Keith Dixon
Keith Dixon has worked as a copywriter, lecturer and business psychologist. A few years ago he had a revelation and realised that what he really wanted was to give up work and write fiction full time.
So since then he's written four novels featuring private eye Sam Dyke and published a non-crime book, Actress. He's also given up work.
The fourth Sam Dyke Investigation, The Bleak, was published in May, 2014.
He's currently sharing his time between the UK and France.
The Sam Dyke Series
ALTERED LIFE
Making a killing in business is one thing - doing it for real is another.
Private Investigator Sam Dyke turns down a job that would require skills that he doesn't have - patience, computer-literacy, tact. Then he finds that the skills he does have - tenacity, aggression, street-smarts - are exactly the ones he needs for his next case - hunting down a cold-blooded murderer who seems to know what his every step will be.
To solve the case Sam must negotiate with his ex-wife, cement a relationship with a new love, unravel an office-based financial fraud and fight off an arrogant murderer armed only with a pen-knife. Altered Life is fast-paced, bitterly comic and introduces a tough new English private eye who knows what he wants and, usually, how to get it.
"If you like private eye stories, you owe it to yourself to check out Keith Dixon's Altered Life. I had a hard time putting it down and I bet you will too. With this book you'll be in on the ground floor of what is sure to be a successful series of 'Sam Dyke' mysteries."
Dan Marvin, The LL Book Review
THE PRIVATE LIE
Investigator Sam Dyke has never met his son, Daniel. Until today. And then he wishes he hadn't.
Because Daniel has a girlfriend who isn't really suitable ... and, it turns out, is missing. In fact she's mixed up in a world of corruption and violence centering around the Ginger Twins - monstrous criminals who extend their crooked web from Liverpool to Manchester and all stops in between. Sam is determined to find the girl despite the odds against him - and also ignoring the fact that he's intruding on some apparently hush-hush police work ...
Trying to do the right thing, Sam does what he's good at. He irritates people, especially bad guys. And not surprisingly he soon finds himself on the Twins' hit list. What can a father do - except hit back?
The Private Lie pits tough private investigator Sam Dyke against a double-threat - the Ginger Twins, and his own inability to know what's good for him.
THE HARD SWIM
FEBRUARY 1942: The Struma, a broken-down steamer, explodes and sinks in the Black Sea, drowning 768 Rumanian Jews fleeing the Nazis and heading for Palestine, and safety.
JUNE 1944: Thirty-one SAS soldiers are captured behind enemy lines and are forced to dig their own graves before being shot and buried in a forest in the heart of France.
SEVENTY YEARS LATER: A young woman is attacked in the grounds of Edinburgh Zoo – the attacker seeking the document that might link these two wartime events.
Private Investigator Sam Dyke rescues the woman, Chantal Bressette, and embarks on a quest to find out why the document she carries is being sought by a high-ranking Government official and his team of ex-Army thugs. They follow a series of clues that lead them eventually to an isolated village in central France, tracked by the thugs and government minister Gideon Blake, who becomes obsessed with uncovering what the document reveals because he believes it implicates his family in an obscene war-crime.
The Hard Swim is the third in Keith Dixon's series of Sam Dyke Investigations.
If you like fast-moving thrillers in the vein of The Day of the Jackal, the Jason Bourne movies and Lee Child's Jack Reacher, then you'll love The Hard Swim.
THE BLEAK
Sam Dyke is back! The private investigator who never gives up until the bad guys are caught—or worse.
For Sam, taking this particular case is not promising. His client is a secretary who’s watching her boss fall apart, and she can’t bear it. The case requires subtlety and finesse and so isn’t his usual kind of job. But he likes her and takes it anyway.
And he soon discovers that it’s not the pressures of work that are getting to her boss. It’s his colleagues, a group of cultish scientists. Their leader is a hyper-intelligent seer/visionary who has a personal philosophy that is taking him towards one final act—to produce a calamitous event that will destroy the lives of hundreds of people. Or more.
Dyke sets himself on a course to prevent this madman from achieving his ends. A course that endangers him, his new partner and it seems anyone else who gets in the way of this doomsday plan ...
THE STRANGE GIRL
Private Investigator Sam Dyke is hired to find a man who’s been released from prison and subsequently gone missing. But the ex-con is an ex-cop who might have been imprisoned for a crime that he didn’t commit.
Working for the man’s daughter, Sam soon discovers that this isn’t just a missing persons case – there are other people involved, including the owner of a high-profile casino and a senior police officer. And when the brutal representatives of an Asian gambling syndicate show up with their own brand of persuasiveness, Sam knows that he must put things right before he and everyone he loves become potential targets ...
