Adele Parks on Eyes on You and love in 2026

If I met you in an elevator and we were travelling a few floors together I might try to pitch to you, my new suspense thriller, Eyes On You I would tell you that it is about a brutal murder, a broken witness, a dangerous obsession and that Amy, our traumatised but resilient, protagonist is all three of those things. Humans are complex, we can be many things at once. We’re formed by all our experiences, relationships, memories and secrets. When Amy was just 15, she watched her father brutally murder his secret lover. Her testimony put him behind bars for a very long time. She’s basically very troubled.

We meet Amy age 32, just when her father might be eligible for parole. Unsurprisingly, after that childhood trauma, Amy hasn’t reached her full potential but lives in the shadow of that infamous night. She works in a grotty, noodle bar; she’s wasted away her twenties in shock and shame hiding from the notoriety of the crime, she’s set to do the same with her thirties. Given the chance, therapists would have a lot to investigate, but she’s a loner and doesn’t let anyone in, personally or professionally. However, that is about to change when a stranger walks into the restaurant where she works. Oliver Harrington also has a past he’d rather not dwell on; he too is an example of trauma shaping identity. The pair feel an instant attraction, that mercurial, much sought after, once in a lifetime fascination with each other. They bond so intensely that it feels like love. But is it?

In this book I wanted to dive deep into what we think love is now in 2026; a complex, much-therapized, emotionally intelligent, extremely exposed, cynical world. I’ve written a particularly dark and twisty psychological suspense novel which is very character based. The more I investigated this matter, the more questions I had on how love can turn dangerous. What is the difference between extreme sexual attraction and being ‘in love’? I drew the conclusion that love is just a blink away from obsession, it is basically a matter of reciprocity. And stalking? The insidious companion to obsession, what’s that about? How do people justify such extremities in the name of love? 

In Eyes On You I write from various points of view, all the narrators consider themselves reliable, but are they? How do people who behave as wildly as they do in my novel – crossing moral, socially acceptable and even legal lines - justify their actions and see themselves as reasonable? I want readers to ask whether we ever truly know anyone, including ourselves. 

Eyes On You also looks at the themes of truth and perspective. I know there’s a fashion for ‘my truth’ or ‘their truth’, an acceptance that truth is subjective sometimes; I’m wondering if we’ve dismantled facts so much that there is no longer such a thing as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If there is, I believe the reader is going to find it, not my characters who are as previously mentioned unreliable, far too good at telling themselves what they want to hear! I’m depending on you to sort through their dark minds and work it out. Who can you trust? 

This novel is fast paced and has multiple layers of secrets, secrets kept from the world, secrets kept within families, and secrets people keep from themselves. This meant I certainly challenged myself with plotting; constantly having to keep in mind who knows what about whom. Most of the time, readers know more than the characters do, although (I hope) not always and not everything because I’m here to entertain and I want you to gasp at some of the twists as you dig down. 

I often write about ordinary families who find themselves in extraordinary situations. Before Amy’s dad murdered his mistress in a jealous rage, she had believed her family were living a perfectly average, happy-enough life. She had no idea her father was having an affair. She thought he was a wonderful dad. I believe if readers relate to the characters starting point, they feel invested and perhaps, in some cases, even sympathetic when things get complicated. It was interesting to explore the way trauma echoes down through families and across generations. The idea behind this story is that whilst we don't choose our families or our history, we can choose what we do with what we inherit. I’m a believer in freewill. 

Eyes on You by Adele Parks (HQ HarperCollins) out 27th August 2026

Be afraid. Someone’s watching. At fifteen, Amy witnessed her father brutally murder his secret lover. Her testimony sealed her father’s fate. With him in prison, Amy and her mother must rebuild their lives in the shadow of a notorious crime. Years later, Oliver Harrington walks into the restaurant where Amy works. Just like Amy, Oliver has a past he’d rather forget. Amy is drawn to him at a profound level; they feel a connection, an understanding… This seems a lot like love, but does it hide something darker – an obsession that could lead Amy into a web of deception and violence she thought she’d escaped? As the truth looms ever closer, Amy must confront a harsh reality: where there is love, there is often betrayal.

