A Tail of Murder by Oskar Jensen

Can you imagine a dog as a master criminal? An assassin, a burglar, a schemer-in-chief? No, nor can I. As a killer, oh yes, as hunter of fox, dog of war, slavering bloodhound. But … sly? Unthinkable.

Since the beginnings of detective fiction (which I’m going to place ambiguously around 1800, but that’s another story) animals have figured extensively in tales of murder and mystery. And mostly they’ve been the animals that work most closely with humans: dogs and horses. We generally find them doing a lot of the legwork: Arthur Conan Doyle’s dog Toby is the apotheosis of this tradition. Watson describes him as an ‘ugly long haired, lop-eared creature, half spaniel and half lurcher, brown and white in colour, with a very clumsy waddling gait’ – but with the best nose in the business. Obviously, he’s on the side of law and order. The Victorians (or at least the sort who wrote best-selling stories) practically worshipped dogs for their ideal qualities of loyalty, courage, simplicity, and generally knowing their place: they didn’t want the vote or anything inconvenient like that. It’s no coincidence that the medieval Welsh legend of Gelert had such a revival in this era. It’s a tale that appear the world over: the story of the faithful hound wrongly slain by his master, who thinks the dog has attacked his baby when in fact he has defended it from a wolf. Come to think of it, maybe that’s the first murder mystery – one in which the human protagonist leaps to a tragically wrong conclusion. No Victorian would make the same mistake: they knew there was nothing so trustworthy as a dog. 

Much more unusual is Josephine Tey’s horse Timber in her novel Brat Farrar – precisely because its character does not conform to this type. In fact, to call this horse unreliable is quite the understatement, and the result is uncanny and effective for this very reason: it subverts all our expectations of how a normally dependable animal should behave. I’ll say no more for fear of spoilers but really, Timber is one of the greatest animals in all of crime fiction.

For unpleasant reasons tangled up in empire and exoticisation, the writers of the nineteenth century in particular preferred to cast more outlandish animals (from a European perspective) in the role of villain. Edgar Allen Poe’s orangutan heads the field, while Conan Doyle weighs in with a whole menagerie, from a lion (or is it?) to a lion’s mane, via baboon, cheetah, snake and mongoose. Today, Leonora Nattrass is the great champion of unlikely animals in her tales of murder, giving us a rhinoceros, a bear cub, a parrot and, most memorably, a sapient hog. But once again, her main protagonist Laurence Jago spends much more time with his most faithful companion – his dog.

Dogs dogs dogs. There’s Agatha Christie’s Dumb Witness –huge letdown, the dog does almost nothing. On the other hand, a canine actually narrates Vee Walker’s recent French-set short story Nice Dog, and solves the mystery to boot: you can hear his tale brought beautifully to life by Paterson Joseph on BBC Sounds. I defy anyone to listen without a broad smile on their face. Besides the aforementioned Toby, we find two of all literature’s most celebrated dogs in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories – the one that didn’t bark in the nighttime, and its nightmare opposite, the Hound of the Baskervilles. Which is where my new novel Helle’s Hound comes in. On one level it’s a deeply irreverent homage, even a rewrite, of Conan Doyle’s Gothic masterpiece. I’ve swapped the rugged marshes of windswept Victorian Dartmoor for the petty politics and fancy restaurants of twenty-first-century Bloomsbury, but all the plot essentials are there, including one very large, very hungry hound: Mortimer, an Irish wolfhound.

But I wanted to do something new with the story. And I kept coming back to those Victorian truisms: that dogs – especially big, brave dogs – are intrinsically and entirely faithful, reliable, a source of friendship and security. The thing is, they sort of are. I return you to paragraph one: dogs can’t be master criminals. But what if there were a way to take those very qualities of dependability, and somehow subvert them? Wouldn’t that be both an interesting challenge, and a deeply disquieting moral for a story? I really, really can’t say any more about where my line of thinking went – except that I promise it’s very much worth your while to find out. You may never look at a dog in quite the same way again.

Helle's Hound by Oskar Jensen (Profile Books Ltd)

A dead art historian. Cold War skulduggery. A reluctant Danish sleuth. And an extremely hungry dog. Dame Charlotte Lazerton - eminent art historian and mentor of Danish academic Torben Helle - is dead. And to make things worse, she was found partially eaten by her Irish wolfhound, Mortimer. While the police believe that she died of natural causes, Torben becomes convinced that Charlotte was murdered, although as usual no one pays any attention to him. That is, until he gains the confidence of a policeman who has watched too many Nordic Noir television shows and is ready to listen to any Scandinavian in a fetching woolly jumper. Aided by his old friend Leyla, Torben soon realises that there are plenty of people who might have wanted Dame Charlotte dead, from her competitors for a prestigious academic presidency to old enemies from her time in intelligence during the Cold War. One thing is for sure: Torben Helle is woefully unqualified to catch a killer, and the killer knows it...

More information about the author can be found on his website. He can also be found on X oskarcoxjensen

The Age of Curiosity by Leonora Nattrass

It was Christmas 2022, and I was between projects, whiling away the holiday by mulling over my favourite Georgian romantic poets, and wondering if some episode in their often eccentric lives might provide a spark for my next historical mystery.

