Killing for Christmas by DA Barker, £8.55

NOT entirely by chance, the sexual grooming of young women is a theme of Donald Andrew Barker's crime thriller Killing for Christmas, a self-published book which costs £8.55 in paper form and £2 as an e-book.

This crime has been a prevalent feature of life in parts of West Yorkshire for at least as long, if not longer, than it has in South Yorkshire. And as Mr Barker's story, which features a psychopathic murderer called The Killer, a man wrongly imprisoned for murder and a thriving sex-for-sale enterprise, the grooming of young women hardly comes as a surprise.

Normally the T&A does not review self-published novels, for good reason: the stories tend to be over-written, indifferently constructed and not readily available at the city's remaining book retailing outlets.

The reason we are making an exception in the case of Killing for Christmas is chiefly because Mr Barker's 262-page book, spiced with more sex 'n' violence than the average curry has coriander, is an object lesson in why stories usually need the critical eye of a professional publishing editor.

The story contains too much subsidiary detail, both in the narration and in the exchanges between characters. For example, the start of chapter two takes place in the railway station of the fictional town of Red Brook. We are told that the late night York to Manchester express is almost 40 minutes late. Even though chapter one has made the reader fully aware of the weather conditions, the author, seemingly unable to trust the reader's memory or imagination, cannot resist giving a weather report-

"This was due to flooding at York and then snow on the line, there being serious accumulations just to the east of Leeds where a full blown blizzard was raging which, the Met Office was predicting, would spread westward through the evening becoming particularly severe on the eastern slopes of the Southern Pennines from midnight through to the small hours and, ominously, in Red Brook, very much at the heart of the Southern Pennines, big white flakes were already swirling down."

I would have put a full stop after "snow on the line" and deleted the rest.

Mr Barker also ignores one of Elmore Leonard's ten rules of good fiction writing: he supplies an abundance of physical description of his main characters. Leonard believes that character should be delineated in speech not description. Unless a writer has the gift of Raymond Chandler or Leonard himself, character and plot development, which should be integral with one another, merge into information.

Thus in the first chapter the menacing atmosphere of The Killer's lurking presence outside a rain-lashed farmhouse is diminished by a man and a woman inside the house, in the thrill of adulterous love-making, implausibly nattering away, providing the reader with back history and plot development.

That's what amateurs do, even ones as adept at assembling word pictures as Mr Barker evidently is. This is a shame because he evidently knows the value of ending his chapters with a bang, with a surprise, as when ex-con John David Bane is bashed over the head by a bottle at a moment of supreme intimacy with prostitute (whose white teeth are "perfect").

Bane is on a personal hunt for the killer of his wife 20 years before. The past has a lot to answer for in this book.