A Novel by Vince Smith
He commits the murders. Someone else serves the sentence.
Lancaster, 1985. One push on a freezing quayside, and nobody even calls it murder. Harry Fisher, brilliant, wealthy, brutally honest and entirely without remorse, decides that next time there will be an investigation. He'll simply make sure it convicts somebody else.
Kindle edition · out 19 December 2026
The novel
So Harry Fisher made sure his traces led to someone else.
Experiments in Murder is a dark crime thriller narrated by its killer. Harry grew up in a quiet Edwardian house across the River Lune from Lancaster, raised on Poe, Lovecraft and true-crime documentaries, and haunted by one question: why was Jack the Ripper never caught?
As DNA fingerprinting and criminal profiling transform policing, Harry draws up a set of rules and treats every killing as an experiment: vary the method, mislead the profilers, and leave the forensic teams exactly the evidence they want to find. The police get their convictions. The public gets its monster. Harry gets to watch.
But experiments have a way of producing results nobody predicted. As his reach extends from the Lancashire coast to the Moscow underworld, Harry discovers something far more dangerous than getting caught. He is beginning to feel.
“Dog walkers are associated with finding dead bodies, not leaving them.”
Enter the story
From a Lancaster quayside to the woods of the southern Lake District, Harry Fisher's experiments are planned with a translator's precision and recorded with chilling candour.
A polyglot translator fluent in more than ten languages, with an IQ of around 140 and no patience for a white lie. Harry studies forensic science the way other men study the racing pages. His rules are simple. Keeping to them is not.
A neighbour in a bitter feud. A stranger with size-13 trainers. Harry chooses the men who will take the blame long before the killing starts, then hands the police a case built on the science they trust most.
In Witherslack Woods, snowdrops push up through the forest floor. The headlines are written and the case is closed. But DC Pamela Davies doesn't believe they've caught the right man, and she won't stop digging.
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Dark crime thriller · Psychological suspense
Harry Fisher never set out to be caught. He set out to be legendary, and to let the guilty verdicts fall on other men. A cold, compulsive thriller narrated by the killer himself.
Out 19 December 2026
Your pre-order is placed on Amazon's own website.
For adult readers (18+). Contains graphic violence, explicit sexual content and strong language. Content details
Why read Experiments in Murder?
Told in Harry's own cold, candid voice: methodical, darkly funny and utterly unrepentant. You'll understand exactly how he thinks. That's the frightening part.
Planted fibres, borrowed footprints, a duplicate car, and a justice system that can't afford to admit its most trusted evidence might point the wrong way.
Written by an Operating Department Practitioner with more than 25 years in the NHS, the novel's medical detail is exacting, and all the more unsettling for it.
St George's Quay, Witherslack Woods, Kirkby Lonsdale, then Moscow's underworld and the frozen wilds of Siberia, building to a cliffhanger finale.
Experiments in Murder · Vince Smith
Every rule he set himself. Every innocent man he chose. Every trace he left pointing the wrong way. Harry Fisher has never told anyone how he did it. Until now.
Kindle edition · Britannia Publishing House Ltd
