THE ODD THOMAS MOVIE IS ON ITS WAY! And even more excitingly, following the first viewing, Dean Koontz is ‘whacked flat by happiness’, and coming from the great man himself, that just proves how incredible this film is going to be.

Check out his review here: http://www.deankoontz.com/dean-speaks-about-the-odd-thomas-movie-2/

And for those of you who haven’t yet read the series, watch the US trailer below and get addicted.

The UK edition of Odd Apocalypse is out in July, pre-order now from Amazon.

As promised, here’s the fourth and final part of Lisa Brackman’s interview – she ends with talking a little about her background and how she ended up writing. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on it, and we hope you like YEAR OF THE TIGER, her debut thriller.

Have a great Bank Holiday everyone!

Killer Reads x

Thankings,

Killer Reads

As always, enjoy! 

All the best

Killer Reads

Killer Reads Exclusive Alert!

An interview with the award-winning Lisa Brackman, author of YEAR OF THE TIGER: a game-changing new thriller set in modern China, in a world of underground artists, government conspiracies and paranoid revolutionaries.

This is the first of four fascinating clips we’ll be bringing to you this week – kicking off with her talking about China, how it’s changed and her experiences there.

Enough from us – over to you, Lisa!

‘Stuart MacBride’s thrillers are written with genuine humour, a dark imagination and superb storytelling skills. It’s rare to find a book that can make you laugh aloud and shudder with horror,and which you cannot put down.’

Bernard Cornwell

And if that doesn’t encourage you to read it, then we don’t know what will!

To find out more about Bernard Cornwell and his book Harlequin which is being given away tonight as part of the World Book Night event, or to read an extract of Stuart MacBride’s Cold Granite please visit the World Book Night website here: http://www.worldbooknight.org/about-world-book-night/wbn-2012/the-books/harlequin 

Recently my son Stan (5) discovered something it took me until I was about 15 to figure out. He’d been playing a lot of Lego Batman on his Nintendo DS over the Easter break – I know I’m a model parent – and I noticed he’d stopped playing as Batman or Robin and switched to the Riddler, ClayFace and the Joker. When I asked why, his fingers kept twitching on the keys and his unblinking eyes never left the screen. ‘Bad guys are cool,’ he said.

Of course he’s right. Bad guys are cool and thrillers and crime novels exploit this innate attraction to the darker shades of the human animal. As readers we love to sink into the murky swamp of a dark story and peer over the shoulders of monsters as they go about their terrible deeds in the tense and hopeful knowledge that good will ultimately triumph and the monsters will be slain so that order is restored by the last page. As writers we spend more time in this swamp than most, mining the darker parts of ourselves in order to breathe life into the villains that will in turn breathe life into our stories.

For The Key, however, the follow up to my debut thriller Sanctus, I found myself entering the story in a bit of an antagonist vacuum. At the end of the first book I had pretty much killed off all the bad guys in an operatic orgy of cathartic violence and retribution. This was all well and good for the end of book one, but it left me at the start of book two with no palpable threat to the heroes – and therefore no tension – so the first thing I had to do was pack my writery bag and trudge back to the darkest places in my head, looking for new baddies to build.

There is a very clear distinction between writing bad characters and writing characters badly.  This is what I have learned:

• If your narrator or other characters have to keep telling the reader how evil a character is, you have failed.
• If your character is doing mindlessly evil things every time we meet them, you are trying too hard.
• If your character behaves less like a person and more like a pantomime villain, you will lose the reader  – unless you are writing a pantomime, in which case your character-creating problems are … behind you!!! (…sorry…)

For me, the key to writing an effective antagonist – or any character for that matter – is to imagine the whole story is about them. The usual inclination is to think about the main (generally noble) character’s story first and work out ways in which the antagonist can thwart them along the way to create drama. This runs the risk of relegating the villain, and all the other characters, to mere functions of the hero’s dramatic needs.

If, however, you switch perspective and see the whole story from the villain’s point of view, imagining the hero is just some annoyance trying to prevent them from doing something that may seem abhorrent to anyone normal but seems perfectly logical to them, you immediately get a different and potentially more interesting take on things. What’s more, the story unfolds according to the logic of that character’s behaviour, making the plot more surprising and the character more believable and human. It also helps you build the story from different perspectives so the whole experience ends up richer.

I started using this technique back in my distant youth when I wanted to be a movie director and would write and direct short films in order that someone important might see them and recognise the rough genius at work and give me a feature to shoot (never happened). I would shoot the films on begged and borrowed equipment and try and cast them as well as I could with no money. In each script the main part was generally fairly easy to cast, but getting decent actors to fill out the smaller but equally necessary roles relied on those parts being interesting. So before I started casting I would go through the script several times, imagining each time that it was all about one character, and think my way through that role. I also lived in fear of being on a shoot and having an actor ask me a question about their character that I didn’t have a ready answer for because I hadn’t thought about it.

