applying her knowledge of human nature — earns the solution through observation and patience rather than luck or force.

The Long Game is built on precisely that structure. Detective Sergeant Gibson investigates what appears to be a natural death in the mining communities of Swinton and Pendlebury in 1990. The official verdict says heart failure. Gibson’s instinct says otherwise. And as he pulls threads, a pattern emerges: former miners dying on the same date, year after year, stretching back through the 1980s, the 1950s, all the way to the Second World War. The killer has constructed something intricate and patient. Unravelling it requires everything Christie’s tradition demands: attention, method and a refusal to accept the obvious explanation.

The Chandler Inheritance: A Detective With a Code

Chandler’s great gift was something different: the detective as moral centre. Philip Marlowe operates in a world of corruption, self-interest and institutional failure. What sets him apart is not brilliance alone but integrity — the refusal to be bought, bent or intimidated. He sees clearly because he has no stake in not seeing. And his voice, sardonic and precise, is the instrument through which the novel’s judgements are delivered.

Gibson carries that quality. He is not a glamorous detective. He works out of a grey police headquarters in Swinton, drives through the rain, argues with his overbearing DCI, and has to fight for every inch of the investigation against institutional indifference. But he will not let it go. His instinct that something is wrong proves stronger than every bureaucratic pressure to close the file. That stubbornness — the detective who keeps going because he cannot in good conscience stop — is pure Chandler, transposed to the industrial North West of England.

What Happens When You Combine Both

The result of putting Christie’s structural rigour together with Chandler’s moral seriousness is a crime novel that offers the satisfactions of the puzzle mystery without the cosiness that sometimes makes the genre feel slight. The Long Game has a real world in it — the mining communities of the North West across five decades, the miners’ strike, the colliery accidents, the bonds and betrayals of men who spent their lives working underground together. The puzzle is embedded in that world. The solution to it carries genuine weight.

If you have always suspected that the best crime fiction combines the intellectual pleasure of the whodunnit with the moral seriousness of the hardboiled tradition, The Long Game is evidence that you were right.

[Get The Long Game on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]

— Kerry Costello is the author of The Long Game and the Frankie Armstrong series. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.

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POST 9: Inspector Morse Fans — Here’s Your American Counterpart

Kerry Costello — Fri, 3 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse is one of the great creations of British crime fiction: a man of fierce intelligence and considerable personal difficulty, operating in a world — Oxford, its colleges, its hierarchies — that he understands completely and belongs to only partially. The crimes are puzzles, but Morse himself is the real subject. His contradictions, his loneliness, his standards, his refusal to accept easy answers.

That combination of a richly rendered setting, a protagonist with genuine inner life, and plots that respect the reader’s intelligence has a counterpart in the Frankie Armstrong series. The surface is very different. But the DNA is recognisable.

What Morse and Frankie Share

Neither is a comfortable person. Morse functions in spite of the system as much as because of it — he is tolerated because he gets results, not because he fits in. Frankie Armstrong is a British ex-soldier in Southwest Florida, an outsider by nationality, background, and temperament, operating in a world that runs on unspoken rules she has no investment in following.

Both are driven by a refusal to let things lie. Both have been shaped by experiences that marked them. Both see through the surface of things with an ease that makes the people around them uncomfortable.

Oxford and Southwest Florida

Part of what makes Morse endure is Oxford itself — beautiful, hierarchical, ancient, and corrupt in the way that very old institutions tend to be. The setting does work that no generic backdrop could do.

Southwest Florida works the same way in the Frankie Armstrong series, but the corruption is newer money, newer power, the kind that comes with no tradition of accountability. Naples is one of the wealthiest cities in America per capita. Behind those manicured facades are the same human failings that Dexter was always excavating in Oxford — greed, vanity, the desire to protect what one has accumulated — expressed in a more contemporary, more openly ruthless form.

For Readers Who Want More Than a Puzzle

The Morse novels are beloved not because the crimes are especially ingenious — though they are — but because spending time with Morse is an experience in itself. The Frankie Armstrong series is built on the same principle. The crimes matter. But Frankie matters more.

Five books into the series, readers who came for the thriller have stayed for the character. If that sounds like your relationship with Morse, You Owe Me is a reasonable place to start.

[Get You Owe Me on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]

— Kerry Costello is the author of the Frankie Armstrong series. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.