Modern biographies are all very well, but the most fun and detailed accounts are often contained in older ones, usually heavier on narrative and lighter on analysis. Accordingly, I was sitting in the festive kitchen, idly reading Alexander Gilchrist’s 1880 Life of William Blake, when I first came across the extraordinary story of seventeen-year-old Blake’s involvement with Westminster Abbey. 

Blake, then apprenticed to an engraver in London, was sent to the abbey to make sketches of the tombs and monuments for a forthcoming book. “From 1773, the Gothic monuments were for years his daily companions,” Gilchrist says. “Shut up alone with these solemn memorials of far-off centuries, the spirit of the past became his familiar companion.” 

This seemed very romantic – and nicely humanised by the fact that he often got locked in when the vergers forgot about him. I could already easily imagine strange goings on between the hundreds of eerie carved figures which crowd the abbey. 

But then, reading on, the plot thickened. 

In 1774, members of the London Society of Antiquaries appeared at the abbey, with permission from the king to open the tomb of Edward I, “Longshanks”, of Braveheart fame. The tyrant who threw his son’s lover bodily out of a window, sent Mel Gibson to be disembowelled, and pinched the Stone of Scone. (Other accounts of his character are available.) 

Edward’s tomb was of special interest to the antiquaries, since his will had ordained that after his death (in 1307) his tomb should be regularly opened and his body embalmed so that it might accompany any future English army against the Scots. This task had apparently been faithfully performed throughout the medieval period but the custom had been forgotten during the English Civil War and Commonwealth. 

When Longshanks’ tomb was opened, the antiquaries were delighted to find the still-robed, well-preserved mummy holding replicas of Edward the Confessor’s coronation sceptres which Cromwell had melted down a century earlier.

“I cannot help hoping that Blake (unseen) assisted at the ceremony,” Gilchrist ended his account of this little episode. 

By now, I certainly hoped so too, and only a brief recce on Google revealed that Gilchrist had missed out the best bit: Blake hadn’t just been present; he’d actually been roped in to sketch the mummified body of the king for posterity! 

What could be more fabulous than Westminster Abbey, the Society of Antiquaries, medieval mummies, and William Blake all together? 

The Society of Antiquaries was the archaeological equivalent of the Royal Society for scientists. Its members were very eager to find physical evidence for old historical accounts, some of which read like outrageous fiction to us today. The earth had been created at twelve noon, on the 23 October 4004 BC for instance; and Britain’s origin story involved exiled warriors from Troy fighting giants and tossing them off the cliffs at Totnes. 

The driving force behind the Society’s request to open the tomb was the elderly Joseph Ayloffe, who went on to write the official account of the event, ably assisted by (among others) fellow antiquarian, Daines Barrington. 

Barrington was a member of the Royal Society as well as the Antiquaries and, with the characteristic chutzpah of the times, was a prolific author on a remarkable variety of topics: childhood prodigies (how created?); bird song (a language?); and the possibility of reaching the North Pole (James Cook was to be roped in). With such eclectic expertise, opening the tomb of an ancient king wasn’t going to faze him!

Nowadays such an undertaking would doubtless be hedged about with safeguards and sucked-teeth warnings, but they were an intrepid lot in those days. And even a hundred years later, the Dean of the Abbey cheerfully dug up dozens of tombs on the flimsiest of pretexts. Such irreverence in such a reverent place seemed even riper for murder and mayhem. 

I was lucky enough to see the Abbey accounts for 1774, with all the names of the gardeners, vergers and other abbey servants of that year neatly inscribed beside their wages. Their names make it to the novel, but my badly behaved clergymen are all fictional, along with the outrageous, murderous consequences of what Gilchrist calls that “highly interesting bit of antiquarian sacrilege.”

Bells of Westminster by Leonora Nattrass (Profile Books) Out Now 

London, 1774. The opening of a royal tomb will end in murder...Susan Bell spends her days within the confines of Westminster Abbey, one of many who live in the grounds of the ancient building. Her father, the kindly but foolish Dean of Westminster, is always busy keeping the many canons and vergers in check, when not being romantically pursued by forceful widows. Life at the abbey is uneventful, even after the unwelcome arrival of Susan's cousin Lindley and his unusual scientific demonstrations. That is until the Society of Antiquaries come armed with a letter from King George III. They wish to open the tomb of Edward I, each to investigate their own academic interests - whether it be rumours of the royal body's embalmment, an obsession with Arthurian legends or even a supposed Roman temple to Apollo beneath the abbey's undercroft. However, as the Society prepares to open the tomb, a ghostly figure is seen walking the abbey cloisters, wearing the crown and shroud of the dead king. There is further uproar when one of the Antiquaries is found viciously murdered, and the corpse of Edward I is stolen. With her father's position under threat from the scandal, Susan feels bound to investigate these strange occurrences. Could one of the Society members be harbouring a murderous secret? Or is one of the abbey's own a killer?

More information about Leonora Natrass can be found here.

She can also be found on X @LeonoraNattrass and on instagram @leonoranattrass.

