A Literary Lunch at Larry’s with Karen-Mille-James

Bibliophiles enjoy discovering new literary talent especially when in the company of fellow readers, so it was delightful to be invited to lunch at Larry’s Bistro in the National Portrait Gallery, adjacent to Trafalgar Square, London.

The occasion was to celebrate the launch of author Karen Mille-James’ novel A Thousand Silent Cries which is released on the 22^nd October 2026, from Vinci books.

It was energising to be in the company of several prominent literary commentators, such as Natasha Cooper of the Literary Review [who also publishes crime fiction as well penning work as Daphne Wright], Barry Forshaw of Crimetime, Financial Times and many other publications, Elisa Bray of The Jewish Chronicle, Bloggers from Reading With Caffeine, Belles Book Sig, Suzanne Sangster, Alexis Parr of the Daily Mail, and many other Literary types. Sadly Mike Stotter, writer and editor of Shots Magazine had to cancel at the last minute due to an emergency in Norfolk.

It was a true delight to see Tony Mulliken back in action, as he is one of the key figures in the British Literary scene. Once we were seated he introduced new author Karen-Mille-James to us 

“……Karen never intended to write a book but what started as a hobby in her spare time away from the office, working in the evenings until late into the night and at weekends, has now become a new and exciting part of her life. Writing has become her passion, made easier due to her background in business, literature and linguistics and having a vivid imagination….”

Read More HERE

Karen then welcomed us all to Larry’s Bistro and gave us a short introduction to the world of Corporate Forensics Investigator Cydney Granger, and what we had in store with A Thousand Silent Cries –

The question at the heart of A Thousand Silent Cries is what happens when a secret eventually comes to light. Does the person uncovering it demand justice, or revenge, and what will they decide to do about it?

A violent act from the past perpetrated by an IRA activist, Rufus Tomlinson, tears apart the family of James Carrington QC who witnessed the murder of his parents but survived to be placed into a child witness protection programme with a new identity. He has concealed his past from everybody, including his wife, but his world is about to fall apart. Tomlinson has returned to England after living in Boston under cover for three decades, and he has now found Carrington. Thus begins their psychological game of cat and mouse.

Carrington is forced to reveal his past and confront the consequences of his actions, his life of lies and betrayal. His survival brought him fear, not only grief, and his cold behaviour to his wife especially over the loss of their young daughter, has caused her irretrievable harm and now they are both in danger.

Cydney Granger, a corporate forensics investigator and spiritual medium, is a close friend of Carrington’s wife and she is relentless in her demand for justice and accountability, against a backdrop of Tomlinson seeking revenge at any cost for what he sees as personal, and Carrington, as a barrister, wanting to ensure justice is meted out.

The Author recently spoke with Crime Time Magazine, introducing her work Here with a downloadable extract / preview. A Thousand Silent Cries is released on Thursday 22^nd October 2026, and available to pre-order from all bookstores.

The good news is that it is the third book in the Cydney Granger series, with The Shadows Behind Her Smile [Book #1] and Where In The Dark [Book #2] also available on the date of release of A Thousand Silent Cries [Book #3].

Click HERE for more information on the Cydney Granger series.

So we all moved around and chatted about this exciting new crime fiction series and the world that Karen had created. As an author, she has an eclectic and interesting background; herself an avid reader of crime / thriller fiction citing Lee Child and John Grisham as favourite authors.

Soon it was time for farewells and to thank Karen and her publishers for a lovely lunch wishing her best wishes for the upcoming release of A Thousand Silent Cries.

Shots Magazine would like to pass our thanks to Henrietta Richardson, Tom Neilson and Karen Millie-James for an excellent luncheon in the wonderful company of bibliophiles.

More Information on the work of Karen Mille-James can be found by clicking HERE or from the following links >

Web: https://www.karenmilliejames.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/milliejameskaren

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/karenmilliejames

X/ Twitter: https://x.com/KMillieJames

Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/jzECaE

Ninas and Easter Eggs – The Game’s the Thing! by Alys Cummings

 Who can resist the lure of a hidden message?

Solving things, uncovering an answer, is one of the joys of being human – just look at the vast numbers of us drawn to both murder mysteries and puzzles. 

But there’s something that can be even more rewarding than finding the answer which is, after all, the objective of the puzzle or the end of the story. And that is something that you don’t even need to discover, an unannounced extra that has been hidden purely for the fun of it.

