About

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.