Thriller Awards 2025

 

The International Thriller Writers Organization (ITW) announced the winners of the Thriller Awards on Saturday 21 June 2025 during ThrillerFest. 

BEST SHORT STORY

Jackrabbit Skin by Ivy Pochoda

BEST FIRST NOVEL

Deadly Animal by Marie Tierney

BEST YOUNG ADULT NOVEL

Darkly by Marisha Pessl

BEST AUDIOBOOK

No One Can No by Kate Alice Marshall (Narrated by Karissa Vacker)

BEST STANDALONE MYSTERY NOVEL

Missing White Woman by Kellye Garrett

BEST STANDALONE THRILLER NOVEL

The Last One at the Wedding by Jason Rekulak 

BEST SERIES NOVEL

To Die For by David Baldacci

Congratulations to all the winners and the nominated authors.

Q& A with Charlotte Carter

©Charlotte Carter

Introduction

Charlotte Carter is the author of the jazz based trilogy novels featuring Nanette Hayes a young Black American jazz musician street busker. A former editor and teacher. The series was originally published in the 1990s and has recently been republished by Baskerville Publishing.

Ayo:- When I first read your Nanette Hayes series one of the things that drew me to the series aside from the fact that your love of jazz comes through on every single page is how spunky and sassy and sexually liberated Nanette is. Is there any part of you in Nanette and if so was this intentional?

Charlotte:- Spunk, sass, sexually liberated. I wish. Maybe the best answer is that my innate shrinking violet was always dueling with a bolder, more courageous persona, and to my surprise, sometimes the bold one won out over Miss Timid. Kind of depends on what’s at stake, I guess.

Of course there’s a bit of yourself in nearly every character. It occurs to me that one of the plusses of a first person narrative is that if you so choose, you can present yourself as a better you. Smarter, funnier, prettier, cooler, whatever. 

Ayo:- When the series was first published it was like a fresh of breath air and Nanette was a very unusual character. A strong black female. This impression has continued with how she has been received since the books have been re-issued. Were you surprised about this especially since she appears to be the head of the curve when it comes to dealing with social issues?

Charlotte:- It’s interesting how many times this thing about Nanette being “ahead of the curve” in dealing with social/racial issues has come up. “Strong black female” on the dust jacket is almost a yawn these days. I had no agenda, certainly I had no intention to use Nan as a way to preach or teach. In fact, perhaps people looked at her as a breath of fresh air because she isn’t out to sway opinion or shout the house down about this or that issue--but her take on race, colour, power dynamics, sexism, and so on, is still clear. 

Ayo:- It is evident that you have a great love of jazz, jazz history and film noir. Where did this come from?

Charlotte:- You know how you hear music that’s strange to your ears, you don’t know who’s playing or singing but you know you need to hear/learn more about it. A lot of the music I love came at me when I was young, and there were endless opportunities to learn more. I was living in a black community, and in a large multigenerational household, where some kind of music was playing all the time. So, one of my relatives was friendly with a guy who worked at a blues club, my mother and her girlhood friend were semiprofessional performers when they were young, my uncle with the drug problem was a Charlie Parker fanatic, an eighth grade teacher would try to instill black pride in us by playing Leontyne Price or some indigenous Ghanaian music, and so on. I guess once in a while I’d hear something and think, Nah, not feeling that, tune it out--but most of the time I could just go with it.

As for the film stuff, having a mother who didn’t make me go to bed at any particular time had a lot to do with how my interest in movies developed. It is amazing how many films you could see after prime time—and the variety was amazing. I’m talking about the early 60s. I’d see foreign movies dubbed into English, talk shows that originated in New York [guests from Richard Pryor to Oscar Levant to Lenny Bruce to Gwen Verdon; I even saw Jack Kerouac on tv], and an endless parade of noir films—a treasure trove. Before long I was taking note of the cinematographers and who wrote the scores and what novel the movie was taken from. The world view that life could be dark and short and often brutal was not a hard sell for me. There was a hell of a lot of grim stuff going on around me. To be honest, I’ve gotten way more out of living than I ever thought I would.