More information about Adele Parks can be found on her website. You can also find her on X @adeleparks.and on Instagram @adele_parks.

Louise Hare on Writing the Women of the Past

One of my starting points for research for my novels is often reading what was written at the time. An absolute joy when writing a murder mystery set in the 1930s because it meant revisiting the Golden Age of crime, a time when female novelists ruled the genre. However, even with so many women in charge, there were very few female sleuths. Of course, from a practical point of view it makes sense. At a time when women were so constricted by social convention, not even able to open a bank account in their own name, it would have been very difficult for them to overcome those obstacles. Even Christie’s most well-known female sleuths get away with it for particular reasons: Jane Marple because she’s of a certain age, practically invisible so that people dismiss her as a threat; Tuppence Beresford who works alongside her husband Tommy.

Writing my accidental sleuth Lena Aldridge, who has had a run of the worst luck in terms of being close to murder on several occasions, I had some extra impediments to consider. A young woman who grew up in the East End of London, of mixed heritage, she’s not the usual Golden Age heroine. Her one advantage is that she’s a singer and actress. Used to playing a role and not minding if she’s the centre of attention, she survives a transatlantic crossing in her first outing, Miss Aldridge Regrets, by faking it. For the sequel, Harlem After Midnight, I began reading up on the women of the Harlem Renaissance. 

One of my favourite novels, Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing, is considered a literary classic but it is also a psychological thriller. Two old acquaintances meet accidentally in a fancy hotel restaurant in Chicago after not seeing one another for years, both hiding the same secret: they’re both African American but light skinned enough to pass the hotel’s colour bar. While one of the women lives openly with her heritage, the other lives as a white woman with her openly racist husband. Of course, the rebirth of their friendship throws both women’s lives into chaos and a final tragedy that I pay homage to in Harlem After Midnight.

Larsen herself gave me permission to be freer with what Lena is able to get away with in 1930s Harlem. A former nurse and librarian, she was at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance despite her working-class background (most members of that group were of the Black middle class with university educations). After becoming the first African American woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship she travelled alone around Europe, staying for longer periods in Mallorca and Paris. 

If Nella Larsen could do these things, then so could Lena. What I love about history is its ability to surprise through the stories of individual people. Writing the women of the past is always interesting both in terms of those pioneers who were breaking all the rules and effecting change, but also in remembering how far we’ve come. 

Harlem After Midnight by Louise Hare.

1936, September 17th, 1am. In the middle of Harlem, in the dead of night, a woman falls from a second storey window. In her hand, she holds a passport and the name written on it is Lena Aldridge. Nine days earlier. Lena arrived in Harlem less than two weeks ago, full of hope for her burgeoning romance with Will Goodman, the handsome musician she met on board the Queen Mary. Will has arranged for Lena to stay with friends of his, and this will give her the chance to find out if their relationship is going anywhere. But there is another reason she's in Harlem – to find out what happened in 1908 to make her father flee to London. As Lena's investigations progress, not only does she realise her father lied to her, but the man she’s falling too fast and too hard for has secrets of his own. And those secrets have put Lena in terrible danger.

Harlem After Midnight by Louise Hare is published by HQ, HarperCollins in paperback, eBook and audiobook on the 11th April. 

More information about Louise Hare and her books can be found on her website. Louise Hare can also be found on “X” and on Instagram at @Lourhare. You can also find her on Facebook.

J L Blackhurst on Locked Room Mysteries

There’s been a murder. But before you can figure out whodunnit, the more pressing question is… how?

The door to the murder scene is locked from the inside. The victim is in the middle of a snowy field with only one set of footprints. A body is discovered burning inside a bonfire effigy that everyone watched being assembled. Congratulations, you’ve stumbled upon an impossible crime. 

Much to the chagrin of true fans, the definition of ‘locked room mystery’ has been used recently to describe a murder with a finite set of suspects. Any murder on an island or in a country manor cut off by a storm, a hotel on the top of a hill and even one set in space, have all been tossed under the locked room umbrella. While these settings offer us a perfect opportunity for a fun and intriguing ‘closed circle mystery’, if you are going to call yourself a true locked room writer, you need just one thing. And no, it’s not necessarily a locked room. You need an impossible crime. Okay, actually, you need two things - an impossible crime and a satisfying solution. We don’t want secret passageways unless they were guarded at both ends, thank you. 