POST 10: Five Reasons Older Readers Are the Best Audience for Crime Fiction

Suggested URL slug: older-readers-crime-fiction-murder-mystery-frankie-armstrong

The publishing industry spends a great deal of time chasing younger readers. It shouldn’t — or at least, not at the expense of the audience that has always kept crime fiction alive. Readers who have been at this for decades are not a niche. They are the core.

Here is why, and why the Frankie Armstrong series was written with them in mind.

1. Experience Makes You a Better Reader

Crime fiction depends on the reader bringing something to the page. The pleasures of the genre — working out what happened, reading character, spotting what doesn’t quite fit — are pleasures that deepen with practice. Readers who have been through hundreds of mysteries have tuned instincts. They notice more. They are harder to fool in the wrong way and more satisfyingly fooled in the right way.

2. You Can Spot Condescension Immediately

A great many thrillers are written for readers the author imagines as credulous. The twists are telegraphed. The characters are thin. The prose is merely functional. Experienced readers see through all of this within the first chapter and put the book down.

The Frankie Armstrong series is written for readers who will catch anything lazy. The plots are layered. The characters have genuine contradictions. The setting is researched and rendered with care.

3. You’ve Seen Enough of the World to Recognise It

One of the pleasures of the Frankie Armstrong series is Southwest Florida itself — a world of visible wealth, invisible power, and the complicated lives of people who have relocated there for reasons they don’t always admit. Readers who have been around long enough to understand how money and power actually work will find the world of these novels immediately recognisable, whatever their geography.

4. Character Matters More Than Plot

Younger readers often read for plot. Experienced readers read for character — for the pleasure of spending time inside a mind they find interesting, even when that mind is heading into trouble. Frankie Armstrong is that kind of protagonist: complicated, capable, occasionally her own worst enemy, and worth following through five novels.

5. You Know What You Like — And You’re Right

The long tradition of crime fiction that the best of the genre stands on — Christie, Dexter, Rendell, Rankin — was built by readers who knew the difference between the genuine article and the imitation. The Frankie Armstrong series is written in conscious awareness of that tradition. It is crime fiction for readers who have earned their standards.

Start with You Owe Me and see whether you agree.

[Get You Owe Me on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]

— Kerry Costello is the author of the Frankie Armstrong series. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.

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The Murder Mystery for Readers Who’ve Outgrown Cosy Crime

Kerry Costello — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ask any serious reader of crime fiction to name their favourite novels and they will almost always describe a place as much as a plot. The Louisiana bayous of James Lee Burke. The Oxford colleges of Colin Dexter’s Morse novels. The English villages of Agatha Christie. The Edinburgh streets of Ian Rankin.

Place in crime fiction is never background. It is character. And the best crime writers understand that the world their stories inhabit must be rendered so precisely that the reader can smell it.

What Makes Southwest Florida Extraordinary

Southwest Florida — Naples, the Gulf Coast, the edge of the Everglades — is one of the least-written settings in American crime fiction. Which is strange, because it has everything a crime novelist could want.

It is one of the wealthiest regions in the United States per capita, which means old money and new money sitting side by side, and all the resentment and concealment that creates. It has a service economy that keeps the whole expensive machine running, populated by people who see the wealthy up close every day. It has genuine wilderness pressing in from every direction — the Everglades to the east, the Gulf to the west. And it has a seasonal rhythm that transforms it entirely: hundreds of thousands of visitors arriving between November and April, then the region contracting back to the people who actually call it home.

That rhythm — who is here, who is hiding, who is passing through — is natural story structure.

Place as the Source of Crime

The best crime fiction doesn’t just use its setting as backdrop. It shows how the setting produces the crime. Christie’s closed-society England produced a particular kind of murderer: someone with something to protect, operating within social constraints that made direct violence a last resort. Rankin’s Edinburgh produces a different kind: institutional corruption, class resentment, the weight of history.

Southwest Florida produces its own kind. Wealth that needs to be kept clean. Power that prefers to stay invisible. A beautiful surface that rewards those who don’t look too hard underneath.

Frankie Armstrong looks hard. She can’t help it.

The British Outsider’s Eye

Part of what makes Southwest Florida come alive in the Frankie Armstrong series is the perspective. Frankie is British, ex-military, an outsider in this particular corner of America. She notices what the locals have stopped noticing. She doesn’t take the unspoken rules for granted. And she is drawn, with the instinct of a trained soldier, to precisely the things that don’t quite fit.

