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What’s your favourite Camilla Lackberg book?
March 14, 201310:33 am
Camilla Lackberg’s irresistible new book THE LOST BOY is out today, and we are celebrating by giving away 5 copies! All you have to do is tell us which is your FAVOURITE Camilla Lackberg book, and why? We’ll reveal the 5 lucky winners on Monday 18th March.
Good luck – it’s a tough choice!
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Could you interview Andrew Taylor?
March 13, 20135:40 am
Calling all fans and bloggers! Could you interview bestselling author Andrew Taylor?As so many of you approached us about reviewing The Scent of Death, we want to offer you the opportunity to interview Andrew Taylor for yourselves!
The bestselling author of The American Boy returns with a brilliant new historical thriller set during the American War of Independence.
Simply send in 3 questions that you would ask him if you had the chance – either as a comment, a Facebook message or an email to killerreads@harpercollins.co.uk. The three best sets will get a copy of the book and a chance to add two more questions before we put their questions to Andrew Taylor, and the final interviews will be published here on the Killer Reads site.
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Winners of the Voss and Edwards Treasure Hunt announced!
March 5, 20136:17 am
Thank you to everyone for entering, it was wonderful to see so many responses! But unfortunately we can only pick one winner…The Kindle Fire goes to… Lynne Griffiths!
The lucky runners-up will win a signed copy of Catch Your Death and All Fall Down:
Julie Moore
Christine Marson
Gavin Counahan
Congratulations to our winner and runners up! Please get in touch to let me know your addresses so that I can get these in the post.
And for anyone who hasn’t won but is still desperate to get their hands on a copy of this brilliant book, then you can buy it here
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Meet Ex-Police Detective Luke Delaney
February 27, 201312:20 pm
Luke Delaney isn’t just an ex-Police Detective, he’s also our brand new crime author, and he’s about to release a book, Cold Killing, that we’re all unbelievably excited about. Below, you can read what he told us about how he became a writer, and beneath that there’s an opportunity to read the first two chapters from Cold Killing.
In case the title doesn’t already give it away, this isn’t a book to read before bedtime…
“My senior school was a huge inner city affair. I often thought we were sent there to keep us off the streets rather than to be educated, the teachers having long since given up on us, but even then I loved to write stories. Unfortunately, if the school itself wasn’t a big enough obstacle to any literary ambitions, I was also slightly dyslexic and found my inability to spell and lack of grammar defeated me. I left school, as did most of us, with almost no qualifications.
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Lars Kepler spills the beans on writing The Hypnotist
February 26, 20131:38 pm
You are a husband and wife writing team. How do you go about plotting and writing the novel together? Do you ever argue over the plot?We’ve tried to write together several times over the years, but each time the cooperation has almost immediately turned into huge arguments and minor catastrophes. As a result of this we came up with the idea of creating a brand new writer.
Since we started to write as Lars Kepler we haven’t had a single fight – it has actually given us a wonderful, creative rush. Many authors who work together write alternate chapters or divide the characters in the story between them. We don’t do that, we write everything together, like two people playing the piano with four hands. If we were to flick through The Hypnotist or our sequel The Nightmare we wouldn’t be able to find one single sentence that only one of us wrote. It’s all the work of Lars.
We always start with discussion. What is bothering us, what makes our hearts beat faster? Is our idea good enough? Our friends and families probably get sick of us sometimes. We’re talking about the plot, about ideas and characters, we talk all the time, when we cook, when we are shopping for dinner and when we pick up the kids from school. If we have a good idea in the middle of the night, we wake each other up.
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Paul Finch on writing Stalkers
February 21, 20136:54 am
It’s difficult to recall exactly when the idea behind STALKERS first came to mind. It was quite a few years ago now – I recall that much. I’m pretty sure I was having a brain-storming session at the time, taking my dog for a walk with Dictaphone in hand, trying to come up with as many high concepts as possible – either for story, novel or script.When STALKERS first jumped into my head, I remember being quite shaken because it was so grotesque a notion that I couldn’t see it working outside the horror genre, and even then it might have been deemed gratuitous. However, the more I thought about it, the more I began to see how it could also fit into a police thriller context – that way it could be more about the investigation than the crimes themselves.
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Friday giveaway winners revealed!
February 19, 201312:25 pm
An enormous thank you to everyone who entered our Friday Giveaway competition! We had a fantastic line up and your entries were brilliant, making it incredibly hard to pick the winners, but we eventually narrowed it down to…
A Foreign Country goes to Jake Eliot, who said:
I’d love to get my hands on a copy of Charles Cumming’s latest, A Foreign Country. I enjoyed watching Skyfall at the cinema, but it’s high time Bond’s flashy suits and big explosions cleared the way for proper suspense, taut dialogue and authentic spycraft. And by the sound of it, I reckon following Tom Kell tracing the disappearance of the first female head of MI6 across Europe and Africa will help me put the stresses of my working week into perspective.
