This week Amazon decided to retire the author beta rank. This won’t mean a lot to readers as you will continue to see items ranked in relevant categories. Authors used to have, in private, a number based on their total sales in relation to others. The figures were often meaningless, sometimes with extreme and inexplicable daily variations, but I liked looking at the graphs.

It is always a pleasure to link another book to my Amazon Page. You will now see The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns edited by Mitzi Szereto, available to preorder. I have contributed an article on the 1884 Carmarthen mystery which features characters loosely connected to Jack the Ripper. That leads me nicely to Swanson, a masterly biography of Donald Swanson by Adam Wood.

Swanson had day to day responsibility for the Jack the Ripper investigation and privately named a suspect. The book goes well beyond that to detail his life and career in the context of a changing police force and society. It deserves to top any Amazon chart.