Ayo:- Is there anything you would have changed if you could since you initially wrote the books?

Charlotte:- Yeah. They’d be better. And I wouldn’t have stayed so silent. I more or less turned away from trying to write, which meant I blew the chance to be better.

©Charlotte Carter

Ayo:- Have you still got a love of jazz and for someone who wanted to read the books with music playing in the background which jazz artists or songs would you recommend? 

Charlotte:- Better for people to listen to anything they really like. I played Talking Heads the other day, to get myself up and moving. I play Coltrane a lot. But I haven’t been diligent about keeping up with newer artists. I’m pledging that when Covid is behind us [ha ha], I will start going out again [if there are any venues left] to hear some of the good musicians around today. There are probably a hundred of them just on this side of town.

Ayo:- How pleased were you when Baskerville decided to re-issue the Nanette Hayes trilogy?

Charlotte:- Very pleased. That came out of the blue. Can’t rewrite them at this stage, but I took the opportunity to do some minor surgery on the books, taking out stuff that was a bit over the top, adding a scene or two to each of the books. I haven’t done much writing the last ten years. Collaborated with my husband in the early 2000s on a film treatment, but we weren’t successful. Wow, was he prescient—he tried like hell for a good 15 years to sell this dystopic novel we were writing together, about the overturning of Roe v Wade and the criminalization of abortion in the States. They all laughed ….

Ayo:- Rhode Island Red is my favourite of the trilogy partly because it sems to be an ode to Dashiell Hammett and The Maltese Falcon which is one of my all time favourite crime novels and also because it is was my introduction to such a wonderful series. Was this intentional as there is a missing saxophone at the heart of the story?

Charlotte:- Yes. That, and many other crime things where the cast of characters are on a kind of quest for something elusive, something or someone. It’s enough of a recognized trope that it didn’t feel like stealing. The search almost never ends well.

Ayo:- Have we seen the end of this series? 

Charlotte:- To be brief, I don’t know. A couple of plots are bubbling, but I genuinely don’t know if anything will come of them.

Ayo:- What are you working on at the moment?

Charlotte:- A novel, due out next year. It’s not a Nanette, it’s full of grief and death but it’s not a murder mystery, and it is set in both the past and the present, often at the same time; it has a paranormal edge; almost a druggy edge; it’s… what?... inescapably erotic; and in this case, those racial and societal issues indeed are like a cloud overlaying the entire book.

My post about the series can be read here. There is also a Q & A with Charlotte Carter at Crime Time which can be read here.

 

Charlotte Carter - In a world of jazz with Nanette Hayes

 

New Yorker Nanette Hayes the main protagonist in Charlotte Carter's excellent noir jazz infused series is a young black jazz musician who not only has a lust for life but an aptitude for solving crimes. Set in streets of New York this acclaimed series has just been republished by Baskerville with some glorious covers by Bristol based artist Lucy Turner who was asked to redesign the covers. Originally published in the 1990s this underrated but brilliantly written series when first published pointed me in the direction of a character who was not only funny with a sense of humour that made the series stand out but also showed that there could be strong sexually confident women who knew what they wanted and be a dab hand at solving crimes as well. 

At a time when there were not (in my opinion) enough black female crime writers visible within the genre (we did have Eleanor Taylor Bland, Barbara Neely, Valerie Wilson Wesley, and Grace F. Edwards) coming across Charlotte Carter made me realise that one had to dig deeper to find these gems to read and also the fact that this series was and still is a delight, whether you are reading them for the first time or whether you are reacquainting yourself with them like I am. Any author who uses Theolonius Monk song titles as chapter headings is is certainly worth reading.