Forthcoming Books from Profile Books and Viper

January 2024

Helle & Death is by Oskar Jensen. A snowstorm. A country house. Old friends reunited It's going to be murder. Torben Helle - art historian, Danish expat and owner of several excellent Scandinavian jumpers - has been dragged to a remote snowbound Northumbrian mansion for a ten-year reunion with old university friends. Things start to go sideways when their host, a reclusive and irritating tech entrepreneur, makes some shocking revelations at the dinner table. And when these are followed by an apparent suicide, the group faces a test of their wits... and their trust. Snowed in and cut off, surrounded by enigmatic housekeepers and off-duty police inspectors, not to mention a peculiar last will and testament, suspicion and sarcasm quickly turn to panic. As the temperature drops and the tension mounts, Torben decides to draw upon all the tricks of Golden Age detectives past in order to solve the mystery: how much money would it take to turn one of his old friends into a murderer? But he'd better be quick, or someone else might end up dead.

February 2024

On the beautiful and windswept island of Tresco, two worlds live side by side. The wealthy visitors come by helicopter to stay at their lavish time-share properties. The estate staff travel by boat, and work all hours to keep them happy, to keep the money flowing in. But while the blue skies and savage waves make the island seem a wild paradise, under the surface the inhabitants are concealing more than they dare reveal. The truths about their marriages, their love affairs, and what they do in the darkness while their neighbours are sleeping. As black clouds come rolling in and a storm hits the island, truths and rumours begin to tumble out, wreaking terrible damage. In the midst of the tempest, two women are attacked and one goes missing. The secrets of this fragile community can no longer be hidden if it hopes to survive. The islanders must finally reveal what they did in the storm, no matter the cost. What We Did in the Storm is by Tina Baker.

April 2024

The Underhistory is by Kaaron Warren. People come to visit my home and I love to show them around. It's not the original house of course. That was destroyed the day my entire family died. But I don't think their ghosts know the difference. Pera Sinclair was nine the day the pilot intentionally crashed his plane into her family's grand home, killing everyone inside. She was the girl who survived the tragedy, a sympathetic oddity, growing stranger by the day. Over the decades she rebuilt the huge and rambling building on the original site, recreating what she had lost, each room telling a piece of the story of her life and that of the many people who died there, both before and after the disaster. Her sister, murdered a hundred miles away. The soldier, broken by war. Death follows Pera, and she welcomes it in as an old friend. And while she doesn't believe in ghosts, she's not above telling a ghost story or two to those who come to visit Sinclair House. As Pera shows a young family around her home on the last haunted house tour of the season, an unexpected group of men arrive. One she recognises, but the others are strangers. But she knows their type all too well. Dangerous men, who will hurt the family without a second thought, and who will keep an old woman alive only so long as she is useful. But as she begins to show them around her home and reveal its secrets, the dangerous men will learn that she is far from helpless. After all, death seems to follow her wherever she goes...

June 2024

It's always the husband... Isn't it? Astrid Webb is missing. The police have found her car crashed near the woods, the driver's door open, the seat spotted with blood. But there's no sign of Astrid herself. Her husband Bryan is sure that she's alive - after all, this isn't the first time she's vanished, only to reappear without explanation. As the days pass, Bryan starts to look like a suspect in his wife's disappearance, perhaps in her murder. But Bryan isn't telling the police the whole truth. Not about Astrid's stalker, their broken-in back door, or the threatening messages. Then a woman's body is found in the woods. By staying silent, is Bryan protecting Astrid, or protecting himself? The Wreckage of Us is by Dan Malakin. 

Forthcoming books from Profile Books (Incl Serpent's Tail and Viper Books)

 July 2023

Sanderson's Isle is by James Clarke. 1969. Thomas Speake comes to London to look for his father but finds Sanderson instead, a larger-than-life TV presenter who hosts 'midweek madness' parties where the punch is spiked with acid. There Speake meets Marnie and promises to help her find her adoptive child, who has been taken by her birth mother to live off-grid in a hippie commune in the Lake District. Forced to lie low after a violent accident, Speake joins Sanderson on a tour of the Lake District, where he's researching a book to accompany his popular TV series, Sanderson's Isle. Fascinated by local rumours about the hippies, Sanderson joins the search for their whereabouts. Amid the fierce beauty of the mountains, the cult is forming the kind of community that Speake - a drifter who belongs nowhere - is desperate to find but has been sent to betray.

Elliott has never thought of himself as a hero. Until one dark night he meets Rebecca, a scared and vulnerable young woman who needs his help. There's a man harassing her, following her; would he mind pretending to be her boyfriend, just while she walks home, to put him off? And that is that - just a favour for a stranger - until there is a knock at Elliott's door. It's the man who was following Rebecca. He claims he's her ex-boyfriend, but it's clear that he's been stalking her. He's obsessed, dangerously so. He wants Rebecca, and will do anything to have her. When Elliott eventually tries to tell him the truth, the man doesn't believe him. The only way to save himself is to get Rebecca to explain. There's just one problem: Rebecca is nowhere to be found. And now it looks like one good deed will cost Elliott everything. One Good Deed is by David Jackson.