The locked room mystery goes back to the middle of the nineteenth century, a fact that weighs heavy when you sit down to write your first one. When you set out to write a locked room mystery, if you are like me you will probably sit at your desk and imagine the critical eyes of the forerunners of the genre watching your every attempt to perfect the impossibility of the murder. You picture writers like John Dickson Carr, Clayton Rawson and Ed Hoch shaking their heads and tutting at solutions that have been used before, or scoffing that you’ve made it far too obvious. And did you know you left a window ajar on page four? Let me tell you, as a voracious reader of the genre, they have all been done before. The good, the bad, and the downright silly (I’m looking at you, Mr Poe). The key to this particular mystery is to use what these masters of the art form gave you, and to spin the tale in a way it’s never been told before. And as for the window being left open – that’s what editors are for.

The first locked room murder in my book (because I chose to have not one, but three) sees a man with his throat slashed pushed from the balcony of an empty room, boarded from the inside. While the solution maybe somewhat Carr-esque, the detective sent to solve the case is the daughter of Brighton’s most elusive con artist, and the dead man is someone from her less than innocent past. She needs the skills of her estranged half-sister to figure out how this murder was committed before she becomes the main suspect. And there’s not a snake or orangutang in sight. Yes, even impossible crime fans have in-jokes. I found this out when I was the only one in my family who understood half of the references in our Sunday night Jonathan Creek episodes. 

Whether you want to write impossible crime, or just settle down and read them, there are some modern day writers who are on a mission to revive what was once an immensely popular genre. Some are reviving the golden age, such as Tom Mead with his recent book Death and the Conjurer, and some such as myself with Three Card Murder, Gigi Pandian with her Jaya Jones treasure hunter series and James Scott Byrnside with The Opening Night Murders are bringing locked rooms and disappearing killers into the modern age as we try to get away with murder. 

Three Card Murder by J L Blackhurst (HQ) Out Now.

One sister is a cop. The other a con artist. Both are suspects. DI Tess Fox's first murder scene has two big problems. One, the victim was thrown from the balcony of a flat locked from the inside. Two, Tess knows him. But the biggest problem of all is Tess's half-sister, Sarah. She has links to the deceased and has the skills and criminal background to mastermind a locked-room murder. But she's a con-artist, not a killer. When two more bodies turn up, Tess now has three locked room mysteries to solve and even more reason to be suspicious of Sarah. Can she trust someone who breaks the law for a living, even if she is family?

You can find her on X @JennyBlackhurst and on Instagram @jennyblackhurstauthor.

The strangest job I attended as a Scenes of Crime Officer by T. Orr Munro

I became a Scenes of Crime Officer (SOCO) by accident. After university, I wasn’t sure what to do with my life when my brother in law, a police officer, told me his force was recruiting civilian scenes of crime officers. I loved photography which was a significant part of the job and it seemed an incredibly exciting area of work so I applied. To my surprise, I got it and after an intensive three month residential training programme, I attended my first crime scene. Most Scenes of Crime work is taken up with minor crimes and I spent most my time attending break ins and car thefts involving people who had little to start with. But, every now and then, I’d be called to a scene that, well, you couldn’t make up.

One night, on late turn, I was working in the city centre when I caught snippets of a police pursuit on the police radio. At that time, car theft was a massive problem. The ‘twockers’ (Taken Without Consent) as we called them were usually teenagers who would take the car for a joyride before dumping and, occasionally, setting it alight. From what I could make out this particular chase ended in a multi-storey car park, a favourite destination of car thieves because it offered a variety of escape routes which is exactly what happened that night.

I didn’t take that much notice because, as a SOCO, I played no part in catching them. If necessary, we examine the abandoned vehicle the following. To my surprise, however, the police operator called me up and told me to go immediately to the car park.

I arrived to find two young boys, cheeks stained with tears, sitting in the back of the police car looking absolutely petrified: their reaction , I assumed, to being caught. However, I still couldn't work out what I was doing there. The officer then asked me to follow him into the dank stairwell which was in almost total darkness as the lights had been vandalised.

