Book: A TWIST IN THE RIVER
Character: Jake Jackson
How would you describe your family or your childhood?
I was the only child of loving parents, who died just as I was reaching adulthood (car accident, no survivors). My main influence growing up was my Uncle Arthur, a wily old bachelor – which is code for serial romancer – who used to send me crime novels on a regular basis. It is thanks to him that reading became one of my formative loves, and that I decided to become a detective. When he died, he bequeathed to me a place called Little Sky, a huge scrap of land complete with farmhouse, wood and lake.
What was your greatest talent?
I have always been good at seeing the pattern of things, making a story out of what looks like a shapeless mess. My final job before my early retirement was in the cold case division of the Metropolitan Police: putting together cases that others had given up on.
Significant other?
The first person I met when I came to Little Sky one hot summer was the local vet: a beautiful, brilliant woman called Livia. We had a torrid – at least I thought it was torrid – affair in those first strange and amazing months. I am very much ready to propose to her, and have a plan ready that is almost as romantic as Peter Wimsey’s proposal to Harriet Vane in GAUDY NIGHT by Dorothy Sayers.
Biggest challenge in relationships?
I can get a little inside my own head sometimes. One of the reasons I came to Little Sky was to escape the bustle and blurts of the modern world. It has no internet, no phone connection, no television or radio reception. On the one hand that makes it a glorious, Edenic idyll; on the other, it can make me rather introspective. When Liv and I want to see each other, we hang a cloth in the tree between our patches of land – called Sherlock Beech – and so know to come calling. When we live together, we’ll have to be more normal, and that might be a challenge!
Where do you live?
The wonderful Little Sky in the middle of an unnamed bit of British countryside. The nearest village (where Livia lives) is Caelum Parvum, which only has one shop in it. That is a magnificent place, by the way, called – with some irony – The Jolly Nook, and is a combination of grocery store, café and pub. You can only pay on account, and there are regular lock-ins in the cider cellar beneath.
Little Sky is big enough that it takes more than an hour to run around. I have named some of the landscape features after my favourite crime writers, so there is Agatha Wood, Chandler Lake, and fields called Bosch, Wimsey and Velda.
Do you have any enemies?
I was a policeman for almost two decades, so yes! Plus, I have been co-opted as a sort of consultant detective here at Little Sky, so – despite all the comparative tranquillity – I often find myself in precarious situations.
My latest adventure involves the existence of an unknown figure seeming to attack female victims, leave no mark on their bodies, and then dump them in the river to the north of Little Sky.
How do you feel about the place where you are now? Is there something you are particularly attached to, or particularly repelled by, in this place?
Little Sky is like a dream. It is beautiful, quiet, teeming with nature. My favourite thing to do is take a sauna (which, and I don’t want to brag, I built myself) and then swim in the lake. It is a place where I am desperate to bring up a family.
The one thing I will say is that such quiet and solitude can seem risky when there are criminals on the loose. I agree with Sherlock Holmes that remote rural places are more dangerous than cities – as someone once said to me, ‘in the countryside, no one can hear you scream’.
Do you have children, pets, both, or neither?
I have inherited, wonderfully, Livia’s family. She has a ten-year-old daughter called Diana, who tolerates this new, big, hairy man in her mum’s life. She also has a large, female, disdainful ginger cat called Cyprian. At Little Sky, I have built an area we call Chicken City, a series of raised wooden house on stilts. The fresh eggs we get in the morning are wonderful.
What do you do for a living?
I don’t have to work, after the inheritance from Uncle Arthur. I suppose my job is somewhere between rustic bum and consulting detective.
Greatest disappointment?
I have to be honest here: the failure of my first marriage. Faye and I met young – as newly qualified lawyers – and found happiness together. Then the bustle of urban life intervened: she became a solicitor, I joined the police force. It worked amid all the stresses, but was not easy. We kept trying to have children; we kept experiencing the tragedy of miscarriage. And then the relationship stopped working. When I had the chance to leave the city, it seemed to be a sign from the universe to give up trying. She is remarried now and has her own child, so there is a happy ending of sorts.
Greatest source of joy?
Dawn at Little Sky, the mist rising from the lake like a witchy broth, coming home from a run to breakfast with Livia and Diana.
What do you do to entertain yourself or have fun?
Have I mentioned the nude swimming? Having your own lake is great fun.
What is your greatest personal failing, in your view?
It sounds so easy to say you’d think I could fix it, but I have a bit of a hero complex. I want to live this simple, isolated life, and yet I also want to solve the mysteries that come my way, be the centre of attention (at least for a while) when exciting things happen around me. So I am a massive hypocrite.
What keeps you awake at night?
Past cases I couldn’t solve, current mysteries that continue to nag at me. When I am lucky, a magnificent, tactile girlfriend too!
What is the most pressing problem you have at the moment?
I am in the middle of a case that is both terrifying and frustrating. How are these women dying? Is it coincidence and they are just caught by the treachery of the water, or is someone brilliant taking their lives for reasons we cannot fathom?
We are working this very hard, with not much of a result at the moment. By the way, I have stumbled into a brilliant team of people who come together when cases like this happen; they have helped me on all my post-retirement investigations. There’s Chief Inspector David McAllister (the local copper, dour, ironic and Glaswegian), Aletheia Campbell (formerly an online "Searcher", an expert in tracing people’s digital footprints, now senior in the security forces), and perhaps my most valued companion, Martha Kline (invalided from the force after her legs were shot off, she is a constant source of narcotically-impacted, sarcastic, foul-mouthed wisdom).
Is there something that you need or want that you don’t have? For yourself or for someone important to you?
Total peace.
Why don’t you have it? What is in the way?
In my experience, life has a way of interfering with the most perfect plans. For every time I pull away from society and connectivity and the modern world, it always finds a way of luring me back. Some of it is joyful (I don’t want to be entirely alone any more); some of it is simply the impossibility of freedom.
Jake Jackson #4
Former London detective Jake Jackson finds his new life in the country threatened when women start disappearing in this beautifully written and deeply immersive novel that will challenge even the most diehard mystery lover’s deductive skills.
A beautiful summer’s day
When young nurse Claire Davidson goes missing on the riverbank, the only clues left behind are her phone and shoes.
A mystery that sweeps the nation
People disappear all the time, but this case sparks an online frenzy. Amateur investigators descend on the rural idyll. Everyone has a theory. Is Claire Davidson just the story of a swim that went wrong, or could there be truth to the conspiracies?
A killer growing bolder
But when another woman is discovered dead in the river, signs point to murder. Jake Jackson, a former detective who came to the countryside searching for peace, must investigate before more lives are taken.
Mystery Private Eye [ Harper Perennial, On Sale: June 23, 2026, Trade Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9780063472419 / eISBN: 9780063472426 ]
Stig Abell presents the breakfast show on Times Radio, a station he helped to launch in 2020. Before that he was a regular presenter on Radio 4’s Front Row and was the editor and publisher of the Times Literary Supplement. At one time or another he has written for almost every newspaper in Britain, and one or two in America as well.
Stig's book How Britain Really Works was published in 2018 and in November 2020 he released his second book What to Read Next. He has since turned to fiction. Death Under a Little Sky, the first in a new detective series, published with HarperCollins in April 2023.
Stig lives in London with his wife, three children and two independent-minded cats called Boo and Ninja (his children named them, obviously).
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