The first book in the series Rhode Island Red sees jazz loving Nanette offering a fellow street musician a bed for the night. Finding him dead the following morning Nanette is soon involved with a strange and sinister couple, a fellow jazz lover who just happens to be a gangster as well and who is someone that she could easily fall for as well as trying to solve what might be the mystery that the jazz world has been trying to solve for quite sometime. Rhode Island Red was clearly inspired by Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, which being one of my all time favourite crime novels is another reason to enjoy this book so much. Furthermore, Charlotte Carter's love of film noir also comes shining through in her prose.

The second book in the series is Coq Au Vin and this time it sees Nanette in the city of love that is Paris. Nanette is trying to find her aunt Vivian who has disappeared. As Nanette hooks up with André a self-taught violinist from Detroit (who is also in Paris) as she searches for her bohemian aunt she finds herself once again deep in the midst of danger, this time in the dark side of historic Paris and at the centre of attention of some extremely dangerous people. Once again Charlotte Carter has continued to share her love of jazz by giving the chapter titles the names of songs sung by some very impressive jazz artists including Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, Billy Strayhorn and Clifford Brown to name a few. 

© Ayo Onatade

Like Rhode Island Red, Coq Au Vin is an intensely jazz filled book. Jazz is certainly the main narrative that is seen via both Nanette and André and their interactions with each other. This time around one has the added love affair, that of the relationship between Paris and Black Americans. One cannot forget that some of the best jazz musicians for example Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Theolonius Monk and Charles Mingus all spent time in Paris during their lives. 

The third book in the series is Drumsticks and after a rather tragic sojourn to Paris, Nanette is back in New York drowning her sorrows metaphorically and figuratively and just about managing to make ends meet. Things start to look up when she receives a Voodoo doll as a present. Could her luck be changing after all? It falls to Nanette to investigate when the lady who sent her the doll is found dead. Who killed her and why? Liking up with some unlikely allies sees Nanette delving into the life of Ida the dead women who had rather a large number of dark skeletons in her cupboard.

Whilst it was great to see Nanette in Paris in the second book in the series seeing her back in her usual haunt of New York was a delight. There was slightly more grittiness in the dialogue (which I loved) which was not so evident in Coq Au Vin, but the descriptions of New York were just as vivid as those of Paris. Charlotte Carter certainly knows how to draw her readers into a city. Her descriptions are profound, lush and very much part and parcel of this trilogy. Again Charlotte Carter does not disappoint us when it comes to her chapter titles, with song titles from the Nat King Cole Trio, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Horace Silver, John Coltrane, Chet Baker and Dexter Gordon.

Nanette's ability to be ferocious in what she delights in whether it be falling in love with men (decent or not) fine wine and food and of course the best of jazz music and not forgetting her innate ability to solve mysteries is what makes this series amongst the best music inspired series to read. 

It is an utter shame that we readers only have a trilogy to read about Nanette Hayes. I certainly wish that there were more. Charlotte Carter not only managed to write a thrilling series with a strong, sexy female character but she also brought jazz to life and enthused this series with jazz music that would delight anyone whether or not the are a novice when it comes to their love of jazz or a longstanding lover of Jazz. 

One of the best things of this series which always makes these books worth rereading is the great sense of place, characterisation and the love of jazz and jazz history that flows through the pages. I love the fact that jazz songs are cited, it makes you want to go and seek out all of them, You don't have to be a fan of jazz to enjoy this series but it does help and its incredibly easy to immerse yourself in reading this series with jazz playing in the background.

If you haven't read this series before then do so. They may have been originally published in the 90s but that has not stopped them from being great reads today. Welcome to the world of sexy, sassy Nanette Hayes, who if anything will bring jazz to life as she solves a number of mysteries. Re-reading these have been a joy. 

Charlotte Carter's Nanette Hayes series has been re-issued by Baskerville a John Murray Press imprint. More information can be found here.