Halfway down a set of stairs, he stopped and shone his torch upwards. A metre or so in front of me dangled a pair of legs. Looking up, I could make out the dark outline of a woman’s body, suspended from the ceiling. The police officer explained that in the darkness the boys had run headlong into this poor woman's legs. One of them had flicked on a lighter to see what it was and, seeing the body, they had become hysterical and had run screaming back up the stairwell straight into the arms of the police officer.

The woman, it turned out, had a history of mental illness and had walked out of a nearby hospital straight to the car park where she ended her life before anyone had noticed she was gone.

My job was to take photos which I did before returning to my van to finish my shift. The last I saw of the two boys, still trembling, they were being driven to a police station. I don’t know what happened to them. The police officers said it was karma but I like to think that the experience shocked them enough to stop them stealing cars.

It was another thirty years before I decided to write a crime novel - Breakneck Point - featuring a SOCO or CSI as they're often called today. We see these white suited people on television going in and out of crime scenes. They are exposed to more horrors than just about anyone else in the police service and the job they do is nothing less than remarkable, but I’d never read a book which centred on a CSI so, drawing on my own experiences, I decided to write my own. I wanted to show what it is like to deal with crime scenes and, although it is a work of fiction, my main character's feelings and observations reflect my own experiences.

We are endlessly fascinated by crime, but I wanted to explore something more; I wanted to show the devastating impact crime can have on an individual - any crime. I attended many crime scenes that would leave an indelible impression on me, but what stayed with me most were the victims.

By the time I arrived often the enormity of what had happened had begun to sink in. They were frightened and vulnerable. Just like those two boys in the car park that night. What I learnt was that it wasn’t just the victims of serious crime whose lives were destroyed. It was also the victims of minor crimes too. Crime is devastating.

Breakneck Point by T Orr Munro is published by HQ, HarperCollins on the 14^th April 2022 in Hardback, eBook and audiobook.

CSI Ally Dymond's commitment to justice has cost her a place on the major investigations team. After exposing corruption in the ranks, she's stuck working petty crimes on the sleepy North Devon coast. Then the body of nineteen-year-old Janie Warren turns up in the seaside town of Bidecombe, and Ally's expert skills are suddenly back in demand. But when the evidence she discovers contradicts the lead detective's theory, nobody wants to listen to the CSI who landed their colleagues in prison. Time is running out to catch a killer no one is looking for - no one except Ally. What she doesn't know is that he's watching, from her side of the crime scene tape, waiting for the moment to strike.

 

Right to Kill by John Barlow

My novel Right to Kill began with a chance encounter. It was in Cleckheaton, the West Yorkshire town where I grew up. About nine in the evening, and I was walking back down towards the centre from the library, a route I’d taken countless times when I was a kid. And there, under a disused railway bridge, was a young guy selling drugs. He was just going about his business, nonchalant, a bit of arrogance in his eyes as I walked past. I don’t know why I was so shocked. It’s as easy to get drugs in Yorkshire’s old mill towns as a bag of chips.

The drug culture is pretty much endemic these days, and it’s not even particularly well hidden anymore. Yet there’s a whole world of depravity lying beneath it, a semi-submerged part of modern life that leaves squalor, addiction and victims in its wake. So I asked myself, what would happen if someone just killed him? What if someone took offence at his presence, the assumed normality of him standing there, unchallenged, cocky, and decided to do something about it, on the spur of the moment?

I think the truth is that the murder of a low-level drug pusher isn’t likely to have much of an emotional impact on us at all. It’s not like the tragic death of a child, or the murder of an innocent victim of crime. Probably wouldn’t even warrant a headline in the Yorkshire Post. And that’s what attracted me to the idea. Do we see all human life as equally valuable, every murder as equally worthy of our compassion? No, I don’t think we do. You’d need a special kind of copper to see the deep human tragedy in a death like this.

