13 articles in this category
A contactless payment at 21:47 in a Soho restaurant looks like the perfect alibi. The suspect could not have been in Hackney at 21:50, because the bank says so.…
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The twist is the crown jewel of crime fiction, the moment a reader lives for: the revelation that turns the whole story inside out, that makes you gasp and imme…
A few years ago, the idea that a short video app could sell millions of books would have sounded absurd. Today it is simply how a large part of the reading worl…
Few settings do as much work for a crime writer as a casino. Drop a character onto a gambling floor and the place starts generating story before a single line o…
There is a test you can apply to almost any crime novel worth remembering. Remove the location. Change Edinburgh to a generic northern city, swap the Cornish co…
There is a question that gets asked of women who write crime fiction, sometimes directly and sometimes in the softer form of a compliment that contains a questi…
There is a moment in nearly every great crime novel featuring a female detective when the investigator is underestimated. Sometimes the underestimation is expli…
There is a question I return to every time I begin a new novel, and it is not about the crime. It is not about the victim, the killer, the method, the motive, o…
Few criminal worlds have shaped modern fiction as decisively as the mafia. Long before television turned mob bosses into household names, novelists and reporter…
Every crime novel makes a promise to its reader. The promise is simple and ancient and almost never stated aloud: I will tell you what happened. The reader acce…
In a quiet, well-to-do suburb of Boston, a schoolboy is found murdered. The body of 15-year-old Ben, covered in multiple stab wounds, is discovered in a park ne…
An idea for a new book always begins, for me, with a scene. A single moment suspended in the aftermath of violence. However, there was something different about…
Casinos have long fascinated both writers and readers because they represent a carefully constructed illusion of control. Every detail — from lighting and sound…