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One of the qualities I most value in music, as in books, is a sense of mystery. In choosing my seven desert island records, I've tried to pick tracks which have something of that mysterious quality. In some cases, they even have at least a tenuous connection with crime fiction. In that regard, Warren Zevon's the most obvious choice. His song titles have been repeatedly borrowed for crime novels and films. He collaborated with crime writers such as Carl Hiassen. He was a friend of Ross MacDonald and had unfulfilled ambitions to write a crime novel himself. Many of his songs feel like excerpts from that unwritten fiction. I've chosen one of the most personal, ‘Desperadoes Under the Eaves' from the Warren Zevon album. It's a song about one of the lower points of Zevon's career, when he was struggling with a lack of commercial success and growing alcoholism, but it's full of mordant wit and terrific lines and somehow still manages to end on a note of hope. Read More

Lucifer's Tears by James Thompson Inspector Kari Vaara of Helsinki is thrown into a case that sees a beautiful young woman murdered in an apparent sadomasochistic attack... But his investigation leads to him coming up against a wall of silence that implicates the very highest levels of power.   His last case left Inspector Kari Vaara with a scarred face, chronic insomnia, a constant migraine, and a full body count's worth of ghosts. Now it's a year later, in Helsinki, and Kari is working the graveyard shift in the homicide unit, terrified of worrying his heavily pregnant wife. Read More

The world-famous annual Agatha Christie Festival takes place on the English Riviera in South Devon, from 11th-18th September 2011. This spectacular annual festival celebrates the world's greatest crime fiction writer, Dame Agatha Christie and her best-known detectives, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. Read More

A few weeks ago we gave you the chance to write in with all the questions that you wanted to ask Mark, and we've finally got the answers! Anyone who has their question answered will win a copy of the book, so if you spot your question here and you haven't already provided us with your address then please it to  killerreads@harpercollins.co.uk and we will pop a copy in the post. Enjoy! I am also a motorcycle fan, and think I'd find it very difficult to not have a cameo of a motorcycle in anything I wrote. Do your real life interests ever come out in your books? Is it a struggle to stop this happening? Or do you just give in and let sports or bikes appear when appropriate? Beverley Funny that you should mention motorcycles - I can sense that one is going to appear in my next novel (after a forced break of one book)! I try and resist the temptation to pepper my stories with personal interests, although they inevitably work their way in, as indeed they should. It's good to write from a position of natural enthusiasm. Do you ever start a book and then leave it unfinished because you cannot find and end to the story? Jill Dawson Thankfully, this has only happened once. The Savage Garden started life as a story set in nineteenth century Java - the opening 60 pages of which still languish somewhere on my laptop's hard drive. After nine months of research, including an abortive trip to Indonesia, it became clear that I wasn't up to tackling a story of that size and complexity. Maybe one day I'll revisit it.   I have never read any of your work - why should I read your new novel? Jeff Hoyle The French Riviera in the 1930s, murder, intrigue, humour... how could you possibly resist, Jeff? Seriously, though, I like to think it's a gripping read which also offers a glimpse of a fascinating period of European history. What would be the one piece of advice you would give someone starting out as a serious crime writer? Sarah Eastham Read More

  The second book in this highly acclaimed new series featuring Giordano Bruno has already been described as ‘impossible to resist' by The Daily Telegraph. This time it's Autumn, 1583, and Queen Elizabeth's rule is under threat.Giordano Bruno, the maverick and charismatic agent of Sir Francis Walsingham, spymaster to the queen, has infiltrated plotters at the French embassy. But his position there is tenuous - while the ambassador trusts him, his beautiful and cunning wife Marie seems determined to prise out his secrets. Meanwhile, the murder of a maid of honour within the palace walls involves Bruno in deeper mysteries. Occult symbols carved into her young flesh point to black magic, but the truth could be even more sinister... All we can do is echo The Times, 'More, please' and we hope you'll think the same.  In order to get your hands on a copy of S. J. Parris' brilliant new Giordano Bruno historical thriller, all you have to do is read this passage and answer the following question... Read More