Who is Vera Kelly - The Short Version? by Rosalie Knecht

 

My interest in Cold War intelligence came from a real-life beginning. My maternal grandfather was hired by the Office of Strategic Services after World War II and stayed there as it became the Central Intelligence Agency, in a non-covert post, analyzing Soviet radio broadcasts. He and my grandmother settled down in the inner-ring suburbs of Washington, DC in the early 1950s to raise their family. Then history intruded in the form of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

McCarthy made his bones on the claim that a secret Communist conspiracy had infiltrated the U.S. government. As McCarthy’s accusations of Communist spies in the civil service grew broader and wilder, my grandfather’s bosses at the CIA began a review of all personnel files. In 1955, internal investigators turned up a number of things in my grandfather’s background that they found troubling. 

Decades later, the memoranda they wrote detailing their findings, and the letters my grandfather wrote responding to them, are still in my family’s papers. The memos listed seventeen charges. He was accused of being friends, twenty years before and a thousand miles away in South Dakota, with a list of named Communists; visiting local party headquarters; handing out Communist pamphlets; and on one occasion, giving a known Communist a lift from Sioux Falls to Minneapolis. He was further accused of hanging around with two named women, also Communists, in Greenwich Village in 1943, and attending a Communist meeting there. More charges: he had founded a leftist newspaper in Sioux Falls, had started a local chapter of the Workers’ Alliance, and finally—this last one jarring with the more mundane activities around it—had joined the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War and been interned in France. 

He responded meticulously to these accusations. In 1935, when he was twenty years old, he had been a socialist, not a communist, he said. He had known some of the people mentioned but could not recall others. He had never handed out any pamphlets. He admitted to the drive from Sioux Falls to Minneapolis. He had no recollection of visiting any party headquarters, unless—he began to speculate here, and his fatigue and anxiety is palpable on the page, all these years later—unless perhaps the Sioux Falls Communist Party was headquartered in the Communist bookstore operated by his friend, the one he drove to Minneapolis, which he had visited several times and where it was possible he might have bought some Communist literature, but probably not, because he was “poverty-stricken at the time.” He knew the two women in Greenwich Village, he said, but his relations with them were “entirely personal,” and they had never tried to convert him to their cause.

The rest—the Workers’ Alliance, the leftist newspaper, the Spanish Civil War? He confessed that he had made those things up in 1943 in an application for a journalism fellowship. He had been told that a leftist resume would help him get it. He deeply regretted the mistake. He had apparently been polygraphed already during the investigation; he referred to this in his statement, and repeatedly offered to be polygraphed again to confirm this or that part of his sworn testimony.

As he sat writing this defense in 1955, he was forty years old and had three young children to support. The charges that were true, he wrote, came down to one charge: that he was friends with Communists a long time ago, and had been a socialist himself. He was fired.

In 1961, my grandfather fell from the roof of the family home while making repairs. He died of his injuries. Sixty years is a lot of silence. It was partly to sound out this lacuna that I began to write about the professional middle classes ringing Washington, DC at midcentury, the intelligence services where they worked, and the way people lived and continued to live with lies—big lies and small lies, public lies and personal lies. What stands out more in his story—the socialist politics of a young man coming out of rural poverty in the midst of the Depression, clearly interested in the radical organizing happening all around him in Sioux Falls, South Dakota? Or is it the extravagant lies for personal gain—the fictitious service in a bloody war from which most volunteers did not come back? Was it about fantasy, glamor, social cache? Was it about justice for the injuries of poverty? Was it both? Who was he? What does any of it tell me about this person I never met, whom even my mother barely remembers? I have only this very small window into his life, this brief instant when he sat sweating over a typewriter with his career on the line, admitting to humiliating deceptions, wracking his brain for the names of passing acquaintances, summoning up a dingy Greenwich Village function hall filled with earnest young people hoping for a better future in the middle of a world war. I can feel him trying to make contact with that younger self, trying to remember what he wanted, who he told people he was, what he believed and when he stopped believing it. He confesses it all. It’s not enough.

