Spanish Lies

Mark was born in Handforth, Cheshire and educated at Wilmslow Grammar School and Macclesfield College. In 2001, he left behind a thirty year career in local government in Manchester and South East London and moved to a small village inland from Spain's Northern Costa Blanca. After adjusting to his lifestyle transplant he began writing and completed a humorous account of his early exploits entitled I Want to Live in Spain, published in 2004. A first novel, Missing, followed in 2006. His second novel, a murder mystery entitled Spanish Lies, is now published by Caffeine Nights. Mark is a keen student of modern Spanish history from the Civil War and Franco's repressive regime to the present day. In 2005 he suffered the all-too-common misfortune of becoming involved in a property development scandal which threatened his new home, not to mention his financial well-being. Determined not become a victim of Spain's notorious Land Grab laws, Mark joined neighbours to fight the plans and stood as a candidate in local elections in 2007. A successful campaign saw the ruling political party ousted from the local town hall and the disastrous development plans were eventually annulled.Spanish Lies is a fiendish murder mystery that draws heavily on Mark's knowledge of recent Spanish history and his experience of the ingrained culture of corruption that is still treated with phlegmatic indifference. The result is an intriguing thriller which, though grounded in fact, stretches credulity in terms of the depths of depravity and subversion to which some people will stoop in search of wealth and self-gratification. All this is balanced by an appreciation of the gentility of the Spanish way of life and the value placed by many ordinary Spaniards on family, friendship and humanity. For the future Mark is researching a new novel set in 1940 in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War when Franco's tentative hold on power was reinforced with brutal oppression which saw thousands of innocent victims killed simply for supporting the wrong side. Many of those victims remain in unmarked graves, denied, even to this day, the decency of a Christian burial.