Jack Slater
Author
Derived from the DS Pete Gayle series
The other side of the mirror from DS Pete Gayle’s investigation in Book One of the series, Nowhere to Run – this is The Dark Side. A young girl is snatched from right outside her school. While she fights to survive in the clutches of her abductors, her family is ripped apart by guilt and recriminations. And, with no demand or even a message to go on, they are forced to rely on the police to find her. But not even the officer in charge of the case is aware until it’s too late of just how close he is to the kidnappers. Available now on Amazon, Kobo and Nook.
Books
Nowhere to Run
A missing child. A dead body. A killer on the loose. Returning to Exeter CID after his son’s unsolved disappearance Detective Sergeant Peter Gayle’s first day back was supposed to be gentle. Until a young girl is reported missing and the clock begins to tick. Rosie Whitlock has been abducted from outside her school that morning. There are no clues, but Peter isn’t letting another child disappear. When the body of another young victim appears, the hunt escalates. Someone is abducting young girls and now they have a murderer on their hands. Time is running out for Rosie, but when evidence in the case relating to his own son’s disappearance is discovered the stakes are even higher…
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No Place To Hide
A house fire. A suspicious death. A serial killer to catch. When a body is found in a house fire DS Peter Gayle is called to the scene. It looks like an accidental death, but the evidence just doesn’t add up. With only one murder victim they can’t make any calls, but it looks like a serial killer is operating in Exeter and it’s up to Pete to track him down. But with his wife still desperate for news on their missing son and his boss watching his every move, the pressure is on for Pete to bring the murderer to justice before it is too late.
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No Way Home
A dead body. A mysterious murder. A serial killer on the loose. A taxi driver is found murdered in a remote part of Exeter. He is a family man, no enemies to be found. There is no physical evidence, except for dozens of fingerprints inside the cab. How will DS Peter Gayle ever track down his killer? Then another cab driver is found dead. Now this isn’t just a case of one murder but a serial killer on the loose, once again…
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No Going Back
DS Pete Gayle’s family problems are still unresolved and about to get worse when circumstances thrust him into another murder case. A woman’s body has been found in woods outside the city. The frenzied killing and the way she was left, naked and posed, send conflicting signals. Was she known to her attacker or is a potential serial killer operating in South Devon? With no clues left at the scene, Pete and his team must first identify the victim before they can even start looking for a suspect.
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No Middle Ground
A missing father. A desperate daughter. A terrible discovery. A new case is the last thing DS Pete Gayle needs right now, but when it falls right into his lap, he has no choice. Justice is crying out to be served. With a career-making trial about to begin and his son in imminent danger from a pair of psychopathic brothers, Pete goes on the hunt in what could turn out to be the biggest case of his life.
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No Safe Place
A body is found, horrifically tortured and left outside a women’s refuge. She is quickly identified as a resident, the victim of domestic abuse. DS Pete Gayle’s young son is recently dead, his traumatised daughter is going through hell and his station chief is out for his blood – or at least his career – when he is called to a murder scene on a residential street in Exeter. But the obvious suspect was three hundred miles away, so who did this? And why? The attack was too personal, the scene too specific and too staged to be random so was this a murder for hire? Or is someone targeting the refuge? Haven’t these women been through enough? Touched by the plight and the resilience of the shelter’s residents, Pete must track down a vicious and sadistic killer before more can fall prey.
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No Compromise
A brutal murder. A man jailed. A new witness who claims he couldn’t have been there. Already in the middle of a violent and complex case, DS Pete Gayle gets caught up in a tangled web of lies and intrigue. With a man in jail for a murder he may not have committed, the reputation of the station and the whole force is on the line. Pete has to face one of the hardest choices of his life. To break ranks and go against another officer risks losing friends, colleagues and career, but if he ignores the case, will he be able to live with himself?
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No Compassion
A vicious rape, a woman left traumatised. A previous victim is quickly identified. Then more come forward. A serial rapist is attacking the women of Exeter in their beds at night. There are fingerprints and DNA but no matches, CCTV but no identification. With the press clamouring for answers DS Pete Gayle and his team must work through a maze of conflicting evidence to identify and arrest the offender before he can commit another brutal attack.
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No Stone Unturned
A murder in mysterious circumstances. A woman is brutally slaughtered just feet from her sleeping family. But no-one hears a thing and none of them belong in this grand and expensive home. Who are they? Why are they here? And why was this woman killed? DS Pete Gayle must draw on all his skills as an investigator to figure out what went on here and why.
