Friday, October 21, 2011

Dean Crawford

Dean Crawford worked as a graphic designer before he left the industry to pursue his lifelong dream of writing full-time. An aviation and motorcycle enthusiast, he lives with his family in Surrey, England.

Covenant is his first novel.

Recently I asked Crawford what he was reading. His reply:
Right now I’m reading The Blue Zone by Andrew Gross. It’s a great story concerning a young professional woman whose life implodes when it is learned by the FBI that her father’s gold business has connections to Colombian drug cartels. Forced into witness protection when her father agrees to testify against the cartels in return for a lenient sentence, a year goes by before the heroine and her family are located and hunted down by the cartels.

I love novels that twist and turn, keeping the reader guessing, and The Blue Zone is a fantastic example of this. It shows how you don’t need a labyrinthine plot or hundreds of characters to keep readers fully entertained: what really counts is whether those readers really care about the characters – achieve that, and as an author you’ve done your job.

I also recently finished reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. In a world that seems in recent years to have become dogged by religious fanaticism, it’s both refreshing and saddening to realise that so much evil is done in the name of so many gods that simply do not exist, by those who claim to be the light or humanity’s salvation! Dawkins does what few governments dare to do: challenge the assumed righteousness of faiths and their leaders, and proves that their extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence that none of them can provide.
Visit Dean Crawford's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue