31st December 2024
Beneath the ruins of a Victorian greenhouse, a skeleton is unearthed – and with it, years of buried secrets in Raven’s Edge… When decades-old human bones are discovered beneath the old glasshous...
2nd December 2024
Award-winning travel and drinks writer Mike Gerrard takes readers on a centuries-long journey highlighting the most bizarre – and expensive – alcohol-related crimes all while revealing the inside worl...
1st November 2024
A brand new Peter Diamond mystery! When his former deputy, Julie, invites Detective Peter Diamond and his partner Paloma to spend a week at her home in the depths of rural Somerset, Diamond is horrifi...
30th September 2024
BEST FIRST NOVEL WINNER: Edgar Awards – International Thriller Writers Awards – Barry Awards A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker – NPR – The Diplomatic Courier During the A...
2nd September 2024
The city’s first winter under Nazi Occupation. A time of rations, breadlines, and desperate hunger. When Detective Eddie Giral investigates the murder of a black marketeer he knows two things: firstly...
1st August 2024
Launching a new series, a podcaster and cult science fiction superfan stages a documentary to solve her friend’s murder, and a 40-year-old disappearance, in this riotous and fiendishly twisty mystery....
3rd July 2024
Reformed banker Pippa is living her best life in the idyllic town of Louennec in Brittany. Business at her new bakery is booming and she even has a new man. But life in France still has its perils . ....
31st May 2024
In the midwinter of 1862, a young woman is found dead by the river, her body marked by a sinister act of mutilation. The mysterious death spreads fear, for this is not the first corpse to be discovere...
2nd May 2024
Everyone told Cara Shelly that she was crazy to set up a cafe in the shadow of eccentric Kentish stately home Tanton Towers. But now, three years later, the forty-something single mother can’t b...
1st April 2024
Why should the devil have all the best tunes? The Salvation Army has come prancing and singing from the slums of London to the poorest quarters of Oxford, but along with its red hot gospel preaching a...
29th February 2024
Three nice people. Three terrible crimes. What made them do these awful things? It’s the night shift worker who finds them. Huddled in a hospital store cupboard is elderly Edith Higgins. Knifed to dea...
20th February 2024
The deadline’s getting close! So here’s some last-minute advice for you on the practicalities of submitting. Please remember the rule: if you have any problems with your Debut Dagger submission, you m...
20th February 2024
Different competitions have different rules – and different levels of rigour in the way they apply them. For the Debut Dagger we are super-strict. We ask for entries not to exceed 3,000 words (1,500 w...
19th February 2024
Here are tips from recent newsletters compiled for you by Dea Parkin, the CWA’s Competitions Coordinator (and professional editor). If you’re at the stage where your entry is finished and you’re into...
1st February 2024
Menacing texts lead to murder in an English village, in this unmissable, witty mystery by the Dagger Award–nominated author of A Most Unusual Demise. May Morrigan is in her bookshop one morning when s...
2nd January 2024
One suspicious death. Two amateur sleuths. And an utterly impossible crime. The Cotswolds, 1924. At the Old Forge in the quiet village of Maybury-in-the-Marsh a cry of anguish rings out: lady of the h...
1st December 2023
Who knew a harmless town fair could be so polarising – or so deadly? When auctioneer Felicia Grant’s best friend, Stamford Mayor Cassandra Lane, talked her into helping with the town’s annual G...
14th November 2023
A lot of readers are writers, too. Whether you’re a bestselling author or an aspiring wordsmith, if you have a short mystery in the works, the Margery Allingham Short Story Competition wants to...
31st October 2023
September, 1939, and the worries of war follow Josephine Tey to Hollywood, where a different sort of battle is raging on the set of Hitchcock’s Rebecca. Then a shocking act of violence reawakens...
1st October 2023
February, 1918. In the small hours of a cold morning, a burglary in Limehouse has escalated into a sinister siege between a band of thieves and the authorities, and a police constable lies dead. Detec...