Mel Sherratt Books In Order

Publication Order of DS Allie Shenton Books

Publication Order of Detective Eden Berrisford Books

Publication Order of The Estate Books

Publication Order of DS Grace Allendale Books

Publication Order of The Hope Street Books

Publication Order of DI Marsha Clay Books

Publication Order of Somerley Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Mel Sherratt is a British writer best known for the writing of crime fiction, mystery, and thriller novels. As Marcie Steele, she is known as an author of romantic comedies. For as long as she can recall, she has liked to call herself a meddler of words. After she won her first writing competition aged only eleven she has always had her nose in a book or a pen in her hand. Mel loves to call her writing grit-lit or what literature buffs would call fiction with a punch or gritty crime drama. Since 2012, she has published over 10 novels, all of which have been bestsellers on Amazon Kindle, with several attaining the top three ranks in their genre classification. Aside from her novels, she has also written feature articles for the likes of Writers Forum Magazine, The Writers and Artists website, and The Guardian among others. She is also a regular speaker at events, conferences, and festivals in the UK with her most favored being Harrogate, Theakstons Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival, and the London Book Fair. Sherratt asserts that she gets her inspiration from Elizabeth Haynes, Mandasue Heller, Lynda la Plante, and Martina Cole. She has been on the shortlist for the 2014 Dagger in Library Award of the Crime Writers Association (CWA). She was named one of the 100 most influential people in her hometown in 2017. Mel Currently lives in Stoke-on-Trent with her husband and Dexter her terrier.

As a young girl, she would always have a book in hand and remembers getting home to flop on the settee to savor the magic of Dorothy Edwards, CS Lewis, or Enid Blyton. While she can no longer plop onto the couch whenever she feels like it, her habits of reading everything she can lay her hands on have never died out. After winning the Staffordshire County Council writing competition that had over 60, 000 entrants, she knew that she was destined for a writing career. She would launch her writing career in 1987 after getting an electronic typewriter on a ten-dollar weekly check off. She soon upgraded to a PC on which she wrote several short stories that publishers for the most part rejected. After far too many rejections, she gave up on her dream of ever becoming a writer and from 1997 got several full-time jobs. She worked for the local authority as a housing officer for nearly a decade before shifting into development and training consultancy. Sherratt would be retrenched in 2010 forcing her to resort to a full time writing career.

She had been writing and rewriting her novel for over a decade before her life changed when he discovered self-publishing with Amazon kindle. After spending years trying to get a publisher for her novel, she became frustrated, as the farthest she ever got was acquisition meetings that never resulted in a book deal. Most publishers told her that her novels were not a perfect fit for any genre, as they were mostly a mix of thriller, crime, and women’s fiction. She wrote a police procedural, but that too was rejected as being too similar to what other novelists of the time were producing. Studying the Kindle market while one of the scariest thing she ever did was one of the most illuminating. Mel Sherratt’s research established that crime thrillers and women’s fiction dominated the top 100 on Kindle. She soon published her first novel in the DS Allie Shenton Series, Taunting the Dead. In a little more than a month, the novel was in the top 100 books in Kindle and soon hit number one in mysteries, thrillers, police procedurals, and number three in the fiction category. After the massive success of her first novel, she went on to publish three more novels on the Kindle platform, and has never looked back since.

Her novels, especially the fan favorite DS Allie Shenton Series is part psychological thriller and police procedural. It stars Detective Sergeant Allie Shenton, a gritty woman who works with her team to try to unravel gruesome murder mysteries, by finding the killer before he can strike again. She is a firm believer in the assertion that both good and bad reside in each one of us depending on the circumstances one is in. As such her writing, particularly in the Estate Series and the Marcie Steel written romantic comedies tend or explore crime one minute, shift to crying the next, and laughter within a few moments. Featuring very strong female characters, the novels are gritty, realistic novels that she loves to call grit lit from the female perspective. What stands out in the novels is that they can be dark while still being very emotional and visual. These are things that many fans of the genres she writes in are always looking out for.

“Taunting the Dead”, Mel Sherratt’s first and most popular novel introduces the lead protagonist of the DS Allie Shenton series, Detective Sergeant Allie Shenton. With the statistics on murder showing that most are committed by someone who the victim knew, Shenton knows to start closer to home when Steph Ryder is killed within earshot of her friends and family. Soon the secrets, backtracking, and lies pile up as the suspects in the case attempt to cover up what they had been up to on the fateful night. It is not long before Allie zeroes in on Terry – Steph’s powerful and ambitious husband. But despite her conviction that he is hiding something and her rigorous interviews, she only finds herself falling for the smooth charmer. With the trail growing hotter alongside her feelings, the bodies continue to pile up as the web of deceit becomes even more complex. She is now in a race against time to unravel the mystery before she finds herself the ruthless killer’s next target.

“Follow the Leader”, the second novel in the series opens to a man’s body found abandoned on a canal with a plastic magnet that spells E in his pocket. Barely a week later, another victim is found with a plastic V sewn into her clothes. DS Allie Shenton and her colleagues are on full alert, even as the childlike though eerie clues make it even more difficult to determine a pattern to the killings. Just like in the first, it is a race against time to find the killers next target. Even as the rules in such cases stipulate that they need to follow the leader to catch the killer – it is not that simple in practice. The novel is a flesh creeping narrative about a childlike killer with a grown up twist. It is a fast-paced and suspenseful thriller of a novel following the life of the killer through flashbacks to his childhood to his early adult years to help explain his motivations for killing without remorse.