Alan Shields

Our reading list ( with many more to come ):

The MISTY MCGILL series of mysteries

1: THEY KEEP KILLING CORWIN

2: A COFFIN FULL OF SILENCE

3: WINTER OF THE SNOW GOBLIN

4: THE TWISTED SHADOW

5: AFTER MIDNIGHT IT GETS EVEN STRANGER

6: DETOUR TO OBLIVION

7: A CELLAR FULL OF TWILIGHT

8: STONE-COLD DEAD IN OCTOBER

9: THE LONG SILENT NIGHT

The ROSSI SISTERS series of psychic thrillers

1: DARKEST NIGHT

2: RED FOR REMEMBRANCE

3: FIREANGEL

HORROR NOVELS:

THE GIRLS OF HUNTER HOUSE

SLASH OF CRIMSON

THE FROST HOLLOW

THE NIGHTSWEEPERS

SCREWBALL COMEDY:

LIPSTICK AND LEMON TREES

WESTERNS BY ALAN SHIELDS:

LAST MAN IN LAZARUS

THE RAWHIDE NOOSE

GUNFIGHT AT APACHE WELLS

All book cover designs by Pippa Gray. See: instagram@pippagrayart

Follow our instagram page at @pippagray_alanshields_ books

For years I worked in various Belfast bookstores. Most are now extinct. The APCK closed its doors decades ago, Cranes is long out of business and Queen’s University Bookshop – gone, baby, gone! I even did a summer stint in Books Etc. in London’s Fleet Street – I wonder where that went?

My last bookselling job started with Dillons before it went into receivership, shortly after I joined, of course. It was bought over and eventually morphed into Waterstones. After twenty years, or thereabouts, they finally sussed that I was death-watch beetle to any bookselling enterprise and cut me loose with a heart-warming redundancy payment. With no more bookshops to destroy I got serious about writing.

I met my writing partner some years ago, when the wonderfully named Philippa Gray chose the University Bookshop for enforced labour/work experience. It was to be a friendship forged of mutual madness. We share similar passions, all of them legal, for books, travel, movies, magic and brilliantly inventive sarcasm, and in a now defunct café in a Belfast mall – not my fault, honest! – we giggled and argued and scribbled our way to what has become a writing partnership.