You Owe Me is crime fiction with a sense of place as strong as anything in the tradition. If you read for the world as much as for the puzzle, this is for you.

[Get You Owe Me on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]

— Kerry Costello is the author of the Frankie Armstrong series. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.

POST 8: The Murder Mystery for Readers Who’ve Outgrown Cosy Crime

Suggested URL slug: murder-mystery-beyond-cosy-crime-frankie-armstrong-thriller

Cosy crime is a genuine pleasure. The village. The amateur sleuth. The death that is always somehow tasteful. The satisfaction of seeing order restored at the end. There is nothing wrong with any of it, and the best of the genre — Christie, Osman, MC Beaton’s Hamish Macbeth novels — are genuinely excellent.

But sometimes the cosiness itself becomes the problem. The sense that the world of the story is padded, that the real darkness is always kept at a careful remove, that nothing will be genuinely disturbing. For readers who have been round the block a few times, that padding can start to feel like condescension.

If you’ve found yourself wanting the intelligence of the best cosy crime, the satisfying puzzle element, the well-drawn characters — but with the edges left in — Frankie Armstrong is where you go next.

What Cosy Crime Keeps Offstage

The cosy genre, by definition, softens its violence. Murders happen between chapters. The body is discovered but not dwelt upon. The investigation is intellectual rather than physical. The world of the story is essentially safe.

Real crime fiction — the kind that lasts — doesn’t keep the darkness offstage. It looks at it directly, because that is the only honest way to write about what violence does to people and places. The Frankie Armstrong series is not gratuitous, but it is honest. The stakes are real. The crimes have weight.

The Puzzle Is Still There

What crime readers who started with Christie or Osman bring to a thriller is the habit of paying attention. Clues matter. Character matters. The pleasure of working out what actually happened, and why, before the protagonist gets there — that pleasure doesn’t disappear in harder-edged fiction. It intensifies, because the stakes of getting it wrong are higher.

You Owe Me is a thriller that rewards careful reading. Frankie Armstrong is not just a fighter; she is an observer, and the story is structured around what she notices and what she misses. Readers with a background in the whodunnit tradition will find familiar pleasures here alongside new ones.

A Natural Progression

Many readers find their way from Christie to Rendell to Rankin to the harder end of the crime spectrum over the course of a reading life. Each step takes the fundamental pleasure — the puzzle, the character, the world — and adds a layer of moral complexity or darkness that the previous step held back.

The Frankie Armstrong series is that next step. Familiar enough to feel like home. Different enough to matter.

[Get You Owe Me on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]

— Kerry Costello is the author of the Frankie Armstrong series. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.

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Why the Best Crime Fiction Is Always About Place

Kerry Costello — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Place in crime fiction is never background. It is character. And the best crime writers understand that the world their stories inhabit must be rendered so precisely that the reader can smell it.

What Makes Southwest Florida Extraordinary

That rhythm — who is here, who is hiding, who is passing through — is natural story structure.

Place as the Source of Crime

Southwest Florida produces its own kind. Wealth that needs to be kept clean. Power that prefers to stay invisible. A beautiful surface that rewards those who don’t look too hard underneath.

Frankie Armstrong looks hard. She can’t help it.

The British Outsider’s Eye

You Owe Me is crime fiction with a sense of place as strong as anything in the tradition. If you read for the world as much as for the puzzle, this is for you.

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POST 6: What Richard Osman Gets Right — And What He Leaves Out

Kerry Costello — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series has been one of the publishing phenomena of recent years, and it’s not hard to see why. Smart, warm, wickedly funny, with a cast of older protagonists who are more capable than anyone around them expects. Osman proved something the publishing industry had been slow to accept: older readers don’t want to be patronised, and they don’t want protagonists who are past it.

If the Thursday Murder Club is on your shelf, there’s a good chance the Frankie Armstrong series belongs there too — though it will give you something rather different.

The Osman Appeal

What makes the Thursday Murder Club work isn’t really the mysteries — it’s the characters. Four older people who refuse to be written off, who have accumulated enough experience to see through nonsense, and who apply decades of hard-won expertise to problems that baffle everyone around them. The setting is cosy, the tone is gentle, but the intelligence underneath is sharp.

