Avon

https://vimeo.com/144023961 ‘EXHILERATING STUFF’ – The Sun James Nally’s debut crime novel Alone With the Dead is a thriller with a twist. What would you do if you dreamt of dead people? If your life was spent caught between the living and those who have passed on? We decided… Read More

The Hunt is such a gripping read and the characters really come to life on the page. How did you go about researching the book? There were areas of the book I needed to research and was keen to get right. Firstly the landscape, which I… Read More

My day begins at 5.30am when my partner gets up for work. I stir briefly then fall back asleep, only to be woken again at 6.40am when my 3 year old son appears in the doorway of our bedroom and announces, “Sunshine is up, Mummy.” After years of 5am… Read More

Whilst reading Stieg Larsson’s books some years ago, what struck me was that Lisbeth Salander was an amazing heroine. Her character and backstory shone through the dense reportage-style prose and kept me reading voraciously. I hadn’t come across a female lead that had captured my imagination so completely in decades. Read More

To celebrate the publication of THE NEMESIS PROGRAM by our top ten Sunday Times bestselling author Scott Mariani we ran a competition to find the ultimate die hard Ben Hope fan. We found him! Meet Rich Wigley and read on to find out exactly why Scott Mariani’s Ben Hope series… Read More

Are you looking for a freebie from a bestselling author? Well, if you weren’t before, you are now! Number one bestseller, Paul Finch, is giving you a treat this Easter. Alas, it’s not in chocolate form, but it does come in the guise of… Read More

  Ask any author about how they write and you’ll find a variety of different ways to achieve the same goal. A finished book. Some of us plan meticulously; planning chapter for chapter. Some of us have an overall arc of how the story will pan out… Read More

Ever wondered how you make the leap to become a writer? This month sees Paul Finch recall the transition from his days in the Police to his time as a scriptwriter for The Bill in his fourth blog piece for Killer Reads.   The first time I ever put pen to paper to write a serious thriller, it was just after I'd finished serving as an actual police officer. The piece of work in question was a speculative teleplay entitled Knock Off Job. It concerned a murder inside a suburban police station, and presented every member of the shift, both uniform and CID, as potential suspects, none of them knowing who to trust. Now that I look back on it, it was very talkie: lots of tense conversations in dim corridors and cramped offices, lots of frank, fraught interviews, lots of suspicions being cast in every direction. It wouldn't work today simply because modern police stations are filled with CCTV, and the comings and goings of staff and non-staff are more carefully monitored. But the concept was of sufficient interest to the production team at The Bill to make them ask me to come in and see them. I accepted the invitation, and though I didn't realise it at the time, my life changed as a result. 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

This week we have a brilliant opportunity for 5 lucky readers to win a copy of Avon's debut novel from author Michael Russell, The City of Shadows.    Michael Russell on writing ‘The City of Shadows’ This book began as a conversation with an Irish film producer about the strange position Ireland had during the Second World War, supposedly neutral but neutral in a very odd way. When German airmen crashed in the Republic they were interned for the duration of the war; when Allied airmen crashed they were given a cup of tea and put on a bus to Belfast. Dublin was not only a city where German and British spies sat across Bewley’s Café from one another and drank together in Grafton Street pubs, it was also a place where the future of Ireland depended as much on the outcome of the war as did the future of the whole of Europe. That conversation brought together many years of writing detective fiction for television and an interest in the events of the thirties and forties that shaped the world we live in now. How did Irish 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

In December we ran our Killer Christmas Advent Calendar competition! With a fantastic prize behind each door, we had hundreds of entries and we are now pleased to announce the winners! Your prizes are on the way to you now! 1. A collection of no less than SIX Stuart MacBride… Read More