Who is Vera Kelly by Rosalie Knecht (Verve Books) Published 21 January 2021

"New York City, 1962. Vera Kelly is struggling to make rent and blend into the underground gay scene in Greenwich Village. She's working night shifts at a radio station when her quick wits, sharp tongue, and technical skills get her noticed by a recruiter for the CIA. Next thing she knows she's in Argentina, tasked with wiretapping a congressman and infiltrating a group of student activists in Buenos Aires. As Vera becomes more and more enmeshed with the young radicals, the fragile local government begins to split at the seams. When a betrayal leaves her stranded in the wake of a coup, Vera learns the Cold War makes for strange and unexpected bedfellows, and she's forced to take extreme measures to save herself.

Call for Papers (Extended) - New York State of Crime

Mean Streets

Call for Papers--Extended

Mean Streets: A Journal of American Crime and Detective Fiction

Issue 2

Topic: New York State of Crime

Proposals: November 30, 2020

Final essays: February 15, 2021

For the second issue of Mean Streets, the editors seek proposals focusing on crime literature of New York City or elsewhere in the Empire State. The “extended” CFP will give particular preference to crime literature set in New York outside of New York City. 

This “extended” CFP also invites proposals dealing with detective/crime fiction in urban environments in which the urban setting is given particular significance.

Raymond Chandler’s “mean streets” were the deceptively sun-dappled streets of Los Angeles, but the streets of New York City and its environs have a longer history of association with crime fiction. The vice-filled streets upon which Horatio Alger’s ragged newsboys trudged were the gritty New York City streets of the 1860s. Detective Nick Carter made his first appearance in the New York Weekly in September of 1866 in a serial focused on a crime in Madison Square, the original location of Madison Square Garden.

Decades later, Rex Stout, Chester Himes, Elizabeth Daly, Ed McBain, Ellery Queen, S.S. Van Dine, Amanda Cross, George Baxt, Julia Dahl and so many others found in New York the perfect setting for crimes, genteel or gruesome. The neighborhoods, bars, waterfronts, police precincts, theaters, subway tunnels and gleaming towers of New York have provided rich settings for sordid activities. Upstate New York—the Westchester and Long Island suburbs, Hudson Valley hamlets, the political cauldron of Albany, the once-thriving Catskill resorts, the Rust Belt, and the Snow Belt—has been featured in much crime writing, too.

Mean Streets is essentially a literary journal, so while discussion of film or other media is welcome, the balance of discussion will deal with literature.

Abstracts of 250 words with proposed title should be directed no later than November 30 to the editors: Rebecca Martin (doc.rmartin@gmail.com) and Walter Raubicheck (wraubicheck@pace.edu).

Final papers of 7000-8000 words will be due by February 15, 2021, with publication anticipated in spring 2021. Feel free to send questions to both editors.

About Mean Streets

This journal is published by the Pace University Press (New York City), which has been sponsoring scholarly journals since the 1980s.

Mean Streets is a refereed journal edited by two scholars in literature and film and guided by an Editorial Board comprised of distinguished scholars from several disciplines. Submissions will be reviewed by the editors and selected Board members.

The journal’s first issue appeared in spring 2020. Copies may be ordered at press.pace.edu/journals/mean-streets/.

Stephen Spotswood - Fortune Favours the Dead - The Inspiration

 

It started with my grandmother’s bookshelf. This was the grandmother I got along with, which was convenient since I spent as much time at her house as at home. It was a modest bookshelf--two dozen ceramic knick-knacks taking pride of place at eye level with the floor-level shelves left for my grandmother’s small collection of aging paperbacks. I imagine things were arranged that way for my benefit. Keeping the breakables safe from the curious toddler.

The curious toddler grew up, but remained curious. Eventually I started pulling out those old paperbacks. The covers caught me first: colourful, sinister, many featuring gun-wielding women showing enough skin that made me think these weren’t for children.