August 2023

When hate runs deep the innocent suffer. Constable Paul Hirschausen's rural beat in the low hills of South Australia is wide. Daybreak to day's end, dirt roads and dust. Every problem that besets small towns and isolated properties, from unlicensed driving to arson. But now, just as Hirsch has begun to feel he knows the fragile communities under his care, the isolation and fear of the pandemic have warped them into something angry and unrecognisable. Hirsch is seeing stresses heightened and social divisions cracking wide open. His own tolerance under strain; people getting close to the edge. Today he's driving an international visitor around: Janne Van Sant, whose backpacker son went missing while the borders were closed. They're checking out his last photo site, his last employer. A feeling that the stories don't quite add up. Then a call comes in: a roadside fire. Nothing much - a suitcase soaked in diesel and set alight - but two noteworthy facts emerge. Janne knows more than Hirsch about forensic evidence. And the body in the suitcase is not her son's. Day's End is by Garry Disher.

I have a gift. I see people as ghosts before they die. Of course, it helps that I'm the one killing them. The night after her father's funeral, Claire meets Lucas in a bar. Lucas doesn't know it, but it's not a chance meeting. One thoughtless mistyped email has put him in the crosshairs of an extremely put-out serial killer. But before they make eye contact, before Claire lets him buy her a drink, even before she takes him home and carves him up into little pieces, something about that night is very wrong. Because someone is watching Claire. Someone who is about to discover her murderous little hobby. The thing is, it's not sensible to tangle with a part-time serial killer, even one who is distracted by attending a weekly bereavement support group and trying to get her art career off the ground. Let the games begin... You'd Look Better as a Ghost is by Joanna Wallace. 

October 2023

Secrecy came naturally to John le Carre, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Adam Sisman's definitive biography, published in 2015, provided a revealing portrait of this fascinating man; yet some aspects of his subject remained hidden. Nowhere was this more so than in his private life. Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over five decades. To these relationships he brought much of the tradecraft that he had learned as a spy - cover stories, cut-outs and dead letter boxes. These clandestine operations brought an element of danger to his life, but they also meant deceiving those closest to him. Small wonder that betrayal became a running theme in his work. In trying to manage his biography, the novelist engaged in a succession of skirmishes with his biographer. While he could control what Sisman wrote about him in his lifetime, he accepted that the truth would eventually become known. Following his death in 2020, what had been withheld can now be revealed. The Secret Life of John le Carre by Adam Sisman reveals a hitherto-hidden perspective on the life and work of the spy-turned-author and a fascinating meditation on the complex relationship between biographer and subject. 'Now that he is dead,' Sisman writes, 'we can know him better.'

Scarlet Town is by Leonora Nattrass. A rigged election. A feuding Cornish town. A suspicious death. And a perspicacious pig. Disgraced former Foreign Office clerk Laurence Jago and his larger-than-life employer the journalist William Philpott have escaped America - and Philpott's many creditors - by the skin of their teeth. They return to Laurence's home town of Helston in Cornwall in the hope of rest and recuperation, but instead find themselves in the middle of a tumultuous election that has the inhabitants of the town at one another's throats. Only two men may vote in this rotten borough, and when one of them dies in suspicious circumstances, Laurence is ordered to investigate on behalf of the town's political patron, his old master the Duke of Leeds. Then the second elector is poisoned and suspicion turns on the town doctor, the gentle Pythagoras Jago, Laurence's own cousin. Suddenly Laurence finds himself ensnared in generations of bad blood and petty rivalries, with his cousin's fate in his hands... 

One dead Santa. A town full of suspects. Will you discover the truth? Christmas in Lower Lockwood, and the Fairway Players are busy rehearsing their festive pantomime, Jack and the Beanstalk, to raise money for the church roof appeal. But despite the season, goodwill is distinctly lacking amongst the amateur dramatics enthusiasts. Sarah-Jane is fending off threats to her new position as Chair, the fibreglass beanstalk might be full of asbestos, and a someone is intent on ruining the panto even before the curtain goes up. Of course there's also the matter of the dead body. Who could possibly have had the victim on their naughty list? Join lawyers Femi and Charlotte as they read the round robins, examine the emails and pore over the police transcripts. Will the show go on? The Christmas Appeal is by Janice Hallett.

November 2023

No Exit is by Simon Lewis. Inspector Jian and his daughter Weiwei just want to go back to their home in China: but Jian is facing a corruption charge in his absence and risks arrest. Instead he tries to scrape a living on London's meanest streets as an illegal immigrant, reduced to hustling Mah Jiang for cash. A bleak future looks to be growing bleaker still when a triad gang blackmail him into tracking down an unlikely young robber. In No Exit Jian and Weiwei scramble between London's grimiest bedsits and its swankiest penthouses as they penetrate the glittering world of 'princelings' - the rich children of the Chinese elite, who treat the city as their playground. Locked in a desperate struggle, with no way out in sight, It will take all their wiles, as well as some lucky gambles, to come out of this latest venture alive.

Ghosts, Shipwrecks and Murder by Guy Morpuss

 

Vancouver Island is a land of ghosts and shipwrecks.

Hauntings abound: the woman in a white ballgown seen on the stairs at Craigdarroch Castle; a crying girl who floats out to sea each morning; Kanaka Pete, a murderer hanged at Gallows Point, whose restless spirit wanders the beaches at dusk.

The western coast of the island is known as the Graveyard of the Pacific. Hundreds of ships have been wrecked in its treacherous waters, and countless lives lost.