Stan as Captain Evil

The same fear suffuses my writing to this day, only now I fear the sinking heart of the reader as they turn to a chapter featuring a character they don’t like. I do it myself when I’m reading, skipping the bits featuring characters that don’t feel as substantial as others. So I try really hard to get all the characters working, especially those all-important baddies. I’m hoping that when Stan’s old enough to read my books he’ll think they are cool too. Maybe he’ll like the good guys as well – but I’m not holding my breath. Shortly after the Lego Batman incident he wandered into our bedroom with an Optimus Prime helmet on his head, a roman sword in his hand and announced he was no longer Stan, he was now – Captain Evil…

Simon Toyne’s latest book The Key is currently at No.4 in the Sunday Times bestseller chart! If you fancy getting involved, then you can buy it here. And you can also watch the brilliant trailer below. If you fancy winning yourself a signed copy of the Key, then sign up to our newsletter – we’ve got ten copies, and one could be yours!

Agatha’s first letters to her mother can be seen below, these are from the first leg of her journey from Madeira to Cape Town.

R.M.S ‘Kildonan Castle’

First day: 20 January 1922

Darling mummy

Everything very comfortable – nice cabin with lots of room.

I do love my violets. Take care of yourself, darling – I do love you so much.

Will write again from Madeira.

Your loving

Agatha

R.M.S Kildonan Castle

[undated]

Darling Mummy,

I couldn’t send you an amusing and cheerful letter from Madeira because I was laid low, and nearly dead! I was terribly ill – it was very rough and everyone was ill. Archie, Belcher, and Hiam were all right, of course but ‘the ladies’ and Mr Bates were very sorry for themselves. I was quite determined to get off at Madeira and come straight home, or take a Villa there for the winter. The day before we got there, I was very bad. Sick without ceasing, having tried everything from champagne and brandy to dry biscuits and pickles, and my arms and legs were all going pins and needly and dead, so Archie fetched the doctor along, and he gave me teaspoonful doses of something or other, chloroform stuff , which stopped the sickness, and nothing to eat for twenty four hours, and then Brand’s beef essence. When we got to Madeira, Archie got me up on deck, and fed me with it, whilst I almost wept because Madeira looked so beautiful! I’d no idea of it. It looked like Kinderscout put bang on the sea, green hills and ravines with houses perched on them like Upper House, or rather like Dartmouth. It was grey weather too, so it must look even more beautiful in sunshine. I couldn’t go ashore of course, which was rather disappointing.

But since then, I’ve been quite all right, and am now enjoying myself hugely, feel perfectly well, have baths and meals, and get up in the morning just as though it was dry land.

From henceforth I shall write you a kind of diary, a little every day. I need hardly say that Belcher was at once made chairman of the Sports Committee on board. The boat is not very full. There is rather a nice sailor lad called Ashby going out to join a ship at Cape Town, who went with Mrs Tweedale over the haunted

house in Torquay, a delightful woman, Miss Wright, belonging

to some college out in South Africa who is most amusing, a Miss Gold who is the thinnest girl I have ever seen and like a Botticelli Madonna, and a particularly fat fellow called Samels with a very nice wife and kiddies. He’s a great ostrich person, and the Mission is fixing up a meeting with him out there. We have trained the Chief Engineer, at whose table we sit, to drink ‘Success to the Mission’ every night, which he does, murmuring. ‘But I’m still not sure what kind of a mission it is. They say it’s not religious.’

The Hiams are nice, but dull. Won’t do anything – enter for quoits or take part in things. Archie and I entered bravely for everything, had our first contest yesterday, when to our utter surprise, we knocked out two Belgians who have infuriated the ship by hanging on to the quoits and practising all day long. It was a most popular victory. Everyone kept coming up to us and saying ‘I hear you’ve knocked out the Dagoes! Splendid.’

Belcher gave us a screaming description of his visit to the King. Whilst airily chatting to Wigram on arrival, a super footman approached and murmured ‘which links would you wish to wear this evening sir?’ ‘Oh any links, any links,’ said Belcher, to which the footman hissed in an agitated whisper: ‘I can’t find any.’ ‘And then, of course, I had to take the brass ones out of the shirt I was wearing and hand them to him. Most unfortunate!’