So of course I read them.

I don’t remember if I liked them much. I was very young and was still working on the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. But they stuck with me. Those hardboiled heroes from half a century before.

Fast forward a few decades. I was going through my own bookshelves--less modest than my grandmother’s since I didn’t have to make room for curios, though I probably have some of the same titles she had. Maybe even the same editions, since my fondness for lurid covers remains.

I was shelving a Rex Stout novel and thought, “I think I’d like to read that again.” One thing led to another and I ended up spending a season doing a reread and sometimes first read of all of Stout’s Nero Wolfe books in chronological order. It wasn’t a hard task since I have a great fondness for Stout, who married the traditional English murder mystery with the hardboiled American voice.

Somewhere in there I began wondering what kind of story I would tell if I decided to play in that particular sandbox. I’d spent the last two decades as a playwright writing almost exclusively female protagonists, many of them queer. And most of my plays deal with characters learning to thrive in a world that, for one reason or other, is set against them.

Very quickly, Lillian Pentecost and Will Parker emerged. The reserved genius thriving in spite of (or to spite) her multiple sclerosis and her circus-trained protege who is learning to be a working detective one hard-won lesson at a time.

As for why I put them in 1945, it’s because life shouldn’t be easy for a hardboiled hero. That time was a pivot point in American culture. Coming off the high of the war and turning inward--to infrastructure and suburbia and family-building, but also to paranoia and fear, the McCarthy hearings and the Lavender Scare. The next decade won’t be kind to Will, a bisexual woman with a chip on her shoulder, and her boss, a woman who’s more interested in doing what’s right than what’s legal. And unlike Stout’s novels, I plan to have these two detectives grow and change as the world around them becomes a particularly difficult place to live if you’re different.

Hopefully I’ll find a collection of readers who will love Lillian and Will as much as I do. And hopefully they’ll tuck them away on the bottom shelf. All the better for a new generation of curious children.

Fortune Favours The Dead by Stephen Spotswood. (published in hardback on 12th November 2020 by Wildfire)

New York, 1946. Lillian Pentecost is the most successful private detective in the city, but her health is failing. She hires an assistant to help with the investigative legwork. Willowjean Parker is a circus runaway. Quick-witted and street-smart, she’s a jack-of-all-trades with a unique skill-set. She can pick locks blindfolded, wrestle men twice her size, and throw knives with deadly precision - all of which come in handy working for Ms P. When wealthy young widow Abigail Collins is murdered and the police are making no progress, Pentecost and Parker are hired by the family to track down the culprit. On Halloween night, there was a costume party at the Collins’ mansion, where a fortune teller performed a séance which greatly disturbed Abigail. Several hours later her body was discovered bludgeoned to death in her late husband’s office. Problem is, the door to the office was locked from the inside. There was no-one else in the room, and the murder weapon was beside the victim; the fortune teller’s crystal ball. It looks like an impossible crime, but Pentecost and Parker know there is no such thing...

Linda Fairstein on How I Write What I Know

Today's guest blog is by Linda Fairstein. She is the bestselling author of the series of novels featuring Manhattan prosecutor Alex Cooper.  In 2002 The fourth novel in the series The Deadhouse  was nominated for a Macavity Award.  It was also nominated and won the Nero Award the same year. Entombed the seventh novel in the series won the 2005 RT Reviewers Choice Award for best P.I Novel. The Devil's Bridge is the seventeenth novel in the series.

In 1972, when I joined the office of the legendary New York County District Attorney as a young prosecutor, my awareness of the great work of that institution was forged and informed while I was a law student.  But long before that, my interest was reinforced by crime novels, film, and television, which fictionalized many of the famous cases that had been handled by my predecessors.

I had majored in English literature at an elite women’s college in the 60’s, hoping to fulfill my childhood ambition to be a novelist.   By graduation, I realized my father was right – I had nothing to write about. My second choice was public service, so I went off to law school, never abandoning the dream to become an author.

