I've only just got round to reading my first Tom Slemen book ('Haunted Liverpool 1'), but got bored about halfway through. Tales with verifiable facts, quickly start giving way to formulaic nonsense, where the protagonists can't be named, locations aren't specific, and the reported 'dialogues' could only have been accurate if CCTV and recording equipment had been in situ.
Written in 1997, Tom seems to have been fortunate that his readership of the time didn't have access to the myriad electronic records now easily accessible via the internet. A simple trawl through the census returns - cross-referenced with the complete births, marriages and deaths records, from 1837 onwards, reveal that individuals alluded to (in those stories were any sort of personal information is supplied at all) seem never to have existed. Why am I not surprised?
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File under: 'harmless fictional entertainment'.
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