The King was charming and most natural, and the Queen had a full description of all the ladies accompanying the Mission, and made a note of my book. Princess Mary was not at all a dump,

but very jolly, but Lascelles was a dull dog, who said little, and drank champagne in enormous quantities! They talked a good deal about ‘their boy’. The Queen said ‘My boy has had thirty five wooden caskets presented to him when he was in Australia, and of course he doesn’t know what to do with them. Lovely wood, but hideously made.’ The King told a story of Hughes starting out to drive with the Prince through Sydney. ‘He started in a topper, but when they got to the suburbs, he hid it under the seat and produced a bowler, and by the time they got to the slums be was wearing a check cap!’ He spoke very warmly of Smuts, and said Belcher reminded him of Redmond, and that Ireland would not be in the state it was if Redmond had lived. Two braces of pheasants were presented to Belcher on leaving, and we ate them on board last night, served with great éclat and ceremony!

Very hot now and lots of porpoises leaping, and I’ve just seen a flying fish! We passed the Grand Peak of Tenerife on Wednesday, and saw the Cape Verde lights last night. No more land now until Cape Town.

The Grand Tour will be published on April 26th.

For all Agatha Christie fans, we also have a treat for you – short stories at only 49p! Get them on Amazon, Kobo or the iBookstore now!

For your chance to win a copy of 15 Seconds, comment on this article in 15 words with a reason for why we should pick you. We’ve got 5 to give away, so get writing! The funnier the better. Competition closes on 30th April.

The new thriller that ‘surprises, shocks and thrills from start to finish’

(Sunday Express)

What did you want to be at 5, 13 and 20 years of age?

I was mainly struggling with trying to be myself, so I really didn’t think much about being someone else. I started reading at 5 and that’s when the world opened for me. When I was 13, I wrote my first poem. Kitsch met hormones whilst connecting frontally with drama. I loved it and I felt like a genius, almost untouchable. Soon I turned to horror stories and left poems that rhymed behind as soon as I opened my first Bukowski. Other kids open beer bottles, cigarette packs, dirty magazines, I was addicted to books from day one and Bukowski was a nice step in the right direction. From 15 until 22, I was copying everything I read, learning the trade from writers by mimicking them and slowly, very slowly finding my own voice. My head was a melting pot, all the stories I have read were tumbling around in there and something new surfaced on paper.

What prompted you to write your first novel?

There were so many books and ideas and plot twists planted in my brain, that I had to do something – rob a bank, start a cooking class, climb a mountain. I never finished school and hated the time it stole from me as much as I hated the thought to be interested in things you cannot be interested in when you are 12 – like chemistry and mathematics and why a curve does this and that and why worms have their heads next to their asses. After reading every book that came close to me I turned very fast onto the road of writing. I was allowed to think and write and express what I wanted, without limits, without rules. I could bleed out my heart or I could be cruel as hell. It was possible. You can’t say no to that.

The first novel was beautiful trash. It was a fantasy plot, full of naked women and men hunting with swords and bad guys with names like Darkian and Komor. The novel was called WITCHHUNTER and it was written on a typewriter on very thin paper that felt like papyrus. I still have it and the world will never see it.

Where did the inspiration for your novel, Sorry, come from?

In the beginning there was a dream. A rather boring one. In the dream I met three friends. We were standing around and no one was very happy with life. Suddenly I had this idea. Why not open an agency that apologizes to people? And why not call it Sorry.

When I woke from this dream it was around 3 in the morning and I was really tired and I thought about the dream and decided it is really not worth thinking about. But as a writer you learn never to dismiss sentences or ideas. If you dismiss them, you can be sure they will hang on in your mind and you will try to grasp them and they will not let you because you already ignored them once. So I took a pen, didn’t turn on the lights, wrote Sorry into the palm of my hand and fell asleep again. That’s how it started.

In what ways was writing this psychological thriller different to your other works?

It wasn’t. For me there is no great difference between a children‘s book or a thriller. The characters are always in front, and sometimes they are just eight years old, a little crazy and hungry for life. And sometimes they are thirty, very crazy and as hungry for life as an alligator. There is no switch in my head seperating how the story is told as I am not writing for an audience and not trying to please a readership. It is very satisfying to move from one genre to the other, telling the stories that bother me and espescially the stories of my characters.

Which writer or writers have kept you hooked throughout their works?

There are so many, I could fill a country and let them make babys and build houses and by the end of the day there still would not be all of them in that country. Their number is growing all the time. When I was young I learned a lot from William Goldman, Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut and John Irving. Later I fell in love with Mark Helprin, Richard Laymon, Richard Brautigan, Joyce Carol Oates, Evan Hunter/Ed McBain, Charles Bukowski, Lars Saabye Christensen, Hubert Selby, Larry McMurtry, Andrew Vachss, the early Michael Crichton, John Sandford and a hundred more.

When writing, what quirky habit/s do you have?

The only one unusual thing is that I am totally lost in time. The days melt into each other and I am always waiting for snow. The silence outside makes me sigh, the darkness wakes me up. My writing needs a lot of coffee and tea, a lot of movies and music, even more books and there have to be candles – no cats and dogs, no fish looking at me. Just me and life and good friends dropping by and my muse. You can’t  write without a muse. And mine is a star.

