THEN: Once upon a time in south London, three young men without a future decide to invent their own. The Sixties are starting to swing and Jimmy, John and Billy want it all: the clothes, the pills, the music and the women. Through drugs, protection and armed robbery, they start building their crime empire; everything they've always dreamed about is within their grasp. But then Billy changes sides and becomes a cop...and finds that his days are numbered. NOW: Billy's son, Mark, is working for John Jenner and waiting for the day when his father's killer gets out of prison. It's any time now and Mark is determined to be there when the doors swing open. An epic novel spanning forty years of love, life and villainy, Guns of Brixton is a major tour de force from an author at the peak of his powers.Review"Mark Timlin, England's hard-boiled enfant terrible . . . excels with this new effort. . . . An important crime writer who deserves better recognition on this side of the pond."  —Mystery Scene"Often brings to mind Coppola's Godfather movies . . . One of the best London crime books in ages. A writer has come of age."  —Guardian"Narrative rough enough to shed splinters when you turn the pages."  —Literary ReviewAbout the AuthorMark Timlin is the author of more than 30 novels, including All the Empty Places, Answers from the Grave, and Stay Another Day, as well as Gangsters’ Wives and Lipstick Killers under the pseudonym Lee Martin. His Nick Sharman novels were made into a television series starring Clive Owen.

When you are an ex-cop and an ex-doper scratching a living as a private investigator in the unromantic streets of south London, you take what you can get. Even a dreary little debt collection job for some toe-rag of a used-car dealer. But when Nick Sharman collects the money due on a classic Bentley he finds himself stepping into another world. A world where a reclusive rock musician in a secluded mansion, complete with its own recording studio – and firing range – broods on the royalties stolen from him by a crooked management – and decides Sharman is just the guy to get them back. Taking the job could be the worst decision of Sharman’s disaster-ridden life. And when rock’n’roll’s godfathers take on the mafia, south London explodes in a maelstrom of violence. Rome’s Tune is an uncompromising thriller from London’s answer to Elmore Leonard.

The explosive and compelling thriller of drugs and murder in south London's mean, gangland streets. Nick Sharman is nobody's favourite person. Ex-cop, ex-doper, invalided out of the Met after a stray bullet in the foot saved him from an investigation into the missing evidence from a drugs haul. The cops don't like him. The villains don't like him. Sharman is unemployable. So he's hired himself an office and set up shop as a private investigator in his south London patch. Divorces and debt-collecting were what he expected. What he gets is Patsy Bright, young, pretty and missing. Her father wants her back. She's a good girl, a model, and only a little bit into drugs. With Sharman's connections it should be a piece of cake. Only when he comes to with a split head, a pocketful of planted heroin, a dead girl and two policemen acting on a tip-off, does Sharman realise this case is different. And serious. And personal.