The Crime Warp

Well, it's nearly time to take the high road to Scotland (Stirling to be precise) for this year's Bloody Scotland Crime Writing Festival which takes place from Friday 9th Sept to Sunday 11th September. I have found it very difficult to make my Top 5 Tips because Bloody Scotland has delivered a belter of a programme.  Diverse and uniquely balanced there is sure to be something for every crime writer/reader's taste.  So, The Crime Warp has perused the programme and come up with our top 5 tips for the weekend.  Read on for more...

  The Crime Warp is lucky enough to be hosting Valentina Giambanca's Blood and Bone blog tour today.  Read on for an extract from  the third in her Detective Alice Madison series (Released in PB 25th August 2016)

McDermid, with deft paint strokes, paints an authentic picture of both character and setting throughout Out Of Bounds .   The over enthusiastic hotwiring of a car by Red Bull and Vodka fuelled youths in Chapter 1 is so vivid you can almost smell the alcohol.   This is swiftly followed by a visit to a Kinross pub where we meet Gabriel Abbott, eccentric and confused, before moving on to Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie, head of the Historic case Unit, who is grieving and in despair, then... there's the dead body.

The Time To Kill is Mason Cross' third Carter Blake book and this author shows no sign of writing a dud novel.  Both the The Samaritan and The Killing Season were phenomenal and The Time to Kill is just as good.  Action packed and sensitive - a James Bond type book for the 2000's (Maybe if Idris Elba doesn't get the 007 role he could play Carter Blake?- just saying).

The mega rich think their money and power shield them from the vicissitudes of fate. But they are wrong. The crash of a private luxury plane into the sea one foggy night proves the point. Evil can strike anyone, at any time. Some survive, some don’t. This is masterful story telling. You could build a writing class around the structure – how to circle  the solution while drip-feeding clues and back story and yet maintain suspense until the end. Or put another way - take an inventive plot with  interesting protagonists and let the thriller resolve itself in an emotionally satisfying conclusion. The author Noah Hawley includes a fascinating cast of very contemporary American characters: corrupt financiers and bankers, nasty chat show hosts willing to destroy lives to boost ratings, washed-up artists, attractive but directionless young women, winners and losers, and a little boy who serves as the centre around which the mystery of the crash pivots. Have you stocked u...

    Background to Black Night Falling My new novel , Black Night Falling , is the sequel to my 2015 debut The Dark Inside . It sees Charlie Yates compelled to return to Arkansas - to a town called Hot Springs, just a stone's throw from Texarkana, the place of his nightmares. Three young women are dead, and with echoes of what went on in Texarkana, it's not just his conscience telling him he has a duty  to put a stop to this...

I've always got a huge pile of books on the go and want my recommendations for Crime Warp readers to represent the newest and best in contemporary crime and thriller fiction.  I’ve also been thinking about what I would recommend for people going on holiday who want to take just one or two books with them.  It hasn’t taken me long to settle on these two as my top recommendations.   The Man Who Wasn’t There by Michael Hjorth and Hams Rosenfeldt.   This is the new Sebastian Bergman thriller – you may have seen the character on the TV played splendidly by Rolf Lassgård, or have read the first Bergman novel, The Man Who Watched Women , which I previously reviewed on The Crime Warp.  Either medium presents superbly both the character and absolutely top writing by Hjorth and Rosenfeldt.  The Man Who Wasn’t There starts with the discovery of six skeletons buried in the mountain a long time ago.  This investigation is perfect for Bergman – no...

Think Forensic Lots of new interesting happenings at Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate this year. One of my favourite’s was the CSI workshop by Think Forensic. The library room at the Old Swan became a gory crime scene. Ex detective Supt Wallace led a briefing on a murder that had been committed and with her colleagues CSI Jo Mallard and forensic scientist Leisa Nichols – Drew, ex police officer Sue Procter and forensic linguist Diane Hall brought to life and analysed the crime scene. Male body, blood spatter, potential murder weapons, hair and fibres, shoe print and DNA… it was all there. Think Forensic workshops are always very popular, in fact they have done them as far away as Austria. It was a super opportunity for aspiring crime writers to ask lots of technical questions. Sometimes the people in the audience are just as interesting as the ones on stage. I got to talking puppies with the nice lady who sat beside me (she’s an expert in d...

  I recently read a Facebook post listing the top 11 novels Stephen Kings considers the scariest… The Last Days Of Jack Sparks is number 12.    As the title suggests this is about the last days of Jack Sparks, who incidentally is the author of the novel. It is a paranormal thriller/mystery narrated as the manuscript from the non-fiction book ‘Jack Sparks on the Supernatural’ that Sparks was researching when he died.   With transcripts of eye witness observations, email transcripts and accounts of phone conversations interspersed throughout the book, it soon becomes clear we are dealing with a very unreliable narrator- one I would suggest would give Sebastian Faulks’s Engleby a run for his money.

Hanna Winter is the pseudonym for Eva Rehberger who is a hugely successful catwalk and fashion model in her native Germany. Hanna Winter's first thriller, THE CHILDREN'S TRAIL (2010), became an instant bestseller and Sacrifice has sold over 30,000 copies in Germany since first publication in 2012 – this is the first time it’s been available in English. We have just published the eBook of Sacrifice and the paperback is due to be published on the 17 th November 2016. The former German model has since published six novels under several pen names. Sacrifice has been received with critical acclaim. Sacrifice is the European bestseller for fans of Nicci French, Anne Holt, Karin Slaughter He must kill her. Hunt her down. Destroy her . . . In her very first case, criminal psychologist Lena Peters is confronted with a killer on a murderous vendetta. And though she is unaware, Lena will play a prominent role in his deadly mission. Lena knows what makes killers tick and al...

An annual highlight for me is the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival. It’s a great opportunity to catch up with friends new and old. And to people-watch and of course listen to talks and interviews and to laugh at anecdotes. My favourite one this year was told by actor/writer Robert Daws. When he had an acting job as hospital manager in the TV series Casualty, he had to fire a particularly popular consultant in a very nasty manner. Six months later, after the episode had aired, he was out shopping. A couple of older women ran up to him and one of them started hitting and punching him as he had been so nasty to the consultant. The other woman was trying hard to pull her friend off, explaining that he was only the actor and that the whole thing wasn’t real. Still makes me chuckle. Goes to show the power of a good story. Crime writers by and large are great story tellers. And nice with it. In fact, from my experience, the niceness of crime writers is not a myth perpe...

As ever there is a wealth of absolutely stunning Young Adult Crime fiction out there and I have been immersing myself in it for the past couple of weeks.. read on to find out more.