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 . ....
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...
1st September 2023
London 1899. The dead body of a Yeoman Warder is discovered at the Tower of London inside a suit of armour belonging to Henry VIII. He had been run through with a sword. The Prince of Wales, fearing...
31st July 2023
Kitty Underhay is riding a carousel… with death. Summer 1935. Enjoying a belated honeymoon visiting her new husband Matt’s family in the rolling Yorkshire hills, Kitty strolls through a village fair....
4th July 2023
‘THE RED DEATH’ BY ABRAHAM KAWA 1970. After a disturbing murder case left DI Chris Bates’ mental health shattered, he spends time recovering in an asylum before being released to a halfway house. When...
27th February 2023
By Leigh Russell Life is full of surprises. Partial to round numbers, I always hankered after writing twenty books in my Geraldine Steel series. To begin with, twenty books seemed like an impossibly a...
15th February 2023
The CWA North America chapter recently hosted an evening in conversation with Sara Paretsky (author of the VI Warshawksi books.) It was recorded and is now hosted on our YouTube channel. Free to watch...
25th January 2023
Like many people, I grew up in thrall to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction (GAD for short). Our home was heaped with Agatha Christie paperbacks, so even before I picked up a single one and actually...
14th December 2022
War and Peace is supposed to contain 500 named characters, and readers find it hard to keep them straight. For one thing, each one is called by multiple names, and, for another, those names are Russia...
24th November 2022
I was once a solicitor who spent each working day dealing with heinous crimes, difficult divorces and professional negligence claims. Now I’m Caroline England/CE Rose author, the ‘Duchess of Dark Dome...
24th October 2022
I 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...
7th October 2022
I was studying my map of London in 1850 to find the end of the Blackwall Railway where Dickens and Jones must alight in pursuit of a murderer. I needed a tavern in which the murderer could be holed up...
3rd October 2022
Do 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...
19th August 2022
My new book, The Velocity of Blood follows 17-year-old Jack Tolleson as he’s bullied online and offline, fat-shamed, victimized and finally thrown away and forgotten. One day in October, he breaks. In...
13th July 2022
I am always astonished by the interesting and extraordinary stories which turn up during my research for the Charles Dickens Investigations. Some things can’t be used and remain in the memory just as...
22nd June 2022
My latest thriller, Truly Darkly Deeply explores a serial killer’s legacy through the eyes of his daughter who, twenty years after his incarceration, still can’t be sure whether he’s actually guilty....
22nd June 2022
There’s something about the psychological genre that sucks me in like no other. The pervading sense of dread, the flawed narrator(s), the tension between characters, along with an iconic twist, all ma...
8th June 2022
The trouble with writing historical crime fiction is that it’s fiction, which means you make it all up, but it’s also set in the past, and if you get your history wrong it can really annoy the person...
24th May 2022
When it comes to my psychological suspense novels, I’m a counsellor, therapist and particularly a psychologist. How I love to excavate my characters’ innermost thoughts and feelings and find out who t...
26th April 2022
I love mysteries that talk of food. Some of my favourite series include the Inspector Chen Cao series by Qiu Xiaolong, which brings Chinese everyday cuisine to life, Mia P Manansala’s Tita Rosie...