The wreck of the Valencia, in January 1906, was one of the most tragic. En route from San Francisco to Seattle in bad weather, her captain overshot the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and struck a reef near Pachena Bay. As the ship slowly sank, a hundred metres offshore, the screams of the women and children could be heard over the sound of the rain and the wind. Only a handful of men survived.

Months later, a local fisherman found a lifeboat containing eight skeletons in a sea-cave next to the bay, the mouth of the cave blocked by a large boulder. There were also several reports of a lifeboat seen on the open sea, rowed by a crew of skeletons.

In late 2019 I had just returned from a trip to Vancouver Island, and my agent was about to put my first novel, Five Minds, out on submission to publishers. He asked me for an idea for a second novel that he could pitch at the same time. I was sitting at my desk with a blank piece of paper on which – for reasons that escape me – I had written a single word: ‘undelete’. As I wracked my brain this turned into an idea for a crime novel: a police officer trying to solve a murder in an isolated community where some members could unwind time. How would it work if whenever they got close to identifying the murderer someone turned back the clock?

For me the three most important parts of a novel are a clever plot, characters the readers want to spend time with, and an interesting location.

I had a plot; the characters would develop as I wrote; so I needed a location.

Vancouver Island has a stark beauty; it is isolated from the world, and frequently battered by fierce storms sweeping in off the Pacific Ocean. It seemed the perfect setting for a classic murder mystery: a group of people trapped in a remote mansion by bad weather, one of them murdered, and one of them a killer.

A friend of mine who comes from the island told me about Black Lake, near Pachena Bay, and the famously tragic shipwreck that had occurred there.

So Black Lake Manor starts with a shipwreck inspired by the story of the Valencia. Mine takes place a hundred years earlier. What follows also draws on the rich mythology of the local First Nations people.

In Black Lake Manor a single lifeboat escapes the sinking of the Pride of Whitby in 1804, but the survivors find themselves trapped in a cave. Only one escapes alive, having survived by eating the flesh of his companions. He is rescued by the Mowachaht, the local First Nations people, who realise that he has been visited by an island spirit and acquired a unique ability, which his descendants will share: once in their lives they can turn back time by six hours.

Two hundred and forty years later, when the locals close ranks around a possible murderer, this presents real problems for the investigating officer. Each time she has almost solved the murder she has to start again, with no recollection of what she discovered last time round – and each time her investigation goes off in a different direction. So, unusually, the reader knows more than the protagonist. But which of her possible solutions is the correct one?

Black Lake Manor features cannibalism, live heart removal, a chess set (which may or may not be a red herring), and a pet octopus.

It draws heavily on its location: the incredible beauty and harshness of the island; and the dark mythology of its people. I hope that I have done justice to it, and perhaps even will inspire some readers to visit the Graveyard of the Pacific.

Black Lake Manor by Guy Morpuss (Profile Books) Out Now

A locked room. A brutal murder. And a killer who can unwind time… In the former mining town of Black Lake, there is an old story about a shipwreck with only one survivor. His descendants have a unique ability: once in their lives – and only once – they can unwind the events of the previous six hours. More than two hundred years later, part-time police constable Ella Manning is attending a party at Black Lake Manor, the cliff-top mansion belonging to the local billionaire. When a raging storm sweeps in from the Pacific, she and several other guests find themselves trapped. And when their host is discovered brutally murdered in his study the next morning, the door locked from the inside, they turn to her to solve the crime. Pushing her detective skills to the limit, against the odds Ella is sure she has identified the killer… but then someone undoes time. With no memory of what she discovered before, her investigation begins again, with very different results. Which of her suspects is guilty? And is there something even more sinister she is yet to uncover? Can she solve the mystery before time runs out… again?

Books to look Forward to from Profile Books (Incl Viper Books)

 January 2022

A murder that no-one wants to solve... Dublin 1986. The murder of an off-duty officer in Phoenix Park should have brought down the full power of the Dublin police force. But Kieran Lynch was found in a notorious gay cruising ground, so even as the press revels in the scandal, some of the Murder Squad are reluctant to investigate. Only Detectives Vincent Swan and Gina Considine are willing to search out the difficult truth, walking the streets of nighttime Dublin to find Kieran's lovers and friends. But Gina has her own secret that means she must withhold vital evidence. When a fire rips through Temple Bar and another man is killed, she must decide what price she is willing to pay to find a murderer. The Burning Boy is by Nicola White.

The Twyford Code is by Janice Hallett. It's time to solve the murder of the century... Forty years ago, Steven Smith found a copy of a famous children's book, its margins full of strange markings and annotations. He took it to his remedial English teacher, Miss Isles, who became convinced it was the key to solving a puzzle. That a message in secret code ran through all Edith Twyford's novels. Then Miss Isles disappeared on a class field trip, and Steven's memory won't allow him to remember what happened. Now, out of prison after a long stretch, Steven decides to investigate the mystery that has haunted him for decades. Was Miss Isles murdered? Was she deluded? Or was she right about the code? And is it still in use today? Desperate to recover his memories and find out what really happened to Miss Isles, Steven revisits the people and places of his childhood. But it soon becomes clear that Edith Twyford wasn't just a writer of forgotten children's stories. The Twyford Code has great power, and he isn't the only one trying to solve it...

