SMATTERINGS

It's competition time again over at SHOTS. This time we are giving away 5 hardback copies of David Morrell's SCAVENGERS and 3 copies of the 2 Disc Special DVD of HELL DRIVERS. Just answer the easy questions.

Sebastian Fitzek writes thrillers that expose reality as an illusion. Fitzek has worked as editor-in-chief and director of programming for various radio stations. Born in 1972, he trained as a lawyer and is now a managing director and partner at Germany’s largest business consultancy for the radio industry. He has also written for countless radio programmes and TV shows. After the overwhelming success Sebastian Fitzek started with his debut novel Therapy, the author now presents his second psychothriller Playing Amok --- Therapy sold since July 06 more than 180.000 copies, and foreign rights were licensed already to 11 countries.

MURDER, polis! According to John Gibson in Scotsman.com you can't move in Edinburgh, it seems, without bumping into a plain-clothes cop. And it's not just road-tax dodgers or binbag louts he's after. There's every chance he is on the trail of a really nasty piece of work. Killer, rapist or whatever. Detectives keep spilling from the pages of novels penned by local authors, and here comes another. But hold on, this one is a woman. And, good on yer, she is doing her damnedest to solve a string of grisly murders in the New Town.
Meet DS Alice Rice, the creation of Gillian Galbraith, an Edinburgh advocate turned author at 50. A career switch that's proving worthwhile. Already she has clinched a two-book deal.
The debut novel, Blood in the Water, has just been published and the follow-up, tentatively titled Web of Fire and chronicling the further exploits of DS Rice, is coming in the autumn. Galbraith scoffs at any suggestion of sexism when she made her central character female.

The Sunday Telegraph has a lengthy interview with Lee Child plus a spotlight on six top thriller writers in the UK, but the most intriguing part of the piece had to do with the bylined journalist in question, David Thomas: I love thrillers. In fact, I love them so much, I wrote one. Like so many thriller writers, including Child, James Patterson and Joseph Kanon, and even Dan Brown, I came to thriller writing in middle-age. It seems to be a job that calls for experience. But it's the best mid-life pick-me-up one can imagine. My book comes out this summer. Sadly, I can't reveal what it's called or what it's about, or even the name which I've written it. My publishers have forbidden me. The whole thing has to stay under wraps until the marketing campaign the posters, the miles of supermarket book shelves, the full media blitz - gets under way in June.

Tom Cain is the pseudonym of an award-winning journalist with twenty-five years' experience working at Fleet Street newspapers, as well as for major magazines in Britain and the US. Although he has edited four magazines, published over a dozen books, written film-scripts and been translated into some twenty languages, THE ACCIDENT MAN is his first thriller. Published this coming July in the UK by Bantam Press is has been sold to USA, Canada, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Russia, Film rights sold to Paramount. This is the first novel in an exciting new series introducing Daniel Carver, the man who makes accidents happen to bad people. To him and those who control him, his targets are all legitimate - dmg dealers, terrorists and other scumbags. It's a necessary job, more valid perhaps than the death he was responsible for in the Special Forces.

Over on Ed Gorman's blog, he talks about one of the writers he admired (and imitated shamelessly)

....in the last throes of the true Gold Medal days (which ended, as I recall, sometime around 1975) was Charles Runyon. His Gold Medals usually featured small town working class protagonists who'd run afoul of local law. The stories were drenched with the drugs and crazies of the Sixties and were often driven by tangled often dark romances. A good deal of his material reminded me of the famous Joe Esterhaus (when he was a journalist and a damned good one) Rolling Stone piece about a Viet Nam vet returning to his small town home and finding a nightmare there that rivaled his time in Nam. Runyon got the era down very very well.

Crime writer Ian Rankin has been named as the first winner of the Edinburgh Award. It's in recognition of the positive impact the Rebus author's work has made on the city.