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This week sees our Killer Reader Kate Stephenson (pictured right) asking for your views on modern Twisted Thrillers Vs. the classic Murder Mystery... Earlier this year at the Oxford Lit Fest, Sophie Hannah and Simon Brett discussed the respective merits of the dark and twisted new school and the cosy old school of murder mysteries in a panel entitled Murder Mystery: Blood Bath or Brain Teaser? Has crime fiction become too gory? It’s a question hotly debated amongst readers and writers alike. Some hark back to the masters of the cosies like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, and despair that contemporary crime fiction has gone too far, indulging in graphic violence – particularly the torture of women and children – for sensationalist purposes. Others don’t have a problem with it, being that it is fiction, after all. The authors are not committing the violent crimes they describe, nor inciting readers to do so. And surely we’re all consenting adults, making our own reading choices – if what you’re reading offends you, all you need to do is put the book down. Read More

Taking a brief break from the hugely popular McRae novels, international bestseller Stuart MacBride is back with a brutal new standalone, Birthdays For the Dead. Detective Constable Ash Henderson is on the trail of vicious serial killer The Birthday Boy – only trouble is, his own daughter is… Read More

We have a little competition for you to take part in with the opportunity for 8 lucky readers to get their hands on a copy of S.J. Parris's Sacrilege.   Summer, 1584: the Protestant Prince William of Orange has been assassinated by a fanatical Catholic, and there are whispers that Queen Elizabeth will be next. Fear haunts the streets of London, and plague is driving many citizens away. Giordano Bruno, radical philosopher and spy, chooses to remain, only to find that someone is following him through the city  As Bruno begins his hunt for the real killer, he is drawn into the heart of a sinister conspiracy hiding in the shadow of England’s holiest shrine…  In the pursuit of power, nothing is sacred… Read More

“The entire Division’s going up!”   It wasn’t unusual to hear that phrase on night patrol in Manchester back in the bad old days of the 1980s. Especially if the night in question was either a Friday or Saturday.   ‘Going up’ was Greater Manchester police parlance for all Hell breaking loose, something that happened with alarming regularity on the F-Division, where I spent the bulk of my police service. If this creates an impression in your mind’s eye of burning cars, feral faces, shattered glass, and blood spattering filthy pavements – then good, that’s totally correct. Read More

Laura Lippman. If you haven’t heard of her yet, you soon will. Laura is a crime superstar on the other side of the pond, and has won almost every prize given for crime fiction in the United States. Last week, she headlined at the Harrogate Crime Festival, with… Read More

The internet sensation are back with another chilling thriller. There’s a thin line between love and hate… Hear Voss and Edwards discuss their latest thriller (when the stalker becomes the stalked) and stock up on your summer reads with this killer offer! Buy Killing Cupid and get Catch Your Death… Read More

To celebrate cult classic THE DICE MAN being published in e-book form for the first time, friends of Killer Reads, HarperFiction, will be living the Dice Life for three weeks. This week they rolled a 2 meaning that the e-book will be on sale for just £1.99 for… Read More

To celebrate the fact that life-changing novel, The Dice Man, will be released in e-book for the first time ever on 26th July, our friends at Harper Collins Fiction  will be living by the dice for three weeks. The price of the e-book will be set by the roll… Read More

The terrifying new novel by Jilliane Hoffman is here, and the beginning is so good that we can’t keep it to ourselves any longer.* To give you an even bigger incentive to read it, we’ve agreed to enter anyone who shares the extract on Facebook into a competition to win… Read More

The original idea for When She Woke was sparked by a conversation I had with my uncle some twenty years ago over a bottle of wine in Hulls Cove, Maine. We were discussing the drug problem in America, and he said something to the effect of, “I think all drugs ought to be legal and provided by the government; they just ought to turn you bright blue.” Meaning, so that other people can see you coming and stay the hell away from you. And this conversation, and the idea of what it would be like to be stigmatized in such a way, stuck in my mind and eventually bore the strange red fruit that became When She Woke. I actually wrote the original story fragment of When She Woke (which was then called Red) in the spring of 2000, in the same workshop where I started my first novel, Mudbound. I had four pages about a woman in a prison cell who’d been turned red for killing someone, and I didn’t know where to take the story, so I wrote Mudbound instead. It wasn’t until six years later, when I was casting about for my second novel, that I returned to my stigmatized red woman. Hester Prynne and her scarlet A popped into my mind, and I thought, huh, I should reread The Scarlet Letter, which I’d last read as an unappreciative 15-year-old. And when I did I was struck by the many parallels between Hawthorne’s late-1600s Puritan Boston and post-9/11 America, where we’d seen a climate of fear that had led to the erosion of civil rights, the muddying of the line between church and state and attacks on women’s reproductive freedom by the religious right. The book grew out of my exploration of those parallels. The scarlet letter that Hester Prynne wears became, in When She Woke, scarlet skin. The scaffold that Hester stood on in front of the entire community became a sinister form of reality TV where prisoners are televised. The popular minister Hester falls in love with became a mega-church preacher, and so on. And because of The Scarlet Letter, my future America ended up being not just cruel and repressive but also essentially a theocracy, as 17th century Boston was. Read More

Kimberley and Pete enjoy a cuppa One wonderfully sunny day earlier in the year, two members of the Marketing team strode out to meet Kimberley Chambers, her agent Tim and her typist Sue in Dagenham – but we were not simply meeting them for pie and mash, oh no, we were here with expert camera man Pete in order to film a video to give her readers a real taste of her latest book, The Schemer. No hard task, then.We all agreed to meet at Roy’s Pie and Mash shop, where the lovely staff gave us a cup of tea and settled down into it. By going back to Dagenham where Kimberley grew up and the book is set, we hoped to really capture a feel of the people and the place. 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