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No Good Deed
A young woman sits quietly compliant at a sea-front bus-stop as a police officer takes a bloody knife from her hand. ‘I’m safe now,’ she says. But safe from whom? Who is she, whose blood is on the blade and where has she come from? These are just a few of the questions DS Pete Gayle must answer in the latest book in this top-selling series.
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No Fair Hearing
A desperate mother fights in vain for the life of her son as he is kicked and beaten to death by a vicious mob. When DS Pete Gayle is called in all he finds is a rumour about the victim that is quickly proved false and a wall of silence more solid than the stones around the city’s old prison. Was this just pointless spite that went too far or is there more behind the horrific killing? Pete is forced to battle a mini crime wave designed to keep him in the dark as he seeks justice for an innocent victim and his distraught family.
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No Fear of Consequences
A student disappears in broad daylight just yards from the university. With potential witnesses beginning to disperse across the country for the Christmas break, DS Pete Gayle is under extra pressure to figure out what happened as quickly as possible. Did she leave of her own accord, unable to cope with the pressures of university? Was she snatched by an ex-boyfriend, a stalker or a random attacker? Or was she targeted because of the way she’d chosen to supplement her student loan? One disturbing discovery after another draws Pete and his team through a minefield of sensitive information, much of which he is all too aware, as a father himself, would be horrifying to the victim’s parents. But he has to follow the evidence, wherever it may lead.
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No More Than Bones
Exeter-based DS Pete Gayle is already busy with a child-snatching case when a call comes into CID that a body has been found in Exwick cemetery. And this burial, in a shallow grave among the trees bordering the graveyard, is not an official one. With nothing but the skeletal remains to go on, Pete must find out who the dead man is, how he got there and, most importantly – who put him there?
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No Second Chance (DS Peter Gayle thriller series, Book 14)
A rumour on the streets. A courier caught in the act. Somewhere in or close to Exeter, someone is making guns and selling them on the black market. Someone secretive enough to cover his tracks by any means necessary and ruthless enough to kill without compunction. DS Pete Gayle and his team must work with the National Crime Agency to catch him before he can spread any more death and destruction across the streets of the UK’s major cities as well as closer to home. But how can they track down a ghost who works in the shadows and leaves no witnesses when all they have to go on is a cryptic nickname?
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No Limit To Evil (DS Peter Gayle thriller series, Book 15)
A burglary. A missing car. Two dead bodies and nothing else apparently touched. It seems like there’s an obvious answer when DS Pete Gayle is called to the crime scene in an affluent area on the edge of the city. But is it too obvious? Then another death occurs. A connection is made that adds a whole new dimension to the case. Now he has to find the link between the victims before more people are attacked and possibly killed.
The Venus Flaw
Murder, corruption and intrigue conceal a horrific secret in Malta's Mediterranean sunshine. When Dan and Wendy Griffin find a cave full of prehistoric artwork on the coast of Malta they are plunged into a living nightmare. Someone is trying to keep something hidden, but who? And what? Unable to trust the police or the British Embassy and with no clues other than the cave itself and the fact that one of the men trying to keep them from it works for the National Security Service, they must try to figure out what is going on before one or both of them are killed.
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Nowhere to Run - The Dark Side
Although a complete story in itself, this book is intended as a supplemental volume for those who have read the first of the DS Pete Gayle crime series, Nowhere to Run. It is the other side of the mirror - the case seen from the viewpoints of the victims, the perpetrators and their families. A young girl is snatched from right outside her school. While she fights to survive in the clutches of her abductors, her family is ripped apart by guilt and recriminations. And, with no demand or even a message to go on, they are forced to rely on the police to find her. But not even the officer in charge of the case is aware until it’s too late of just how close he is to the kidnappers.
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Raised in a farming family in Northamptonshire, England, Jack Slater had a varied career before settling in biomedical science. He has worked in farming, forestry, factories and shops as well as spending five years as a service engineer.
Widowed by cancer at 33, he remarried several years later in the Channel Islands, where he worked for several months through the summer of 2012.
He has been writing since childhood, in both fiction and non-fiction. No Compassion is his eighth crime novel in the chart-topping DS Peter Gayle mystery series.
