To get the Sam Dyke Starter Pack (the first two series books, for free), visit the offer page by cutting and pasting the following into your browser: eepurl.com/bqDJbv

Altered Life

Making a killing in business is one thing - doing it for real is another.

Private Investigator Sam Dyke turns down a job that would require skills that he doesn't have - patience, computer-literacy, tact. Then he finds that the skills he does have - tenacity, aggression, street-smarts - are exactly the ones he needs for his next case - hunting down a cold-blooded murderer who seems to know what his every step will be.

To solve the case Sam must negotiate with his ex-wife, cement a relationship with a new love, unravel an office-based financial fraud and fight off an arrogant murderer armed only with a pen-knife. Altered Life is fast-paced, bitterly comic and introduces a tough new English private eye who knows what he wants and, usually, how to get it.

"Right out of the gate, this is an amazing novel for first-time author, Keith Dixon." - Ron Peters, POD People.

"If you like private eye stories, you owe it to yourself to check out Keith Dixon's Altered Life. I had a hard time putting it down and I bet you will too. With this book you'll be in on the ground floor of what is sure to be a successful series of 'Sam Dyke' mysteries." - Dan Marvin, The LL Book Review.



Investigator Sam Dyke has never met his son, Daniel. Until today. And then he wishes he hadn't.

Because Daniel has a girlfriend who isn't really suitable ... and, it turns out, is missing. In fact she's mixed up in a world of corruption and violence centering around the Ginger Twins - monstrous criminals who extend their crooked web from Liverpool to Manchester and all stops in between. Sam is determined to find the girl despite the odds against him - and also ignoring the fact that he's intruding on some apparently hush-hush police work ...

Trying to do the right thing, Sam does what he's good at. He irritates people, especially bad guys. And not surprisingly he soon finds himself on the Twins' hit list. What can a father do - except hit back?

The Private Lie pits tough private investigator Sam Dyke against a double-threat - the Ginger Twins, and his own inability to know what's good for him.



FEBRUARY 1942: The Struma, a broken-down steamer, explodes and sinks in the Black Sea, drowning 768 Rumanian Jews fleeing the Nazis and heading for Palestine, and safety.

JUNE 1944: Thirty-one SAS soldiers are captured behind enemy lines and are forced to dig their own graves before being shot and buried in a forest in the heart of France.

SEVENTY YEARS LATER: A young woman is attacked in the grounds of Edinburgh Zoo – the attacker seeking the document that might link these two wartime events.

Set in Scotland, Britain and central France, The Hard Swim is the third in the Sam Dyke Investigations series.

Sam is a private investigator from a working-class environment who usually runs investigations amongst the wealthy and privileged of the Cheshire set—those whose morals and levels of discretion are offensive to him and contradict his own values, forged in a strong family environment. The mysteries he unravels become personal crusades against entitlement, wealth and the abuse of power. Like Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade he has a clear view of what the world is actually like, but he nevertheless wants evil-doers set straight and will do what he can to help.

In The Hard Swim Sam becomes involved in unravelling a mystery that dates back to the Second World War. While concluding another case, he rescues a woman who is on the point of being abducted and, for all he knows, murdered. He takes charge and helps the woman, Chantal Bressette, escape, subsequently learning that she’s carrying a document that has importance to a group of powerful people. Chantal’s abduction is a crime he can’t ignore, especially when people subsequently involved in the case are murdered and his own loved ones are threatened.

The document the woman holds is a coded diary written by a French Resistance fighter in the Second World War, but also contains information implicating the British Government in the sinking of a ship carrying over 700 Jewish refugees to Palestine. Now the descendant of a key player in that action has let loose a team of ex-army killers to recover the information before it can be made public.
Sam Dyke is the only person who can stop them.

Based on true events, and with action ranging from bustling Edinburgh through to a quiet village in the centre of France, The Hard Swim pits Sam Dyke against his toughest opponents yet—an experienced team of killers backed by a ruthless MP about to ascend to one of the great roles of State.

Here's what some reviewers have said:

'The Hard Swim is deftly plotted and an engaging read, weaving together stories from the Second World War with those set in the present. The plotting is so well done that Dixon keeps the reader guessing. Every detail that is set-up earlier on in the novel has a pay-off later on in the story. Keith Dixon's prose is fluent and assured and he has that knack of making the writing look easy.... '

'I liked this enormously. It has a Dick Francis like attention to detail which makes the plot totally convincing. The thing that I found fascinating was the character of Steele and the psychology of someone who knows he is a sadist but at the same time is aware of what it does to his karma and who thinks of himself as an honorable soldier until disillusioned. A really good read with a depth of characterization, a classic private eye hero and interesting historical twists to the plot.'

'It would have been typical of the genre, and much simpler for the author, to have made Sam's chief antagonist, appropriately named Connell Steele, an inscrutable psychopath. Dixon, to his credit, makes him a far more complex personality, a professional assassin who is losing the ability to hide from his own doubts behind his avowed commitment to the military virtues of patriotism and honor.'



WINNER OF THE 2014 CHANTICLEER CLUE AWARD FOR PRIVATE EYE/NOIR FICTION!

Sam Dyke is back! The private investigator who never gives up until the bad guys are caught—or worse.

For Sam, taking this particular case is not promising. His client is a secretary who’s watching her boss fall apart, and she can’t bear it. The case requires subtlety and finesse and so isn’t his usual kind of job. But he likes her and takes it anyway.

And he soon discovers that it’s not the pressures of work that are getting to her boss. It’s his colleagues, a group of cultish scientists. Their leader is a hyper-intelligent seer/visionary who has a personal philosophy that is taking him towards one final act—to produce a calamitous event that will destroy the lives of hundreds of people. Or more.

Dyke sets himself on a course to prevent this madman from achieving his ends. A course that endangers him, his new partner and it seems anyone else who gets in the way of this doomsday plan ...