When Scott Turow’s great courtroom drama – PRESUMED INNOCENT – was made into a movie, the director asked me to consult.  The victim was, after all, a sex crimes prosecutor, just like me.  When LAW AND ORDER:SVU was created, it was based entirely on the work of my unit.   Each time Hollywood knocked on my door for assistance, my desire to work on my own crime novels grew stronger.  The screenwriters and directors were picking my brain because the authenticity of my job experience was what they hoped to bring to the project.  The old adage – write what you know – became more and more meaningful to me.  I started to write the Alex Cooper series of crime novels while I was still a prosecutor, anxious to capture the immediacy and excitement of my job, giving that voice and spirit to my protagonist.

The first five Coop novels were published before I left the office in 2002, after thirty years of work that was a challenge every day, and that I loved more than I could ever have imagined when I started out in the practice of law. I figured that when I stepped out of my high-profile job - where I had been responsible for supervising sex crimes, domestic violence, child abuse, and related homicides for more than 25 years – I would be less likely to be exposed to all the cutting edge forensic developments that had made my day job so unique.  In 1986, for example, I was one of the first five prosecutors in America to be introduced to DNA technology, which helped our team solve a sensational murder case, even though the judge refused to allow the jury to hear about this new science.  How could I possibly keep current enough to make Coop’s investigations as timely as they were in the early books?

The transition was far easier than I had feared.  First, I had three decades of insider information – technique, language, courtroom dynamics – that would carry me a long way in my plotting.  Second, I thought the work was so interesting that I planned to keep my credentials as a lawyer, and to this day I handle scores of cases pro bono and continue to consult on these issues – with corporations, national sports teams, and universities which have seen sexual assault cases increase in such dramatic numbers.  Third is that the best perk of my job was the friendships I made – the young lawyers who honed their skills on my watch, the brilliant detectives who taught me how to investigate every kind of violent felony, and the forensic pathologists who guided me through my first autopsies and made me understand why DNA would become my three favorite letters of the alphabet.  I count on my beloved friends every day to keep me informed and up to the moment on law and science.  In exchange, my pals make cameo appearances in my books – always good guys, of course – covering Coop’s back and helping her make her way through capers and catastrophes.

In crafting DEVIL’S BRIDGE, one of the smartest cops I’ve ever known – Lt. Jimmy West of the Cold Case Unit, who oversees the re-investigation of all unsolved  murders in Manhattan as old as 40 years - took me every step of the way through the NYPD’s manner of investigating the kidnapping of prominent figures…the right way, and the rogue way.  Both directions are always great for fiction.  I never pass up an opportunity to spend a night tour in a patrol car, go to the morgue for a tutorial, or sit in on a lecture at the D.A.’s Office – still working with my former colleagues on reducing the backlog of untested rape evidence collection kits, a project I started fifteen years ago when I still wore my prosecutorial hat.

I think the best surprise of my writer’s life has been the great fun of mixing law and literature.  I’ve had two careers, both of which I’ve loved.  The chance to use the raw, real texture of my legal background to infuse Alex Cooper with authentic style is something for I’m grateful every day.  Need any help with a courtroom scene?  Just give me a call.

Devil’s Bridge by Linda Fairstein is published 18^th February by Sphere, price £7.99 in paperback.

The Manhattan waterfront is one of New York City's most magnificent vistas, boasting both the majestic Statue of Liberty and the busy George Washington Bridge. But Detective Mike Chapman is about to become far too well acquainted with the dangerous side of the Hudson river and its islands when he takes on his most personal case yet: the disappearance of Alex Cooper. Coop is missing - but there are so many leads and terrifying complications: scores of enemies she has made after a decade of putting criminals behind bars; a recent security breach with dangerous repercussions; and a new intimacy in her relationship with Mike, causing the Police Commissioner himself to be wary of the methods Mike will use to get Coop back... if he can

More information about Linda Fairstein and her books can be found on her website.  You can also follow her on Twitter @LindaFairstein.  You can also find her on Facebook.

