BOOK REVIEW: best-selling Wigan thriller writer's historical drama debut should win a new army of fans

The former Wigan journalist and police officer is a Sunday Times best-selling author in this genre but, for now at least, he's turning his back on it.

Yet while fans of cops Mark “Heck” Heckenberg and Lucy Clayburn (his two most famous creations) may bemoan this career change, it is very much to the advantage of those who enjoy historical drama packed with plenty of action.​

Finch’s first venture of this kind is Usurper - Part One of two volumes known as The Wolfbury Chronicles - which charts the sudden and violent upheavals besetting the life of an Anglo-Saxon earl's younger son, Cerdic.

Disgruntled at plans set out for him to become a monk rather than a warrior like his sibling, he suddenly finds himself with more action than he bargained for when pitched into the bloody and history-changing events of 1066.

Fans of Bernard Cornwell and the Netflix series The Last Kingdom should lap this up.

But Finch is very much his own man. He creates highly believable, three-dimensional characters with whom the readers can relate, even from a distance of almost a millennium.

Fictional characters mix with the most famous figures of the time in a totally convincing way, while the descriptions of battles and other savage encounters are visceral and harrowing, but for reality's sake rather than gratuity.

This is born out by the detail of the brutal episodes' aftermaths and consequences which so often tend to get brushed over by other authors. The book contains the macrocosm of England defending itself against two different foreign invaders almost simultaneously, and the microcosm of 17-year-old Cerdic's rapid coming-of-age as he loses many of the important people in his life and he has to fend for himself.

A compromise has to be made on the language used: sales would doubtless be heavily dented if, in an attempt at hyper-realism, the author had penned it in Old English!

But this reader soon accommodated this, while the unavoidable technical terms of the time which do appear are worn very lightly.

Usurper, published by Canelo, goes on sale in all good books shops and online in paperback form, plus e-books and audible books on April 27.

I can't wait for Part Two.