That combination — experience, wit, and refusal to be underestimated — is enormously appealing. It reflects something true about how sharp minds work at any age.

If You Want the Edges Left In

Frankie Armstrong shares some of that DNA. She is also an outsider who sees more clearly than those around her. She also has the experience that comes from a life actually lived, not a comfortable existence that kept the world at arm’s length.

But where Osman keeps the darkness at a careful distance — cosy is a genre with rules — the Frankie Armstrong series lets it in. The crimes have real stakes. The violence is not politely offstage. Southwest Florida is a beautiful and genuinely dangerous place, and the series treats it as such.

If you’ve finished the Thursday Murder Club books and wanted something with the same intelligence but a harder edge, You Owe Me is the natural next step.

A Protagonist Who Earned Her Skills the Hard Way

Osman’s characters are marvellous, but their expertise is largely professional and intellectual — a spy, a nurse, a union leader, a psychiatrist. Frankie Armstrong’s expertise was earned in warzones. That changes the texture of the tension considerably.

The Frankie Armstrong series is for readers who want the intelligence of the best modern crime fiction, the warmth of a protagonist with real humanity, and a world that doesn’t pretend the rough edges don’t exist.

[Get You Owe Me on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]

— Kerry Costello is the author of the Frankie Armstrong series. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.

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: If You Love Agatha Christie, It’s Time to Try Something Darker

Kerry Costello — Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Agatha Christie built the template. The closed setting, the cast of suspects, the slow revelation of motive, the satisfying click of everything falling into place at the end. If you grew up reading Christie — or came to her later and worked through the Poirot and Marple novels in a sitting — you understand what good crime fiction does at its best.

But sometimes you want something harder-edged. A world where the violence has weight. Where the protagonist doesn’t solve the puzzle from the safety of an armchair.

That’s where Frankie Armstrong comes in.

What Christie Got Right

The Christie formula works because it respects the reader. The clues are there. The characters are distinct. The setting is carefully drawn. And beneath the civilised surface — the country house, the village, the ocean liner — there is always something rotten. Someone wanted someone dead badly enough to do something about it.

That moral engine — the idea that ordinary life conceals extraordinary darkness — is what all great crime fiction shares. Christie located it in the drawing room. The Frankie Armstrong series locates it in the sun-drenched wealth of Southwest Florida, where the manicured lawns and waterfront properties hide the same human rot Christie was always writing about.

The Same Instinct, A Harder World

Frankie Armstrong isn’t Poirot or Miss Marple. She doesn’t solve crimes by sitting in a chair and applying her little grey cells while others bring her tea. She’s a British ex-soldier, physically capable, trained in actual threat assessment, and she gets her hands dirty.

But the investigative instinct is the same: look carefully, trust no one’s version of events, follow the money and the motive, and refuse to accept the comfortable explanation when something doesn’t quite fit.

Christie readers will recognise that quality in Frankie immediately. The difference is the world she operates in — one that hits back.

Why Older Readers Often Enjoy This Transition

There is a particular pleasure that comes from reading a thriller that trusts your intelligence. Christie readers know that pleasure well — she never condescended to her audience. The Frankie Armstrong series is written in that same spirit: the plots are layered, the characters have genuine depth, and the setting is rendered with real care.

If you’ve been reading crime fiction for decades, you’ve earned something that doesn’t insult your experience. You Owe Me delivers that — with sharper edges than Christie, but the same fundamental respect for the reader.

[Get You Owe Me on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]

— Kerry Costello is the author of the Frankie Armstrong series. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.

POST 6: What Richard Osman Gets Right — And What He Leaves Out

Suggested URL slug: richard-osman-thursday-murder-club-fans-frankie-armstrong

If the Thursday Murder Club is on your shelf, there’s a good chance the Frankie Armstrong series belongs there too — though it will give you something rather different.

The Osman Appeal

That combination — experience, wit, and refusal to be underestimated — is enormously appealing. It reflects something true about how sharp minds work at any age.

If You Want the Edges Left In

If you’ve finished the Thursday Murder Club books and wanted something with the same intelligence but a harder edge, You Owe Me is the natural next step.

A Protagonist Who Earned Her Skills the Hard Way

[Get You Owe Me on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]

— Kerry Costello is the author of the Frankie Armstrong series. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.

POST 7: Why the Best Crime Fiction Is Always About Place

Suggested URL slug: best-crime-fiction-setting-southwest-florida-whodunnit

Place in crime fiction is never background. It is character. And the best crime writers understand that the world their stories inhabit must be rendered so precisely that the reader can smell it.

What Makes Southwest Florida Extraordinary

That rhythm — who is here, who is hiding, who is passing through — is natural story structure.

Place as the Source of Crime

Southwest Florida produces its own kind. Wealth that needs to be kept clean. Power that prefers to stay invisible. A beautiful surface that rewards those who don’t look too hard underneath.

Frankie Armstrong looks hard. She can’t help it.

The British Outsider’s Eye

You Owe Me is crime fiction with a sense of place as strong as anything in the tradition. If you read for the world as much as for the puzzle, this is for you.

[Get You Owe Me on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]

— Kerry Costello is the author of the Frankie Armstrong series. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.

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Tired of Waiting for a Female Reacher? Meet Frankie Armstrong

Kerry Costello — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If You Love Jack Reacher, Meet Frankie Armstrong

The question comes up constantly in crime fiction forums, Reddit threads, and book club chats: what do I read when I've finished all the Reachers?

It's a fair question. Lee Child built something addictive — the lone operator, ex-military, physically capable, morally certain, moving through the world beholden to no one. Once you've acquired the taste, very little else satisfies it.

But here's the thing most readers don't notice until it's pointed out: part of what makes Reacher work is that he's an outsider. He drifts through small-town America with no house, no luggage, and no stake in local politics. He sees what the locals have stopped seeing. He's not impressed by the man who owns half the county, because he's never heard of him.

Now imagine that outsider's edge sharpened further. Imagine he isn't American at all.

Frankie Armstrong is a British ex-soldier — Special Forces, with the scars and the skills to prove it — who has washed up in Naples, on Florida's Gulf Coast. He came over because he owed a debt to an old friend. He stayed because Florida has a way of not letting people leave quietly.

And Florida, as anyone who has spent time there will tell you, is the perfect hunting ground for a man like Frankie. It's a state built on sunshine and reinvention, where everyone is from somewhere else and half of them are running from something. Behind the beach bars and the gated communities and the manicured golf courses there's money — serious money — and where there's serious money, there are people who will kill to keep it.

Reacher solves America one small town at a time. Frankie works a single, gorgeous, rotten stretch of paradise — and because he's British, he takes none of it at face value. He doesn't share the local reverence for wealth. He isn't dazzled by the right address or the right boat. When a retiree is taken by an alligator and everyone calls it a tragic accident, Frankie is the one asking why the gate was open. When a hurricane tears the roof off a building and exposes something that was never meant to be found, Frankie is the one who won't let it be quietly reburied.

He has Reacher's moral certainty, but he carries something Reacher doesn't: history. A debt owed to a friend, a past in uniform he can't entirely put down, and the dry, understated humour of a man who has seen real trouble and refuses to be impressed by the local imitation.

The series runs to five books so far, each one a complete mystery — no cliffhangers, I promise, just a twist at the end you won't see coming — but the best place to start is the beginning.

You Owe Me opens with that debt being called in: an old friend, a sunken fortune, and a Florida coastline that swallows secrets whole. By the time Frankie understands what he's been dragged into, the mafia, the police, and several people pretending to be neither are all asking the same question — and the answer is worth killing for.

If you've worn out your Reacher collection, give Frankie a try. He drinks tea instead of coffee, he'd never be caught dead in a motel without checking the exits, and he might just become your new favourite reluctant hero.

Start the series with You Owe Me — available now on Amazon.

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POST 3: Why British Protagonists Make the Best American Crime Heroes

Kerry Costello — Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There's a long tradition of British characters cutting through American crime fiction like a cold knife. Something about the outsider perspective sharpens everything.

Think about it. When a character who wasn't raised inside a system looks at that system, they see it more clearly than anyone who grew up inside it. They notice what locals have stopped noticing. They don't take the unspoken rules for granted. And when something is wrong, they say so — because they have no social skin in the game.

The Outsider Who Sees Everything

James Bond is the obvious starting point — the British agent operating in foreign environments, always slightly outside the culture he's navigating. But the more interesting tradition is the ordinary British person dropped into American chaos.

