Archive

Kate Mildenhall recounts her experiences sailing from Australia to Indonesia as inspiration for her latest novel The Mother Fault... Read More

  It’s that time of year again, when we frolic on the dark side, flirt with bad spirits and inexplicably spurn perfectly-functioning reverse digits to ‘bob’ for apples. As I turn off the houselights, hide my confectionary and sit in the dark until it’s all over, it seems… Read More

The irony of being published as an ebook has not been lost on me. All my life, I have been easily frustrated by technology and prefer to use pen and paper and speak to a ‘real person.’ I used to run a busy court department with one large hard backed… Read More

This week sees the publication of A Burnable Book by Bruce Holsinger, a stunning debut historical thriller set in the turbulent 14th Century. We’re absolutely delighted to welcome Bruce to the Killer Reads blog today, to talk about the fascinating story behind… Read More

The publication of Bruce Holsinger’s stunning debut novel is now just two days away, and the Killer Reads team are getting extremely excited! Bruce has very kindly taken the time to answer a few of our BURNING questions (sorry, awful pun), for this exclusive Q&A. Read on… Read More

Howdy folks, and thanks for letting me take the dais. The topic is Carson Ryder’s recent move from Mobile, Alabama, to South Florida. Because I can’t speak into microphones without them squealing like a kicked pig, I’m gonna take my beer to the edge of the stage,… Read More

This month sees our third blog entry from the incredible Paul Finch. The Former The Bill scriptwriter turned author is back this week with a sneak peek into his life as a journalist, a period in which Paul feels had a huge impact in becoming the author he is today...   People often ask me how it happened that I went from being a policeman to writing police stories. Well, the cross-over is not as straightforward as some may think. While I was in the police, I wrote almost no fiction at all. I had a yearning to write – I’d always written fiction as a youngster, and my father had been a professional author, but whenever the temptation came over me, I used to tell myself that I was too tired, too stressed and too busy obsessing about dreadful incidents in the real world – and for the most part that was probably true. But it’s also the case that I was being sucked into a radically different discipline. I was buried in a world of procedure and legalities, which came to completely dominate my daily thinking. It was near enough impossible to go home at night and put the job, or whatever case you’d been working on, out of your mind. These were serious affairs after all, and people’s lives and liberties might be at stake. This is something I’ve tried to bring into the Mark Heckenburg books in fact; the way police life can consume you. Even your recreation time tends to be spent with other police officers, or at least it often was for me, and usually such R&R consisted of drinking hard and yet again discussing the job. Anything else seemed frivolous. Read More

Former The Bill scriptwriter turned author, Paul Finch, tells us how his time working for the Manchester police force was the starting block for his passion of crime fiction writing. Read Paul's second instalment into the killer reads diary...   There’s no question that my police service gave me an excellent grounding from which to write crime fiction. It’s not just about procedure, you see – it’s an innate understanding of the police officer’s role in society, and more importantly, the role the police may play in his or her life.   Being a cop is not like any other work. You can’t just put it away at the end of your shift. By its very nature, the job can alienate you from everyone you know. It can depress you, frighten you, outrage you. But by the same token it can empower you, and be massively rewarding. Above all though, it’s a weird occupation – where the complexity of experience can truly be stranger than fiction. And this air of the unreal is something I feel honour-bound to try and bring to my crime-writing, particularly in my forthcoming trilogy of cop thrillers from Avon Books.   But where does having actually been a cop leave you as a crime writer? Read More

  Our No.1 bestselling author Stuart MacBride talks ‘Tartan Noir’ on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book Channel – a term being used to  describe the abundance of exceptional crime fiction coming out of mighty Scotland. MacBride also explains how music  really helps  to influence his characterisations and thrilling storylines. Read More

Thanks so much for all your comments and tweets on Lisa’s interview – YEAR OF THE TIGER is out in paperback tomorrow – so to celebrate, here’s a second interview clip in which she talks about writing characters and especially focusses on Ellie, the heroine of her debut… Read More

  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… Read More

A massive congratulations to Stuart MacBride who has reached number one again this year!… Read More