February 2022

Who will survive the night? A nightmare jolts Debs awake. She leaves the kids tucked up in their beds and goes downstairs. There's a man in her kitchen, holding a knife. But it's not an intruder. This is her husband Marc, the father of her children. A man she no longer recognises. Once their differences were what drew them together, what turned them on. Him, the ex-army officer from a good family. Her, the fitness instructor who grew up over a pub. But now these differences grate to the point of drawing blood. Marc screams in his sleep. And Debs hardly knows the person she's become, or why she lets him hurt her. Neither of them is completely innocent. Neither is totally guilty. Marc is taller, stronger, and more vicious, haunted by a war he can't forget. But he has no idea what Debs is capable of when her children's lives are at stake... A powerful exploration of a relationship built on passion, poisoned by secrets and violence. Nasty Little Cuts is by Tina Baker

March 2022

You can't escape the desert. You can't escape Sundial. Rob fears for her daughters. For Callie, who collects tiny bones and whispers to imaginary friends. For Annie, because she fears what Callie might do to her. Rob sees a darkness in Callie, one that reminds her of the family she left behind. She decides to take Callie back to her childhood home, to Sundial, deep in the Mojave Desert. And there she will have to make a terrible choice. Callie is afraid of her mother. Rob has begun to look at her strangely. To tell her secrets about her past that both disturb and excite her. And Callie is beginning to wonder if only one of them will leave Sundial alive. Sundial is by Catriona Ward.

April 2022

Begars Abbey is by V L Valentine. A dark house filled with darker secrets. Winter 1954, and in a dilapidated apartment in Brooklyn, Sam Cooper realises that she has nothing left. Her mother is dead, she has no prospects, and she cannot afford the rent. But as she goes through her mother's things, Sam finds a stack of hidden letters that reveal a family and an inheritance that she never knew she had, three thousand miles away in Yorkshire. Begars Abbey is a crumbling pile, inhabited only by Sam's crippled grandmother, Lady Cooper, a housekeeper and a handful of servants. Sam cannot understand why her mother kept its very existence a secret, but her diaries offer a glimpse of a young girl growing increasingly terrified. As is Sam herself. Built on the foundations of an old convent, Begars moves and sings with the biting wind. Her grandmother cannot speak, and a shadowy woman moves along the corridors at night. For there are dark places in the hidden tunnels beneath Begars. And they will not give up their secrets easily...

May 2022

Murder by the Seaside is by Cecily Gayford. It's the height of summer. As the heat shimmers on the streets and ice cream melts onto sticky fingers, tempers begin to rise and old grudges surface. From Cornish beaches to the French Riviera, it's not just a holiday that's on people's minds ... it's murder. In these ten classic stories from writers such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Cyril Hare and Margery Allingham, you'll find mayhem and mysteries aplenty. So grab the suncream and head down to the beach - if you dare.

To tell the truth? Or protect his family? Cornell is having a bad time. Kicked out of secondary school for a fight he didn't start, he finds himself in a Pupil Referral Unit. Here he makes friends with one of the Sinclair family. You don't mess with the Sinclairs, and when Ryan Sinclair demands Cornell comes with him to teach another student some respect, Ryan witnesses something that will change his life. Torn between protecting his family and himself, Cornell has one hell of a decision to make. Witness is by Alex Wheatle.

'There were good people in The Homes. But there were also some very, very bad ones...' A thousand unwanted children live in The Homes, a village of orphans in the Scottish Lowlands on the outskirts of Glasgow. Lesley was six before she learned that most children live with their parents. Now Lesley is twelve, and she and her best friend Jonesy live in Cottage 5, Jonesy the irrepressible spirit to Lesley's quiet thoughtfulness. Life is often cruel at The Homes, and suddenly it becomes much crueller. A child is found murdered. Then another. With the police unable to catch the killer, Lesley and Jonesy decides to take the matter into their own hands. But unwanted children are easy victims, and they are both in terrible danger... The Homes is by J B Mylet.

June 2022

Would you open The Box to save your daughter? Ed Truman's family is falling apart. His daughter Ally is being targeted by an alt-right incel organisation, Men Together. His house is being picketed, former clients are accusing him of sexual assault, his son won't speak to him. And then Ally disappears. Frantic, Ed suspects that Men Together have abducted her. But before he can go to the police, his DNA is found on the body of a young woman. Suddenly he's the subject of a nationwide manhunt, led by the tenacious DCI Jackie Rose. Ed finds himself on the run with Ally's friend, the enigmatic Phoenix, who claims to know where Ally is. But what is the truth? Is Ed a violent sexual predator? Or is he the victim of a ruthless conspiracy? The answers are in The Box. But not everyone who goes in, comes out alive... The Box is by Dan Malakin. 

Catriona Ward on the Inspiration for The Last House on Needless Street

 The Lake, the Forest

How the Lake Sammamish Murders helped inspire ‘The Last House on Needless Street’ 

By Catriona Ward

It’s a misconception that those who write crime, thrillers and horror are more resilient to the subject matter than others. I find you can only write impactfully about something if you feel the impact of it yourself. Certain crimes weave their way into the imagination and cling to your subconscious. The ones that reverberate throughout ‘The Last House on Needless Street’ have horrified me as long as I can remember. 

It’s almost impossible to talk about this novel without revealing the bones of the plot. But I’ll do my best to describe what fed into it and why this book burned in me, demanding to be written. 

