 A BOOK-LENGTH poem that's also a murder mystery set in Liverpool. That should be a concoction intriguing enough to tantalise the tastebuds of any literary sleuth on the track of something different. This pocket-sized gem, Quiver is the latest work by acclaimed city-born poet Deryn Rees-Jones and is set to get the big sell when it's launched at the influential Hay on Wye festival this Saturday. It tells the story of Fay Thomas, a poet with writer's block, who becomes a murder suspect when she stumbles on the body of her husband's former lover Mara as she jogs through a cemetery. With the the help of her friend Erica and trailed by both a police detective and a ghostly figure, she tracks the killer through Liverpool before a final showdown in Chinatown. A cunningly blended mixture of narrative and the fictional heroine's own poetry, it's a sophisticated whodunnit that also studies the nature of creativity while capturing the sometimes dream-like essence of certain city locations. Indeed it makes no bones about nailing the Liverpool colours to its mast, the front cover being a purple negative of the Pier Head. "Although someone's already asked why a picture of London's been used," laughs 35-year-old Deryn, a petite sparkle-eyed English lecturer at Hope University. Her highly praised previous works include The Memory Tray and Signs Round a Dead Body but this is the first collection of sorts to feature her home town. "Liverpool has always been absolutely central to who I am, I think," says Deryn who read English at Bangor University and spent a number of years in London before returning home to Aigburth, where she lives with writer Michael Murphy. "I feel rooted here. My daughter was also born here and I really wanted to write about something in relation to where we came from." As a big fan of women's detective fiction Deryn admits that initial thoughts were that Quiver should be a first novel in murder mystery form - before reality kicked in. As she explains: "I especially like the work of Val McDermid. She uses Manchester as the basis for her stories and I like the way you get to know the town through them. "There are also lots of things that go along with the characters of women detectives which I find intriguing: that they always love exercising, they always have big appetites and they're always having problems with their relationships - all sorts of other criteria that gets worked in with the murders. | 