How did you feel when Sorry entered the bestseller list almost immediately after release and was placed on the prestigious best of crime list, Krimi-Welt-Bestenliste, in Germany?

I was smiling.

What were the challenges you faced while writing Sorry?

I planned a novel about four friends who have a great idea and turn it into business. It should have been a critical novel about our social life and the way we behave with each other. I knew there was more behind the story, but I didn’t expect it to be so much more. After 150 pages I got scared by the story, as two young characters that were never planned stepped into it. They popped up while I was writing, I let them loose and the story turned on me and I was scared of my own writing. I put the book away for two years, wrote three children‘s books in-between to let the steam out. But a writer has to be loyal to his books and espescially to his characters. So I came back and I turned one winter into a long dark night. I hope I have not to do this again.

What should a new reader expect from Sorry?

Forgiveness.

The reader has to forgive me for the beginning.

So let’s talk to her/him directly:

Dear Reader, I am a nice guy. I hate torture, I don’t mutilate people to put you on edge and I would never hurt you. I love to scare you, to make you feel uncomfortable, so that you start to doubt reality. I really love this. But honestly – you will never see me being unfair to you, all the way along I will try to gain your trust. And if  you think my novels starts mean and ugly there are some suprises along the way that I really hope will blow your mind. And I can promise you, the further you get into the novel, the more you will understand why I did the mean and ugly act and I am sure you will forgive and understand me. 

As a token of our sincerest apologies, we’re offering the chance for 2 lucky Killer Readers to win a first edition hardback of SORRY. To enter, just answer the question below and email killerreadscomp@harpercollins.co.uk

After his dream, where did Zoran write the word SORRY to help him remember his idea?

Oxford, 1583. A place of learning. And murderous schemes.

 England is rife with plots to assassinate Queen Elizabeth and return the country to the Catholic faith. Defending the realm through his network of agents, the Queen’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham works tirelessly to hunt down all traitors.

 His latest recruit is Giordano Bruno, a radical thinker fleeing the Inquisition, who is sent undercover to Oxford to expose a Catholic conspiracy. But he has his own secret mission at the University – one that must remain hidden at all costs.

 When a series of hideous murders ruptures close-knit college life, Bruno is compelled to investigate. And what he finds makes it brutally clear that the Tudor throne itself is at stake…

A gripping, atmospheric Tudor crime novel with a conspiracy twist – by an author who knows her history as well as how to keep the pages turning. To be considered as a reviewer, simply email killer.reviews@harpercollins.co.uk

Photo of Ovret, courtesy of Visit Sweden

So many books are based on real places, but how often do you get a chance to visit them? I’ve lived in London, so recognized the parts of town Monica Ali wrote about in Brick Lane. I’ve travelled to Edinburgh and seen the steep side streets Ian Rankin have described so well in his Rebus books.

Fjällbacka of Camilla Läckberg’s brilliant books, however, was a complete unknown to me, despite being a huge fan of her books. I’ve been reading all her books with images in my head that were a mix of the televised Henning Mankell-books and islands I’d been to myself. What a lovely place it turned out to be, though! I can see why Ingrid Bergman spent all her holidays there.

We were in Oslo and my husband suggested popping over to Sweden for a laugh. I innocently said I’d heard about a place called Fjällbacka which was meant to be picturesque. He didn’t suspect a thing. The drive up to it was motorway followed by narrow roads between fields and forests. Then the church was majestically on a hill in front of us and we could drive through the town. I say town; it’s very little more than a village, but very, very cute. England has Miss Marple’s villages, Sweden has Fjällbacka.

The town is framed by the harbour on one side and a big hill on the other side. If you walk up it, you get a stunning view of the hundreds of mini-islands that are between Fjällbacka and the sea. Most of them have no trees and no houses on them, but the closest ones have little red, wooden boathouses on them. I am convinced the bigger island directly opposite the harbour is the island mentioned in the Christmas novella (which is still to be translated into English).

The houses in Fjällbacka are all wooden clapboard houses in various colours, mainly white, red and yellow. They are just the sweetest little things with conservatories and balconies galore and lovely rose gardens still in bloom in November.

I was in the middle of reading The Hidden Child when we went to Fjällbacka, and it really changed the way I read the rest of the book. I was suddenly able to picture the houses people live in; the big houses overlooking the sea, the boathouses in the harbour, the youth hostel by the mini-beach and even the boats that Erica and her sister travels to and from the islands in. I made a small cry of excitement as we walked up the hill behind the town and I spotted the big rock stuck in between hillsides that I’d read about in a previous book.

You can see pictures of  what  Camilla’s world of Fjällbacka really looks like and find out more about her books at www.killerreads.com/thedrowning  .

By @smemobooks

Stine Smemo Strachan