This was the question we all puzzled over for weeks after reading The End Specialist. At our desks, in the staff kitchen, over the photocopier - we couldn't stop talking about it, so when we put the question to you in our last article we decided to put our opinions down, too. In The End Specialist, taking the cure for aging isn't a cure for death. You can still be shot, die from disease or get hit by a car. When you take the cure your age is frozen in place, so you'll look the same way you look when you take it as long as you live. Interested? To find out more about it check out this site or read an extract. And as for the Killer Reads Team's thoughts on the matter... Read More

‘I took my picture again this morning. Still the same. The nose. The eyes. The brow. The chin. Nothing has sagged. No creases have formed. I scrolled through the “Face” folder in my library to compare it with the others.’ And it’s been this way for the last… Read More

City of Sins by Daniel Blake The pulse-pounding new thriller featuring FBI agent Franco Patrese, in New Orleans on the hunt for a warped serial killer as Hurricane Katrina threatens the city. The first one was found with a rattlesnake in place of her missing left leg, and a mirror smashed into her forehead by an axe blade. Strange... but even stranger that she'd just told new FBI agent Franco Patrese she wanted to uncover a conspiracy as disgusting as it is unthinkable. Read More

From hairdryers at dawn to radio 6 at dusk with the odd courtroom thrown in along the way, we give you a day in the life of Neil White. Most days start with the noise of the hairdryer at around seven.  My wife gets up before I do, and so her hairdryer stirs me. I don't spring into action exactly.  I have to get the children packed off for school. We've got three noisy boys, thirteen year old and ten year old twins, and so I spend a blurry hour lost in a flurry of making breakfasts and putting together packed lunches and getting myself ready. Once they are all sent on their way, scrubbed and fed, I set off for my day job.  As well as being a writer, I'm a solicitor by profession, and work as a prosecutor in the north west of England. My days are a mix of courtrooms, office work and providing advice to the police. I enjoy the courtroom the most. I like the drama, the arguments, and it is what attracted me to being a criminal lawyer. If I'm in one of the remand courts, I spend the day working through a pile of files, trying to keep people in custody if they ought to stay there, and agreeing that they shouldn't be in prison if that's the right thing to do. As I drive into work, I never know what I will face. It could be something as mundane as shoplifters, or as dramatic as a murder. If I'm not in a remand court, I conduct trials, anything from assaults and thefts to routine road traffic cases.   Read More

Richard Shephard interviews Maj Sjowall.     Q: The series has a strong international feel, especially in the first two books, with the influx of tourists in Roseanna and the complex business of passports, hotels and border crossings in The Man Who Went up in Smoke. Did you give them this to expand the canvas, as it were?   The idea for Roseanna came to us when we took a boat on the Göta Canal in Sweden and the boat was full of American tourists. Roseanna was modelled on a beautiful American girl whom I realized Per was observing a bit too closely, so I suggested that she be the victim.We were sent to Budapest by a Swedish film company to do research for a screenplay on the disappearance of Raul Wallenberg. The film was never made, but we fell in love with the city and decided to go there to write our second novel. Read More

This is your chance to have your say about our books and to be part of the quest to find the next killer read! Our panel is made up of our initial volunteers, but each month we will be offering two lucky people the chance to be a guest reviewer… Read More

 "25 years ago he stole her innocence, now he knows where she lives..." From the author of To The Power of Three and the Tess Monoghan series, comes Don't Look Back, a gripping and intriguing story of memory and murder. Eliza Benedict leads a simple, quiet family life in the leafy suburbs of Washington. But her world is set to come crashing down around her as she receives a letter from the man who abducted and sexually abused her as a teenager. Now on death row, Walter Bowman, a serial killer and kidnapper, is looking to reach out to Eliza; the victim who lived. The novel is constructed as two parallel narratives; beginning in the present where we meet Eliza for the first time. She is a mother and wife who has just returned to the USA after following her husband's career to London and is finding it difficult to connect with her role as a suburban American. This narrative is intertwined with chapters based in 1985 and the tale of her abduction by Walter Bowman as well as his previous encounters with other young women whom he abused and murdered. The parallel story-lines allow us to connect with both Eliza as a woman whilst also understanding Elizabeth as a teenager. This also allows us to see Walter from both the perspective of killer and abductor as well as his incarcerated present self. Both Walter and Eliza are extremely complex characters who do not conform to generic archetypes of hero and villain. The psychology of both is so well explained through their conversations as well as the use of ‘flashback' chapters that we are presented with a truly unique example of the victim/abductor relationship. Read More