In ‘The Last House on Needless Street,’ children have been going missing from the lakeshore for years. None have ever been found. Dee’s little sister, Lulu, was one of the missing children, and Dee has been searching for her abductor ever since. She thinks she has found him. Ted Bannerman lives in a boarded-up house at the end of Needless Street with his daughter, Lauren, and his disapproving cat, Olivia. Lauren and Olivia don’t go outside. Needless Street ends in the wild, Olympic forest, and is only a short hike from the lake. Dee moves into the vacant house next door to Ted’s and begins her watch. She has to be sure it’s him. When Ted’s daughter Lauren goes missing, suspicion turns to terror. 

There were thousands of people at Lake Sammamish, in Washington State on July 14th 1974, when Ted Bundy abducted two women from the crowded summer shores. He approached Janice Ott with his arm in a cast and a sling, asking for her help to move a sailboat. He drove a gold VW Bug. A few hours later, he used the same ruse to lure Denise Naslund away as she made her way to the restroom.¹ He approached several other women that afternoon, always giving his name - Ted. Janice Ott and Denise Naslund were the fifth and sixth women to go missing in the area that year. They were not the last. 

We feel safe in crowds, in numbers, surrounded by our families. We don’t expect the monstrous to pursue us out of the night, into the blazing light of a summer day. The Lake Sammamish murders were staggering in their greed and cruelty. These women died for their kindness, for wishing to assist what they thought was an injured stranger. As Denise Naslund’s mother told the Seattle Times, ‘she had the kind of helpful nature that would place her in danger.’²

This day has always had a cold grip on my imagination. Ted Bannerman in ‘The Last House on Needless Street’ is not directly based on Ted Bundy. But a sense of the grief and violent loss Bundy inflicted on victims and their families permeates the book, which is full of echoes of that summer day at the lake in 1974. The very setting seems to me an array of disturbing, arresting contrasts. The deep, cool woods of Washington, the burning light on the lake-water. Two women taken from the midst of a crowd, for lonely death. 

The investigative team appealed for all the negatives and film taken by visitors to the lake that day to be sent to them. This image haunts me, too - police combing through holiday photos of smiling families, searching the background for a murderer with his arm in a cast, and his gold VW bug. They found several images of the car in the parking lot. Home video from that day, only discovered in 2018 in the King County archives, shows the gold Volkswagen boxed in by a patrol vehicle, surrounded by milling officers. Bundy is not in the car.³

Washington State has a grim history with serial killers. Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer, murdered so many women around Tacoma and Seattle during the 1980s and 90’s that he lost count. The estimate is 71. During this investigation detectives approached Bundy, then awaiting execution on death row, for insight into how the killer’s mind might work. They also hoped that by encouraging Bundy to talk, they might glean more information about his own crimes. It was a Faustian pact, giving Bundy what he wanted most – power and the sense of importance he craved, as well as titillating details of Gary Ridgeway’s crime scenes, and the chance to relive his own.

The search for Denise Naslund and Janice Ott intensified, as the summer of 1974 turned to fall. The two women seemed to have vanished without a trace, swallowed whole by the land and the forest. Their remains were found in September, that hot fateful year, on a hillside two miles distant from Lake Sammamish. Homicide detective Robert Keppel recalled his first sight of the scene:

‘The surrounding tree cover was so dense that even in daylight the forest floor was very dark, like the mysterious landscape in a fairy tale and only occasional sunbursts escaped through the small openings in the canopy of leaves.’⁴

That part of the Pacific Northwest is rich in wildlife – elk, deer, herons, scavengers like raccoons and wild dogs. Certain artefacts were recovered from the scene - coyote faeces containing human hand bones; a bird’s nest entwined with long blond hair. Just how long, Keppel wondered, had it taken for the birds to learn to use human hair in this way? How long had this place been used? Vertebrae and pieces of leg bone belonging to an unknown third woman were also found. She has never been conclusively identified, though Bundy later claimed the remains belonged to eighteen-year-old Georgann Hawkins. The wilderness had indeed begun to absorb Denise Naslund, Janice Ott and the third woman back into itself. 

These details are at the heart of ‘The Last House on Needless Street’ – the wilderness of those parts, and how it can swallow people, is part of the fabric of the book. The birds have no concept of how horrifying their nests are. Coyotes will always eat whatever they can find. Similarly, the forest at the end of Needless Street is vast and indifferent to human suffering.

It’s neither good nor bad, but its own roiling force. It does not distinguish between human evil, suffering, love or hope. Human endeavour is overrun by the wild, leaving no trace. 

But love and hope do endure, and can even be born, in the face of horror and suffering. Having conjured this atrocity in ‘The Last House on Needless Street,’ I was determined that compassion and life must also thread their way through the novel - like filigree perhaps, or golden hair, woven into a nest for hatching birds. 