Lee Child's Jack Reacher is American, but Child is British — and Reacher carries that outsider clarity in his bones. He moves through America like a visitor who has studied the place long enough to understand it but never been captured by it. He's never attached to institutions, never trapped by social obligation, never too polite to name what he's seeing.

A British character in America does that structurally. They arrive with different reference points, different assumptions, different thresholds for what counts as normal.

What a Soldier Adds to That

Frankie Armstrong isn't just British. She's a British ex-soldier.

That combination creates a protagonist with multiple layers of outsider status. She's foreign. She's military in a civilian world. She's a woman who spent years in environments designed around men. She has trained her threat assessment in actual warzones — which means small-town Florida corruption reads very differently to her than it does to the locals who've lived alongside it for years.

She's not naive. She's not easily shocked. But she hasn't normalized what's in front of her either.

That gap — between what the locals accept and what Frankie refuses to accept — is where the story lives.

The Fresh Set of Eyes Florida Needed

Southwest Florida, where the Frankie Armstrong series is set, is the kind of place that runs on unspoken agreements. Old money, new money, powerful interests, quiet corruption. It's beautiful on the surface. It rewards those who don't look too hard.

Frankie Armstrong looks hard. She can't help it — it's how she's wired.

You Owe Me, the first book in the series, drops a British ex-soldier into this sun-drenched world and watches what happens when someone with no stake in the local social order starts pulling threads. Readers who love the clarity that outsider protagonists bring to American crime fiction — from Reacher to the best of Coben — will find exactly that here.

[Get You Owe Me on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]

— Kerry Costello is the author of the Frankie Armstrong series. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.

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Why Southwest Florida Is Crime Fiction's Most Underrated Setting

Kerry Costello — Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone knows Miami. South Beach, neon lights, Dexter, Miami Vice. Florida crime fiction has been synonymous with Miami for decades.

But Southwest Florida? That's different. And that difference is exactly what makes it such fertile ground for crime thrillers.

The Real Florida Nobody Writes About

Naples, Florida is one of the wealthiest cities in the United States per capita. It's manicured, sun-drenched, and expensive — the kind of place where people come to disappear into a comfortable retirement or a second life.

Which makes it perfect for crime.

Old money and new money sitting side by side. A service economy that keeps the whole machine running invisibly. The Everglades pressing in from the east. The Gulf of Mexico to the west. And underneath the perfect lawns and waterfront properties, all the complexity that comes when people have a great deal to protect — or a great deal to hide.

What the Setting Adds to a Thriller

The best crime fiction is inseparable from its location. James Lee Burke's Louisiana bayou bleeds into every page of his Dave Robicheaux novels. Carl Hiaasen's Florida is a character in its own right — wild, contradictory, darkly funny. When a setting is done right, you can smell it.

Southwest Florida has a specific atmosphere that's different from any other part of the state. The light is intense. The seasons blur. The tourist season transforms the region entirely — hundreds of thousands of people arriving between November and April, then the population dropping back down to the locals who stayed through the summer heat.

That rhythm creates natural story structure. Who's here in season and why? Who's a local, who's passing through, who's hiding?

Enter Frankie Armstrong

You Owe Me, the first book in the Frankie Armstrong series, is set in this world — the real Southwest Florida, not a generic sun-and-sand backdrop.

Frankie is a British ex-soldier who has ended up here, in this improbable corner of America. She's an outsider twice over: foreign and military in a civilian world, working-class instincts in a wealthy postcode. She sees the gulf between what Southwest Florida presents to the world and what runs underneath it.

That tension — between the polished surface and the grim reality beneath — drives the story.

Florida Crime Fiction Worth Reading

If you're a fan of the genre, Southwest Florida deserves a place on your map alongside Miami and the Keys. It's got everything a crime novelist could want: wealth, inequality, wilderness, secrets, and enough sunshine to make the darkness feel even darker by contrast.

The Frankie Armstrong series is set here, in this specific, overlooked, fascinating corner of the state. Start with You Owe Me and see Florida crime fiction through completely different eyes.

[Get You Owe Me on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]

— Kerry Costello is the author of the Frankie Armstrong series, set in Southwest Florida. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.

