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...

28th March 2022
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...
22nd March 2022
We 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...
22nd March 2022
My 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...
23rd February 2022
Many stories ago, I found a second-hand book published in 1947 called The Queen’s Awards. It contained the winning short fiction in a competition organised by the two American mystery writers, Frederi...
23rd February 2022
Having now written two non-fiction and several fiction books about undercover cops, I know a thing or two about authenticity when writing fiction involving characters who are undercover police officer...
17th February 2022
What goes on inside closed groups has always fascinated me – whether it’s a dysfunctional family unit, an urban gang or a Metropolitan Police murder team. All three feature in my fourth book, Silenced...
28th January 2022
It has been a long time coming. Since I first encountered Sherlock Holmes when I was 11 years old, I wanted to write crime and detective stories and, over the years, I wrote several crime novels (unpu...
15th December 2021
It might appear perplexing to some that the latest book by the erstwhile owner of the Murder One bookshop and current Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association happens not to be a crime and mystery nove...
25th November 2021
One 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...
25th October 2021
West 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...
20th October 2021
“Excuse me, miss. I think you’ve dropped something.” He held the camera under one arm like the bellows of a bag pipe, while with the other he thrust something in her direction. A book. The one she had...
12th August 2021
The 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,...
9th August 2021
My 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...
28th July 2021
Do you actually know anyone who is entirely good? Or entirely bad, with no redeeming qualities? I ask because as a crime writer I create both goodies and the baddies: those who do their very best in t...
15th July 2021
When 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...
15th July 2021
I’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...
14th July 2021
I wasn’t feeling like writing another book just now partly because I too often seem to choose a subject needing a great deal of research but, despite not previously being attracted by the subject, I...
1st July 2021
Chris 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...