Pete Gayle's origins lie in Malta
Some years ago I saw the TV series Underworld, presented by author and journalist Graham Hancock www.grahamhancock.com and read the book that accompanied it. I was fascinated by the section on Malta. This tiny, densely populated tourist Mecca in the middle of the Med was reported to be the centre of a conspiracy that went back decades and stretched at times to the highest levels of government. Using meticulous research, Hancock described a student who gained a PhD on the strength of a thesis that, even as he was writing it, was clearly and provably wrong yet, practically as soon as it was written, it gained him a job in charge of Malta's premier archaeological museum and a career that eventually placed him in complete charge of the country's archaeology. Violence, vandalism and the deliberate destruction of artefacts and even entire archaeological sites were combined with the ridiculing of finds that could not be concealed or explained away, the intimidation of scientists who discovered them and the falsification of what little dating evidence could not actually be prevented in a concerted attempt to downgrade the importance of the islands' archaeology. Finds that, anywhere else, would have been dated at between seven and eleven thousand years old were here claimed to be no more than two and a half to three thousand years old.
All this was so obvious that it bordered on the ridiculous but so persistent and insidious that it had to mean something. The only question was what? What were they so determined to hide? It had started while Malta was still part of the British Empire but continued for decades after it gained independence. What could be so important that the British government as well as the local one that followed it would be so dead-set on hiding it?
I was fascinated.
As a non-journalist without the resources of someone like Graham Hancock, The Venus Flaw was my attempt to find the answers and, having written it, I was determined to make it as good as I could so I began working on it with London-based independent editor and writing coach Kathy Gale. While we polished and honed the story, making it as good as we could, two things happened.
The first was the aftermath of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code which saw a flood of conspiracy thrillers hitting the bookshops, soon followed by a complete loss of interest in the genre by the major players in the publishing industry. This type of book was suddenly not going to get taken up by anyone.
And the second was a comment that Kathy made one day while we were working on a scene involving one of the secondary characters in the book, a police detective who she had taken a shine to.
'You know, you ought to write crime fiction.'
Well, I was taken aback. It wasn't something I had ever contemplated. There are basically two types of fiction writers - pantsers and plotters. I am definitely of the former persuasion - as, it turns out, are some of my favourite authors to read - while I had always thought of crime fiction writers as having to be of the latter. Careful and meticulous plotting and planning had to be an essential part of their process, surely? I had never been into that. I saw no fun in it. I'd rather just start at page one and see where the characters took me. But I gave it some serious thought. I discussed it with my wife and with Kathy and eventually decided to give it a go. Which is what led to Pete Gayle and his first case. So, while he was born in Okehampton and lives and works in Exeter, he was conceived in London and his origins lie firmly in the sun and sand of Malta.
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Featured Locations
Below are a few photos of locations featured in the DS Pete Gayle series. Some are mine, others from the Internet. More will follow in time. They are in no particular order.
The first one is of Fore Street, location of the pool hall Pete's informant Darren spends a lot of time in. Second is Mama Stone's, at the bottom of the narrow street containing the taxi office Pete has visited a number of times. Then we have The Lodge, in the corner of Bury Meadow Park. A night shot of Cathedral Square. Another of Bury Meadow Park. The Combined Courts. Dawlish Warren from above. The Alms Houses on Magdalen Road. Exeter Prison. The entrance to Dartmoor Prison. The Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, which Pete has visited countless times, for various reasons, in the books. Crownhill police station in Plymouth. Two pictures of Heavitree Road police station. Exeter Central railway station, outside which another of Pete's CI's, Mick Duggan, busks as often as he's allowed to. And an aspect of modern Exeter - Princesshay shopping centre, which has featured in more than one of the books. Following that, the new Exeter police station, opened in April 2020, next to the Devon and Cornwall police HQ at Middlemoor on the eastern edge of the city and a happy co-incidence - I was writing the next novel in the series, at a point where Pete had just visited a potential witness in South St Exeter and left there to head up the High Street. When I finished the scene I went onto Facebook and what did I find? This picture of that very junction, posted that same morning! Then we have a couple of shots of Exmouth Esplanade including the setting for the opening scene of Book 10, No Good Deed, followed by a couple of Exwick cemetery, where Book 13, No More Than Bones, opens. Then we have some from Book 14, No Second Chance, starting with one of mine of the head of Barbican Terrace. Then there is Barbican Steps, which go down from the Terrace, an old image of Countess Wear where Mill Road meets Countess Wear Road, (there is now a garage on the junction, belonging to the cottage beyond it), and one of the gargoyle in the back of the house on the corner of Roberts Road and Topsham Road. Weirdly, all three of these last images popped up on-line while or very shortly after I was writing about those very locations. In April 2024 I managed a rare visit to the city. (My ME prevents it being a regular occurrence.) So here's one taken by Pru of me outside the Sidmouth Road police station. And we returned in September. Thorverton has featured in more than one of the books, but particulary in No Fear of Consequences. Here is a shot of the village centre, opposite the pub where we stayed.