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If You Love Jack Reacher and Carl Hiaasen, You Need to Meet Frankie Armstrong

Kerry Costello — Fri, 1 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You've finished the Reacher series. Again. You've burned through every Carl Hiaasen novel set in Florida. You need something new — but it has to hit that same nerve. Gritty. Fast. Smart. With a protagonist who doesn't flinch.

Meet Frankie Armstrong.

The DNA of a Great Crime Thriller Hero

What makes Jack Reacher work isn't the action — it's the code. Reacher operates by his own moral compass, completely outside the system, utterly self-sufficient. He walks into chaos and walks out the other side, usually leaving a lot of broken things behind him.

Carl Hiaasen's Florida books work differently but scratch the same itch. His characters are sharp-eyed outsiders — people who see Florida's corruption and madness with brutal clarity and refuse to look away. The humor is dark, the stakes are real, and the setting does half the work.

Frankie Armstrong is built from both of those traditions.

A British ex-soldier transplanted to Southwest Florida, Frankie carries the Reacher DNA — the military training, the instinct for threat assessment, the refusal to back down. But she's operating in Hiaasen territory: sun-baked, swamp-edged, morally compromised Florida, where the heat gets to everyone eventually.

Why Florida Is the Perfect Crime Setting

Florida has always been crime fiction's secret weapon. The state is genuinely strange — a collision of old money, new money, no money, tourist traps, retirement communities, and genuine wilderness. The heat compresses everything. Nobody's quite who they say they are.

Lee Child sets Reacher loose on the American road. Hiaasen plants his stories deep in the Florida ecosystem — the developers, the politicians, the wildlife, the weather. You Owe Me, the first Frankie Armstrong novel, does both. It takes a British outsider with a soldier's instincts and drops her into a Florida that is equal parts beautiful and dangerous.

If you've ever read a Hiaasen novel and thought I'd love this with more action and a protagonist who hits back harder — that's Frankie.

What Readers of Both Authors Will Find Here

The Reacher connection: Frankie Armstrong is ex-military, physically capable, and morally certain even when the law isn't on her side. She doesn't wait for permission. Like Reacher, she tends to find trouble — or trouble finds her.

The Hiaasen connection: The setting is real Florida, not the postcard version. The crimes are rooted in the kind of institutional rot and human greed that Hiaasen has been skewering for decades. The tone has teeth.

The difference: Frankie Armstrong is a woman navigating a world that didn't build its systems with her in mind. That adds a layer of tension that neither Reacher nor Hiaasen's male protagonists carry. She has to be smarter about when to push and when to wait — and the story is sharper for it.

Start with You Owe Me

The first book in the Frankie Armstrong series, You Owe Me, is available now on Amazon. If you're the kind of reader who finishes a Reacher novel in two sittings and immediately starts hunting for something with the same energy, this is your next read.

Florida crime fiction. A British ex-soldier who doesn't owe anyone anything — except the people who made her that way.

Get You Owe Me on Amazon → https://www.amazon.com/s?k=kerry+costello+you+owe+me&crid=3PGBC8SU9226N&sprefix=kerry+costello+you+owe+me%2Caps%2C164&ref=nb_sb_noss

— Kerry Costello is the author of the Frankie Armstrong series. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.

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Backlash - Frankie Armstrong Murder Mystery - Book 4

Kerry Costello — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Video Trailer forEmbedded Youtube video removed, see original post to watch.
Backlash - Frankie Armstrong Murder Mystery - Book 4

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The Long Game - Gibson Thriller Series book 1 video trailer

Kerry Costello — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Embedded Youtube video removed, see original post to watch.
The Long Game - video trailer

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Frankie Armstrong Murder Mystery series - book 1 trailer

Kerry Costello — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Embedded Youtube video removed, see original post to watch.

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Kerry Costello — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Real fish I caught off the beach in Naples Florida

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Songs I've written

Kerry Costello — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In addition to writing books, I also enjoy writing songs...

Embedded Youtube video removed, see original post to watch.
Embedded Youtube video removed, see original post to watch.
Embedded Youtube video removed, see original post to watch.
Embedded Youtube video removed, see original post to watch.
Embedded Youtube video removed, see original post to watch.
Embedded Youtube video removed, see original post to watch.

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Fish, wooden and otherwise...

Kerry Costello — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Here are some more examples of the wooden fish I've carved in the past, plus a real fish I caught in Naples Florida

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