In video games and movies, these have long been known as Easter Eggs. (There is a legend that this arises from The Rocky Horror Picture Show where some of its very dedicated fans have spotted actual Easter Eggs rumoured to have been overlooked in an egg hunt organised by cast and crew – perhaps unlikely given the movie was filmed in the Autumn. It’s more commonly accepted the phrase arose from the game Atari where the developer hid a credit to his own name.) 

For solvers of crosswords, these hidden messages abound – you might find one spelt out in an acrostic at the start of clues, in the letters round the edge of a completed grid, or in the words at the top and bottom, for example. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that for people who love playing with words – and whose cryptic setter names are themselves playfully hiding their true identity - they are a fairly common occurrence. Some setters have regular Ninas – such as Pangakupu who frequently hides words and messages in Māori in their puzzles. Well-known examples from the Guardian include a puzzle from the much-loved setter Araucaria, who revealed the news of his late-stage cancer to solvers in a series of clues. And in 2017 those who solved a puzzle by an apparently new setter called the Sphinx discovered they were in fact completing the same puzzle that featured in that evening’s episode of Inside No.9 – The Riddle of the Sphinx. The setter was one of the show’s creators, Steve Pemberton.

In the world of the cruciverbalist these hidden messages are called Ninas, named after the work of American caricaturist Al Hirschfield, who would hide his daughter’s name, Nina, in the lines of his drawings.

In Murder Most Cryptic, my debut novel combining murder mystery with cryptic clues, the protagonist is called Nina – an allusion for crossword fans to enjoy. And there are plenty of other Ninas for readers to find, if they wish to look for them.

In the crosswords that feature in the novel they are used to give additional information about what happened to the man who collapses and dies in Chapter One. These Ninas help the recovery group at the heart of the book begin to piece together what might have happened. But there are also clues from these crosswords at the head of each chapter, with the word that is the answer hidden somewhere in the chapter itself. These are not part of the plot, just something extra for the reader, a treasure hunt if they wish to take part in it. 

One of my Ninas in Murder Most Cryptic is something I haven’t yet revealed – a message hidden in the names of all seven principal characters. I’d love to know if anyone thinks they’ve spotted it….

Readers of Murder Most Cryptic might also spot references – some more obvious than others – to other crime writers they enjoy. The books of some of my favourite authors appear and comments on a blog one of my characters writes gave some freedom to sneak in yet more allusions that readers may recognise.

This is something that authors who find their written work transferring to the screen may also indulge in - a moment of mingling among their own characters for that other type of Easter Egg, a cameo. Who spotted Mick Herron sitting alongside Diana Taverner during a funeral in the latest series of Slow Horses?

It’s a little treat, a surprise, something extra for a mystery lover.

For although a setter or writer can convey a huge range of messages hiding in plain sight, the vital thing about a Nina is that it is not necessary. The solver doesn’t need to spot it to complete the crossword, it’s simply there because it exercised the setter’s mind and they hope it will do the same for the the solver. It’s all just part of the game.

Murder Most Cryptic by Alys Cummings (Penguin Books Ltd)

Nina is a promising young journalist. She’s also an alcoholic. Once a week, she attends a recovery group in the local church hall. When a stranger walks in one night, the group think they might have a new member. Until he promptly drops dead. The police believe it’s nothing more than an accident. But the group soon realise there’s more to this mystery than meets the eye, when they discover a cryptic crossword clue hidden in the dead man’s pocket – the answer to which is Murder. As more mysterious and threatening clues start appearing in a newspaper crossword, Nina and team must work to crack this cryptic case. Can they solve the clues, and catch a killer? Or will the next crossword spell death for one of them…

More information about the author can be found on her website. You can also find her on Instagram and X @alyseliza

The Final Act of Daphne Divine by Syd Moore

The Final Act of Daphne Divine is the third instalment in my World War II series which looks at how the British Security Service exploited the Nazi’s obsession with the occult. Readers of the first two books will have a good idea of what’s coming. But I don’t think it’s a spoiler, for those who haven’t, to state a large part of the action takes place in Heinrich Himmler’s notorious occult castle. After all, it’s pictured on the cover.

Eighty years after its liberation the castle continues to exert a morbid fascination over many.