Cue Joe Romano, a half-Sicilian police detective based in Leeds. Joe is tasked with finding out who killed this small-time drug dealer. The murder seems to have been spontaneous, unusual in its mode of violence, and lacks an obvious motive. Joe’s colleagues show little interest in the case, and many members of the public in fact applaud the killer. But Joe believes that every life matters, especially after he gets to know the victim’s mother. When he’s joined by the bolshie, foul-mouthed DS Rita Hridi Scannon-Aktar from Batley, the investigation takes on a new dimension. Especially when the victim appears to have had links to a group of far-right, racist vigilantes.

What I found fascinating about setting a novel in Leeds and the mill towns of West Yorkshire was how the atmosphere of these towns has changed over the last decade or so. When I grew up here, the area was standard ‘north’, part of Labour’s red wall. But recently it also saw a huge pro-Brexit vote, and it was where Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered, apparently in the name of ‘English nationalism’. The red wall is crumbling, and there’s a tension, an undercurrent of racism, a sense of things having lost focus. Just the kind of context in which a vigilante killer might receive popular support. And when a second victim is discovered, Joe Romano has a tough job convincing anybody that justice needs to be done.

My family are all from Leeds. I wanted to write a novel set in the city, not least because I really love the place, its elegance and self-assuredness, Lewis’s, Harvey Nicks, the lions outside the Town Hall… There’s a nineteenth-century grandeur and charm to the city centre: big but not boastful. However, as I wrote Right to Kill I was drawn to the mill towns to the south, Cleckheaton, Batley, Dewsbury… Joe Romano is from Leeds, a real city boy. Although the murders take place just a dozen miles away, it’s as if he's taking the reader with him out of the city to somewhere less familiar.

The second book in the series, To the Grave, also explores these contrasts, moving from the Porsche-spattered, millionaire-infested greenbelt of leafy northern Leeds, to the shadowy world of illegal workers in the run-down and sometimes grim mill towns nearby. Rugby league rather than Premiership football.

In the end, I think that’s what I find most enjoyable about West Yorkshire as a setting for crime fiction. It’s the variety, the quick-fire contrasts, the sense that everything is happening in close proximity to everything else. You can go from pockets of idyllic greenery to noir-ish abandoned factories in a matter of minutes. Plus, there’s the people. Friendly but not flamboyant, with an understated wit. Writing about the north makes for great dialogue. Although, since southerners are also allowed to read it, we had to tone down the accents a bit, tha’ knows.

John Barlow’s RIGHT TO KILL is published in paperback on 4th February, 2022, by HQ/HarperCollins.

On a Thursday night in February, DS Joe Romano finds himself back on home turf in Wortley, West Leeds. He's following up on the disappearance of drug dealer Craig Shaw. It's the start of a case that could make or break Romano's career. Because Shaw is about to go from missing to murdered. While some don't think Shaw's killer should be brought to justice, Romano believes every life counts. But he's running out of time. The killer is ready to strike again. And Romano will be forced to question whether anyone has the right to kill.

TO THE GRAVE is published on 24th May, 2022

When DS Joe Romano first meets Ana Dobrescu she's nervous, in serious danger, and clearly needs help. The next time Romano sees her, she's dead. There was nothing more he could have done, but that's cold comfort for Romano. He's determined to catch Ana's killer. Although the prime suspect, her millionaire boyfriend, is in a coma. With the help of his larger-than-life partner Rita Scannon-Aktar, Romano begins to piece together a puzzle that places Ana at the centre of something much bigger than they could have imagined. But while they're hunting a murderer, those higher up are more concerned about the money. So it's up to Romano to get justice for Ana. And whatever she knew, he'll just have to pray that she didn't take her secrets to the grave.

More information about John Barlow can be found on his website. You can also follow him on Twitter @John_Barlow_LS9 and on Facebook

 

CWA announce shortlist for Best Crime Publisher

Shortlist Announced for New CWA Dagger Best Crime & Mystery Publisher

The shortlist has been announced for the inaugural CWA Dagger for the Best Crime and Mystery Publisher of the Year. The award is the first new Dagger category created in over a decade.

The Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Daggers are regarded by the publishing world as the foremost British awards in crime writing, established in 1955.

