★ Featured Article
The Truth About Tax on Gambling Winnings in the UK
Ask a room full of British bettors whether they owe tax on a big win, and you will get a surprising range of answers. Some are convinced HM Revenue & Custom…
Read More »»
🔪
Blog
9 articles in this category
2026-07-07|Blog
The Drug Shortages That Keep Happening and Nobody Fixes
Every so often, a story surfaces that a hospital has run out of a common medicine — a basic chemotherapy drug, a sterile injectable, an antibiotic that has exis…
2026-06-22|Blog
The Women Who Beat the House Real Card Counters and Con Artists Who Outsmarted the Casino
The pit boss is trained to look for a certain kind of man. He scans the blackjack tables for the lone wolf with the twitchy bet spread, the one who raises his s…
2026-05-28|Blog
Why Games of Chance Became Central to Crime Fiction
There is a scene, somewhere near the middle of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, that almost any reader of crime fiction can call up without effort. James Bond is at…
2026-04-30|Blog
The First Draft Is Always a Crime Scene
Nobody tells you what the first draft actually looks like.The finished crime novel — taut, precise, its clues embedded with surgical care, its red herrings earn…
2026-03-24|Blog
The Hell of Historical Research
Call it the Hilary Mantel effect or the CJ Sansom effect, but so much fiction is set in the past these days. But how do you find a balance between re-creating t…
2026-02-02|Blog
Write a novel in an hour
Alison Joseph raids her kitchen drawers to demonstrate how to knock up a bestseller in 60 minutes…The heading of this blog is taken from a writing workshop I ru…
2025-12-10|Blog
5 Ways to Tell You’re In The Wrong Genre
Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train, reveals how she knew it was time to switch tracksIn another life, under another name, I wrote books with (relati…
2025-10-01|Blog
Learning to Love Unlikeable Characters
Today I hit a sweet spot, the sort of which has been rare of late. I was elbow deep in plot, the cogs of my mind whirling and spinning, throwing out ideas faste…