New Books

I'm excited to say that the coming days will see the publication of three of my books (plus a fourth in America), with my fifth and latest Rachel Savernake novel, Hemlock Bay, leading the way. I really enjoyed taking Rachel and Jacob Flint to the seaside in this mystery, and I'm very much hoping that readers will delight in one of my most intricate stories, which is published by Head of Zeus under the Aries imprint. There's a Cluefinder, as in earlier Rachel Savernake books, and this one contains no fewer than forty-seven clues - see how many you can spot before Rachel reveals all!

The previous book in the series is just being published by Sourcebooks in the United States. This is The House on Graveyard Lane, known in the UK as Sepulchre Street. As part of the celebrations around the launch, I took part in an interview with Barbara Peters of the legendary Poisoned Pen bookstore and it can be found here   

Returning to England, September 10 sees the publication of my latest anthology in the British Library's Crime Classics series. This is Metropolitan Mysteries, subtitled A Casebook of London's Detectives, and it features stories by luminaries such as Henry Wade, Dorothy L. Sayers, and John Dickson Carr, as well as some unfamiliar names, including Malcolm Gair. I aim to include both familiar and deeply obscure stories in these themed collections and there are some genuine rarities here.

Last but by no means least comes Midsummer Mysteries, which I have edited on behalf of the Crime Writers' Association. The publishers, Flame Tree Press, have come up with a quite gorgeous volume. In stark contrast to the British Library book, this is a collection of brand new stories and more than half of them are written by people who have never previously had a short story in a CWA anthology, which I find quite remarkable. Among those stories is one of my own, 'The Widow, which is set in Berwick-upon-Tweed, and was partly inspired by my visit to the Berwick Festival last year. But the story is set in the Sixties and concerns an idea which has interested me for a very long time..