Shortlist 2019

Faber & Faber

Harper Fiction (HarperCollins)

HQ (HarperCollins)

No Exit Press (Oldcastle Books)

Orenda Books

Pushkin Vertigo (Pushkin)

Raven (Bloomsbury)

Maxim Jakubowski, Honorary Vice-Chair of the CWA, said: “We’re delighted with the high quality nominees for this new Dagger, a category we felt was overdue in our award portfolio. Publishers play a vital role in driving the biggest selling genre and shaping our cultural landscape. The publicists, editors, designers and hard-working teams that support new and existing authors deserve this recognition.”

The shortlisted publishers and imprints were nominated by a representative group of leading book reviewers, booksellers, festival organisers, bloggers, literary agents and journalists.

The nominee criteria was the display of excellence and diversity in publishing. Factors taken into account include developing new authors and marketing and promoting crime fiction.

The winner will be announced at the prestigious Dagger Awards Dinner on October 24 at the Leonardo Royal Hotel London City (formerly known as Grange City) on Cooper’s Row, London.

For ticket details and to book a place, https://thecwa.co.uk/the-daggers/cwa-dagger-awards-gala-dinner-2019 or contact admin@thecwa.co.uk Discounts are available for tables of 10 or 12.

Sleep, Dreams and Memory - The Inspiration for Under My Skin by Lisa Unger

There’s almost always a single germ for each of my novels. A moment, a line of poetry, a news story, a piece of junk mail. What happens next is -- a bit odd. I start to hear a voice, or a couple of voices. And these voices draw me through my narrative. I don’t have an outline. I don’t know who is going to show up each day or what they are going to do. And I certainly don’t know how the book is going to end.

For UNDER MY SKIN, it wasn’t a single moment, as there often is. It was something.

Carl Jung wrote, a phrase that’s been kicking around in my head for a while:

“Between the dreams of day and night, there is not so great a difference.”

It’s a short sentence, but as with many Jungian quotes there are layers of meaning here. The dreams of day and night – what did he mean by this?

We spend an average of 229,000 hours asleep during our lifetime. That’s more time than we spend eating, working, or driving – more than a third of our lives sleeping and dreaming. Still we’re convinced that our waking life is more real than whatever it is we’re experiencing when we close our eyes at night.

Between those two worlds – the waking and the dreaming worlds – is a doorway called hypnagogia. Maybe you haven’t heard that word before, but you’ve definitely experienced it. It’s the threshold moment where we have those bizarre dreams – we’re falling, or a bear leaps out from the shadows – and we’re startled awake. This connection between the adjacent worlds of waking and dreaming has been a point of wonder for me, as are other states where perception is altered.

For example, while I was researching another of my novels CRAZY LOVE YOU, I interviewed a clinical psychiatrist about fugue states and black outs. I had always thought that black outs were the result of repressed memory, or memories that got buried so deep that you no longer have access to them.  But he said no. That black outs are ultimately a failure of cognition, that at a certain point in intoxication, we stop taking information in altogether. Addiction alters our perception of reality.

And then, of course, there’s trauma –which is most certainly a brain event, as well as a psychological and emotional one. And one I’ve explored in other novels. This too is a state where our memory, our perception might be altered. I was speaking to a former Navy Seal who works with veterans suffering from the after-effects of blast and PTSD. And he talked about the spiral some of these soldiers find themselves in – untreated PTSD, which can lead to sleep disruption, which can lead to addiction, which unravels the support system of family and friends. In this state, reality starts to unravel to devastating result.

So, it wasn’t one of these things, but all of them I think that led me to start hearing the voice of Poppy Lang. In her journey, I wanted to explore the way the psyche copes with grief and trauma, the twin demons of addiction and sleep disruption, and how our own perception and memories can be as slippery and unreliable as our dreams.

Under My Skin by Lisa Unger published by HQ on 18th October 2018

Her husband’s killer maybe closer than she thinks… It’s been a year since Poppy’s husband, Jack, was brutally murdered during his morning run. She’s trying to move on but what happened that morning is still haunting her. And now she’s sure she is being followed… Sleep deprived and secretly self-medicating, Poppy is unable to separate her dreams from reality. She feels like she’s losing her mind. But what if she’s not? What if she’s actually remembering what really happened? What if her husband wasn’t who he said he was? And what if his killer is still watching her…