A Christmas Murder of Crows by DM AustinDecember 1923. In the picturesque Westmorland village of Crowthwaite, the barmaid at The Black Feather entertains a traveller with a local story of pagan sacrifice – the Murder of Crows. Unbekno...
Suspense Novels: Home or Away? by Helen CooperI write this while looking at the covers of my two novels. My debut, The Downstairs Neighbour, features a house with a half-open doorway: an ordinary, familiar image, but with an air of shadowy secrec...
Every Time Unlucky: finding new challenges for a series character by Antony JohnstonDo we expect spy thrillers to have an emotional arc? Perhaps not. Many readers, certainly, seek out the genre for action and tradecraft rather than mental health issues, relationship problems, or dysf...
Curtain Call at the Seaview Hotel by Glenda YoungCurtain Call at the Seaview Hotel is the second in the series starring hotel landlady and amateur sleuth Helen Dexter. You can still read it as a stand alone book, however. This cosy crime is set agai...
Announcements of Daggers 2022 & Self-Nomination for 2023 All lists will be reproduced on the CWA website shortly after the announcements. Debut Dagger longlist only: online late afternoon event (5...
Fascists – the Perfect Villains? by Jason MonaghanWe all hate fascism, agreed? If not, stop reading here. When we were young, ‘the Germans’ were the baddies in our games, on TV shows and those stalwart WW2 films. Only when I began to study hist...
The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe by David LeighMy book started its life in late 2007, the same month I had flown from Panama to Miami and on to Manchester, via Atlanta, Georgia, to bring Anne Darwin home to face the music. Anne was the wife of ‘Ca...
The Subsequent Wife by Priscilla MastersJennifer Lomax is just twenty-one but she’s already taken some hard knocks in life. So when older, reserved and enigmatic widower Steven Taverner asks her to marry him, she’s desperate to...
When I signed a two-book deal with Polygon back in 2019 under the new name of Morgan Cry, I was ecstatic. I delivered both books to the publisher by late 2019 and thought, what do I do now? I knew tha...
KGB Banker by William Burton McCormick & John ChristmasA return trip to the land of his ancestors is about to turn deadly for one whistleblowing Chicago banker. When financial executive Bob Vanags takes a job at ominous Turaida Bank in Latvia, he hopes to...
A Theft, A Dog and a Man called Harold by Peter BartramOne of the pleasures of crime writing is when research turns you into a ‘snapper up of unconsidered trifles’. (The Winter’s Tale, Act 4 Scene 3, if you were torturing yourself to remember where the qu...
Bookseller of the Month: The Book Makers, BrightonEvery month, as part of the new CWA Booksellers Champion initiative, we want to celebrate a bookshop because we believe bookshops don’t just sell our books – they bring our streets alive. This month,...
Many Deadly Returns by the Murder SquadIt’s 21 years since Murder Squad, a group of award-winning crime and mystery writers, was formed and they have written a new anthology of short stories to celebrate the occasion with a bang. Murder Sq...
How I Came To Write ‘Appointment in Tehran’, by James StejskalWest Berlin, 1980. We knew it was going to happen sometime soon. When exactly was a mystery. It was one of those closely guarded secrets that would only be revealed when it was successful or went spec...
True Crime? How we bottle up and serve real-world acts of depravity, by Ed WhitfieldThe British fascination with murder has a long and illustrious literary history. From Thomas De Quincey’s 1827 essay, On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts to Kate Summerscale’s The Wicked Boy,...
When close confinement was a choice, by Kate EllisMy twenty-fifth Wesley Peterson mystery, The Stone Chamber, begins with the execution-style murder of Robert and Greta Gerdner at their home in the Devon countryside. DI Wesley Peterson suspects that...
The Postscript Murders by Elly GriffithsWhen 90-year-old Peggy Smith is found dead in her seaside apartment, it’s assumed to be from natural causes. Then her carer, Natalka, finds business cards describing the dead woman as a ‘murder consul...
The Dinosaur Who Came In From the Cold by David HodgesWhen I first discovered my desire to write, it was in virtual prehistoric times, when publishing houses like Methuen, Herbert Jenkins and Collins – to name just a few – adhered to simple publishing pr...
The Challenges of Writing From Multiple Perspectives by A.A. ChaudhuriI’m hugely excited that She’s Mine, my first psychological thriller, is coming out with Hera Books in August. Unlike my Kramer & Carver legal thriller series, I chose to write it in the first pers...
CWA Daggers 2021 AnnouncedChris Whitaker, Eva Björg Ægisdóttir, Michael Robotham, Vaseem Khan and Peter May win 2021 CWA Daggers. The winners of the 2021 CWA Daggers, which honour the very best in the crime writing genr...
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