Simon Toyne

Hello and Happy Halloween from the Killer Reads team. In the spirit of today’s festivities (and also the release of the new Bond movie), my question to the KR team this morning was “Who’s your favourite bad guy?” Read on for their brilliant answers and your chance to win a special treat...   Sarah Hodgson: Blofeld remains the all-time classic supervillain. As well as vast wealth and far-reaching influence, he also has a very cool cat.   Kate Stephenson: Best villain (not sure it’s correct to say my favourite, because I hated this guy with the passion of a thousand suns): Col. Hans Landa as played by Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds. That apple strudel scene with Shosanna – so incredibly unsettling. Actually, just all the scenes with him in them. Such a talented actor. Read More

Hello there, So, it's officially got to that time of year again when we wake up for work and it's dark, and then we get home from work, and guess what...it's dark. So, as there will be many of you out there jetting off for some Autumn sun, or maybe you're going off for a nice traveling session (I've recently spoken to many a soon-to-be intrepid explorer - seems the travel bugs come around again), or even if, like me, you're going to power through the winter months with layers of clothes and mugs of hot chocolate, then fear not I've got a plan that means we can all journey round the world together. Follow this link to our world map of travel Killer Reads. Read the extracts and journey to cities you know and love,  or get lost in towns you've never even heard of. If you are off on your travels this autumn to any of these locations (or any other destinations from your favorite thrillers) then please feel free to send us images from locations mentioned in those thriller books and films to killerreads@harpercollins.co.uk or tag Killer Reads in the photo on facebook so the team can journey all over the world this Autumn as well... Read More

The primary intention of any writer is to try and create an emotion in the heart of the reader. The surest way to do this is to tap into some kind of truth. Unfortunately, as a writer of fiction, you are – by definition – creating something that is untrue,… Read More

Writing Bad   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. Read More

Match the fact to the correct team member and win a copy of 5 of our latest proofs, so you can read them months before they’ve even hit the shops! From the left: Sacrilege by S.J. Parris, The Schemer by Kimberley Chambers, A Foreign Country by Charles Cumming, Portrait of a Spy by Daniel Silva and The Key by Simon Toyne Which member of the Killer Reads team... ... has shared the screen with Al Pacino? ...sang in a national Australian campaign about saving water? ...is married to a TV book club pick author? ...was once a tudor model? ...saw the Dalai Lama on the way to KFC? ...has eaten a tarantula? ...set up their own charity in Uganda? ...has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro? Read More

Hello – and welcome! You’re in for a treat now: the world’s very first glimpse of the trailer for THE KEY, from the author of SANCTUS, the biggest selling thriller debut of 2011… Enjoy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjikOo5GfEw… Read More

Simon Toyne graduated from Goldsmiths College in London with a degree in English and Drama then worked in television for almost twenty years before becoming a novelist. SANCTUS is his first book and also the first volume of the Ruin trilogy. Visit Simon Toyne’s official site Find… Read More