My attraction to Villains......

Today's guest blog is by author Charles Belfoure. An architect, he practices historic preservation as both an architect and a consultant.  His first novel was The Paris Architect. 

I have always been attracted to villains.

In fact I admire them. In the movies, I always root for them to win out but in an American society based on strict Puritan-Calvinist morality, they always get their comeuppance and get caught or killed off. My admiration is probably because I secretly want to do something evil or criminal but don’t have the guts to actually try it.

In my novel House of Thieves, a society architect in 1886 New York is forced to join a criminal gang in order to pay off his son’s massive gambling debts or the son will be killed. As the story goes on, the architect discovers he likes being a criminal.

I based the character on a real historical figure named George L. Leslie who came from a wealthy Midwestern family and supposedly practiced architecture in New York City in the 1870s. He gave up being an architect because he preferred being a criminal who planned bank robberies. The career change was probably much more lucrative.

The closest I’ve ever been to the criminal world is when as a young architect I inadvertently got a job designing a house addition for the head of the New England Mafia (the New England Mafia extends from Connecticut to the Canadian border) in the early 1990s. It was just a small addition to a nondescript suburban house (and yes, I got paid in cash). I didn’t find out who he was under the project was well underway. I knew something was amiss when I told the contractor, an elderly Italian fellow, that the steel beam he’d gotten was way bigger than it needed to be. He replied not to worry, someone had given it to us for free.

I was scared but couldn’t do anything but see the job out. The Mafia is its own separate nation-state within America which has its own laws and doesn’t answer to anyone. Who would have I complained to? But I really got along well with my client. He was always on the construction site during the day telling me he worked nights. 

Whenever he called me to come over and look at something, I never said I was busy. I knew I had to come right away. He had a hair-trigger temper but never yelled at me. My client yelled so much at the contractor that he had a nervous breakdown. The old man asked me to step in and help with the construction management, giving me a dubious compliment – “Billy really likes you.”

About two weeks after the job was finished, I was passing a newspaper vending machine and saw my client’s face on the front page. It was his mug shot from the time he spent at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. The article said his naked body had been found in the river with a bullet in the base of his skull. A combined sense of shock, relief, and regret swept over me. I actually came to like the guy. Later, it turned out that his own crew murdered him because they couldn’t stand working for him anymore. From displays of his temper, I could tell he had poor people skills.

In the same article were accounts of what happened to people that had crossed him. In front of bar he owned was a landscaped area where one day he saw a man trample newly planted flowers. He chastised the man who cursed at him. Two days later, the flower hater was slumped over the wheel of car with a bullet in his head.

When I was watching the Sopranos series, something a character said about Tony Soprano

struck me. “You know, before he became a boss, he used to be the sweetest guy in the world.” That’s exactly the same thing the old contractor said about my client.

After that experience, I had no desire to be in the criminal world but I still root for villains.

The House of Thieves by Charles Belfoure is published on 17 September  (Allison & Busby, £12.99)

In 1886 New York, a respectable architect shouldn't have any connection to the notorious gang of thieves and killers that rules the underbelly of the city. But when John Cross's son racks up an unfathomable gambling debt to Kent's Gent's, Cross must pay it back himself. All he has to do is use his inside knowledge of high society mansions and museums to craft a robbery even the smartest detectives won't solve. The take better include some cash too: the bigger the payout, the faster this will be over. With a newfound talent for sniffing out vulnerable and lucrative targets, Cross becomes invaluable to the gang. But Cross's entire life has become a balancing act, and it will only take one mistake for it all to come crashing down and for his family to go down too.

More information about his work can be found on his website.  You can also follow him on Twitter @charlesblefoure and find him on FaceBook.