The SS Reichsführer leased Wewelsburg in 1934 as a school for the SS elite. He also wanted to create an impressive venue for SS leaders, and remodelled it in a strange, symbol-drenched style which married Arthurian legend with Germanic and Nordic rune ‘magic’. Himmler was obsessed with the occult, mysticism and esoterica. He had already commissioned Otto Rahn to search for the Holy Grail (think Indiana Jones) and a year after he leased the castle founded the Ahnenerbe, a SS division, which undertook research into folklore and prehistory. He also set up the Hexenkartothek (Witch Card Index) to compile information on the German witch hunts.

From 1935 to 1943, using the slave labour of the Wewelsburg (later Niederhagen) concentration camp inmates, the castle was remodelled extensively in a design that reflected his fixations.  When the allies closed in on 31 March 1945, Himmler ordered the SS to demolish the castle, covering evidence of the crimes committed there. The demolition squad ran out of explosives and resorted to setting the castle on fire. Most of it was gutted but the North Tower, with its crypt for rituals and the Obergruppenführersaal (Hall of the Supreme SS Leaders), survived. And so it was to there I travelled for research in 2024 and 2025.

Many aspects of the castle shocked and surprised me. For a start, I hadn’t expected there to be a ‘Family Day’ going on. But one has to remember that there’s been a building on the site for over a millennium. The Nazis’ association lasted less than eleven years and, aside from the North Tower, the rest of the castle reflects its long history as an early Medieval fort, a hunting lodge, its use during the witch trials, and its function as seat for the Prince-Bishops of Paderborn. There are displays featuring Ice Age artefacts and curious exhibits of traditional folk costumes from the region.

To visit the North Tower, however, you must pass through the Wewelsburg Memorial Museum’s permanent exhibition, Ideology and Terror of the SS. Though the material is difficult to handle, it prepares you for crossing over the moat into the monument to human suffering and totalitarian terror.

Every single person I saw walk through the arched entrance gasped and stopped. It is vast, echoing and dark, built to resemble an ancient Mycenaean tomb and is quite frankly – quite obviously – sinister. Its rounded spaces are designed to make you feel small and anxious. Your stomach plummets. The air is different, pregnant and tense, layered with so imagined horrors you can almost taste them.  I have visited many troubling sites in my life, but I have never been so affected by the atmosphere of a place.  The chamber’s architecture embraces ghastly theatre - twelve plinths are arranged around the perimeter. In the centre three steps lead to a pit, with a hole in its middle. Above it, at the apex of the ceiling, is a decorated swastika with four small square holes. Around the walls a series of paintings, Memorial Cycle by Josef Glahé, depict the human cost of war and the holocaust. The whole scene is devastating. 

On the second storey, the Obergruppenführersaal, a mosaiced runic sun wheel, in black marble, dominates the floor. The symbol was co-opted in the 1990s by extreme right wing neo-Nazi groups, who gave it the name the ‘Black Sun’. To avoid any ‘celebration’ or ‘romanticising’ of the thing, while there you are closely monitored. All visitors to the North Tower are forbidden to take photographs or wear symbols or clothing associated with far-right groups or racist slogans. Perhaps, in an effort to reclaim the space, this hall now forms part of a youth hostel that runs along the top of the castle (yes, you can stay there if you really want to). When I visited, neon orange and grey bean bags were scattered across the Nazi design.

Once I’d left, it took a while for me to ‘decompress’. The crypt’s atmosphere stays with you, as does the knowledge that you have just visited a site steeped in so much blood. Any writer or reader with a pinch of imagination cannot stop themselves from wondering - what happened within those walls?  What nasty rituals took place? Why is there a pit? What the hell is in it?

Though Himmler tried to bury his secrets in the ruins of the castle, some things have a way of coming to light. If you can bear the horror, you can find out what I made of it in my new book. 

 The Final Act of Daphne Devine by Syd Moore (One world Publications) Out Now

No mission is without its element of danger. But nothing could have prepared Daphne Devine for this... Back in enemy territory, Daphne and one-time lover Jack have been sent to deliver The Grimoire, a centuries-old book filled with mysticism and spells. Posing as a rare book dealer, she will hand the book to a prominent SS officer and send the Nazis into a spiral where their very beliefs are turned against them. But this is war. Behind every corner a betrayal is lurking and your enemies are often closer than you think. There are some things we cannot foresee, and these are the things that can kill us. Is this the mission where there can be no return?

Syd Moore can be found on  Facebook, Instagram @sydmoorewriter and X@sydmoore1