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Win the books in our arms!
February 15, 20137:38 am
FRIDAY GIVE AWAY! You could win one of the books in our arms!
Just comment here or on our Facebook Page to tell us which one you want and why!
Best answers will win and we’ll pick our winners on Monday.
Just in case you can’t see clearly, the books we’re carrying are:
Close to the Bone by Stuart MacBride
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Our Killer Valentine’s picks
February 14, 20132:25 pm
Fed up with Valentine’s? Want to read about serial killers, killer viruses or gangland executions instead? We don’t blame you. In fact, we’ve put together a list of our top Valentine’s reads so that you can do just that!
StalkersHappy publication day to Paul Finch! And what a Valentine’s treat he’s got for you… In his nail-shredding debut Stalkers, Detective Sergeant Mark ‘Heck’ Heckenberg investigates the disappearance of 38 different women, each one happy and successful until they vanished without a trace. Dragged into the dark underbelly of the crime world, Heck soon stumbles across the so-called ‘Nice Guys Club’, a gang who can arrange anything you want. Provided you pay the price…
Killing Cupid/All Fall DownDoesn’t love always feel this way? Alex Parkinson is in love with his writing tutor, Siobhan. He has never loved anyone like this, but how can he convince Siobhan that they are meant to be together? So Alex stalks her on Facebook and finds out where she lives, buys her presents using her own credit card and sends her messages telling her exactly what he wants to do to her. He breaks
into her house, reads her diary and secretly listens to her while she takes a bath. Isn’t that what all lovers do?
We also have to say congratulations to Voss and Edwards on the publication of All Fall Down! Whether you want to read about bleeding hearts in Killing Cupid or killer viruses in All Fall Down, they’ve got it all covered…
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Desert islands, leeks and writer’s block: Killer Reads chats to self-publishing sensation Mark Sennen
January 29, 20139:58 am
Some of you savvy crime readers may have already heard of self-publishing sensation Mark Sennen, whose ebook debut, Touch, recently rocketed up the bestseller lists. Following this success, he’s now been warmly welcomed onto the Avon crime list, and the whole team are extremely excited to be publishing his unforgettable thrillers.
Obviously we love to quiz our authors when they join us, so scroll down and find out what Mark had to say for himself when we were lucky enough to chat to him recently.
If you were stranded on a desert island, which book would you take with you?
My Kindle? I’ve got hundreds of books on it and… oh, OK, if that’s not allowed I’d try to sneak along my set of Patrick O’Brian ‘Aubrey/Maturin’ novels.
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The Challenge of Writing International Thrillers
January 25, 201310:13 am
My first two novels, The Istanbul Puzzle and The Jerusalem Puzzle are set mainly in the cities of their titles. I decided to write them because I’ve always enjoyed travelling, seeing other cultures and trying to understand what make them tick.The Istanbul Puzzle was easier to write because I have been there about a dozen times. What struck me most about the city was how different it was from my preconceptions. We don’t see much in the media about Istanbul, even these days. Whatever we do see is usually about football hooligans or bomb attacks, and it’s usually quite negative.
I had never, for instance, heard anything about Hagia Sophia, the symbol of Istanbul and one of the greatest buildings in the world. What attracted me to Hagia Sopia were the mysteries that still surround it. One mystery I explore in The Istanbul Puzzle is what is underneath it. There have been few underground excavations at Hagia Sophia.
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The Killer Reads Team’s Top Picks for 2013
January 18, 201312:04 pm
Wondering what to read this year? Look no further. The Killer Reads Team have put pen to paper to tell you what we’re most excited about publishing and reading in 2013.
Emad Akhtar, Assistant Editor for Crime and Thriller, says:
The books I’m most excited about publishing:
The Tower by Simon Toyne, marks the end of the Sancti trilogy, and will definitely be an event for all the people who have been following this story from Sanctus. You can read any of them on their own, to be honest – they are just amazing, slick, satisfying thrillers which take you to really unexpected places. I don’t think anyone’s quite doing what he’s doing with the genre; a really special mix of ancient themes and cutting-edge ideas.And of course, The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes. If you’ve been following any of the buzz building around this dark, hypnotic serial killer story, then you’ll know that this is one to put everything on hold for. Lauren is a really rare talent, who can bend her imagination to any genre, shaping and mashing-up stories into highly original novels which no-one else could write. I think she’ll win a lot of new fans this year with The Shining Girls, if the early reviews are anything to go by.
Both these books are out in April and if you don’t read at least one of them, I will hold you in contempt forever.
