A Shock to the System

By Simon Brett

Graham Marshall's ambition has made him a professional success, and he has the usual domestic problems to prove it. When he is passed over for promotion by an ambitious colleague he is shocked, but not half as shocked as when he is implicated in a murder, but is it by accident or design?

Simon Brett is the winner of The CWA Diamond Dagger 2014.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Severn House Digital
• Release date: Apr 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781448301287

Simon Brett

Simon Brett worked as a producer in radio and television before taking up writing full time. As well as the much-loved Fethering series, the Mrs Pargeter novels and the Charles Paris detective series, he has written a number of radio and television scripts. Married with three children, he lives in an Agatha Christie-style village on the South Downs. You can find out more about Simon at his website: www.simonbrett.com

Reviews for A Shock to the System

[eyejaybee · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have been a great fan of Simon Brett’s novels featuring the down at heel actor, Charles Paris, recently so well portrayed on Radio by Bill Nighy. That sequence of books, now extending to around twenty volumes, is merely one string from Brett’s capacious bow. He has also written several television and radio programmes (including After Henry which straddled both media) and two other sizable series of novels.This is one of his rare ‘stand-alone’ books, and follows the travails of Graham Marshall as he pursues a career in the unglamorous world of personnel and human resources. All is going well, and more or less to plan, until a cataclysmic encounter with a vagrant while on his way home from work.Graham is a finely drawn character, and his parents’ obsessive emotional investment in his success has possibly caused him to develop excessive aspirations within the ambit of work and family life. It also becomes apparent that he has developed an obsessive sense of his own worth, and his entitlement. It also becomes clear that he is prepared to take steps to fulfil that sense of entitlement.There is little of Brett’s customary humour in this novel, but it does not suffer for that. It is a fairly straightforward tale, which leaves one in the unaccustomed position almost of rooting for the bad guy. It appears from the cover of my edition that this was made into a film, starring Michael Caine, which I would be interested to see, but it would appear to have sunk entirely without trace.