1^ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/31113871/remains-of-janice-anne-ott-and-denise/

2^ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/remembering-the-washington-victims-of-ted-bundy-the-serial-killer-spotlighted-in-new-movie-and-netflix-docuseries/

3^ https://www.kiro7.com/living/dating/never-before-seen-film-shows-ted-bundys-vw-where-he-killed-two-women-in-1974/696707928/

4^ ‘The Riverman: Ted Bundy and the Hunt for the Green River Killer,’ Keppel, Robert D., Pocket Books, a division of Simon and Schuster, New York, !995. Ebook, location 381

The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward Published by Profile Books (Out Now)

This is the story of a serial killer. A stolen child. Revenge. Death. And an ordinary house at the end of an ordinary street. All these things are true. And yet they are all lies... You think you know what's inside the last house on Needless Street. You think you've read this story before. That's where you're wrong. In the dark forest at the end of Needless Street, lies something buried. But it's not what you think...

A Q & A Interview With Kate Simants

Ayo: - For those who don't know you would you like to give us a bit of background information    about yourself.

Kate:- Of course. After my degree in English I worked for several years in the UK television industry, specialising in undercover investigations and police shows like Crimewatch UK. After that, I left London for Bristol, where I lived on the river Avon and focused on my writing. My first novel was published in 2019 by HarperCollins, and my second, A Ruined Girl, came out last year with Viper/Serpent’s Tail. I’m working on my third novel at the moment, which will be published by Viper in 2021.

Ayo:- Your first novel Lock Me In was shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger, did that (do you think) put more pressure on you when you started writing A Ruined Girl.

Kate:- You know what, that had never occurred to me. The CWA shortlisting really gave me a lot of momentum I think – I had been writing for a while when it happened and I’d almost lost faith in anything really happening with it. But after the shortlisting, I applied for a place on the UEA’s new Crime Fiction MA, and won a scholarship to study there, which was obviously another bog vote of confidence. A Ruined Girl was written as part of that course. I think getting on the CWA shortlist took the pressure off if anything -it kind of reassured me that I was going in the right direction, when before I had that old doubt that maybe I was wasting my time! 

Ayo:- Congratulations on A Ruined Girl winning the Bath Award. How did you feel after you heard that you had won?

Kate:- Thanks! I was utterly thrilled, and very surprised. I almost didn’t enter because I’d read some previous winners and didn’t think I had a chance, and then at every stage - longlisting, shortlisting – I was just so excited, and humbled, actually. It’s such a lovely thing though because Caroline Ambrose who runs it has created this wonderfully supportive community around the prize, and all the other entrants were so generous. Winning it was just mad, I was stunned. 

Ayo:- You have been an investigative broadcasting journalist how did this job impact on your writing.

Kate:- Well, apart from the in-depth knowledge that I picked up from the documentaries I worked on, I learned how to research efficiently. Obviously when we were making documentaries that exposed wrongdoing and/or criminality we had to make sure everything we alleged was absolutely watertight from a legal point of view: a discipline which isn’t strictly necessary when you’re writing fiction, but it was good training. I learned a lot about the police working on Crimewatch UK, the kind of behind-the- scenes cultural and social stuff that money can’t buy, which really stood me in good stead when I started writing about law enforcement. Scriptwriting was also great training for writing fiction – any experience of getting ideas across to a wide audience using words is basically invaluable when you become a novelist!

Ayo:- A Ruined Girl is as much about trust as it is about finding out what happened. What was the impetus for the story?

Kate:-  It’s always so hard to think back and find the source of where a story came from, but I think it was the convergence of a lot of particular themes of mine. Even before I worked on the Dispatches documentary in which I worked undercover in children’s homes, I was very conscious of children’s social care. A close family member was temporarily in the system, as were several friends, and even though there were plenty of people who worked in the industry who cared deeply for these young people, there were quite a few who saw opportunities for exploitation.

Ayo:- One of your main characters is Wren Reynolds, a probation officer who is investigating the disappearance of a young girl in a care home. How did your own experience in investigating care homes impact on your story?

Kate:- Well, I haven’t come across much other fiction set (even partially, as A Ruined Girl is) in children’s homes, so I think if I hadn’t had that experience, I wouldn’t have known much about what those places were really like as an insider working in them. The absolute gift of undercover work is that you get to see things for what they really are, without the people around you being observed. 

Ayo:- What are your favourite type of characters?

Kate:- That’s something that’s changing all the time actually. I used to think we needed to really like our main character in order to care about them but some of the most powerful, compelling books I’ve read recently have had pretty awful protagonists. Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, for example, has an overwhelmingly selfish character at its heart, and is one of the most memorable characters I’ve come across in a long time. 

Ayo:- There is a dark side to fostering and care homes but on the other hand they are necessary for society. Is there anything you could think of that could make fostering and care homes better?

Kate:- Are you sure you want to get me started with this?! I’ll try to keep it polite… I’d start with funding. The cuts to children’s services in the last decade has just been outrageous, a 29% drop across all councils with per-child cuts of up to 50% in the most deprived boroughs. As with any social care, the cuts invariably cause the most suffering among those without a voice – children, vulnerable people, and the many older and disabled people who rely massively on the rest of society to treat them with dignity. 

Ayo:- What do you think is the most important, characterisation or plotting?

Kate:- If I absolutely had to choose, it would be character. I have a really terrible memory for plots but I’ll remember a great character forever. Once you have a really powerful character, it’s a lot of fun to see them struggle out of the horrible situations the author puts them in – but if you don’t care about them in the first place, you’re not going to be impressed by even the cleverest plotline.

Ayo:- Do you plot beforehand, or do you just let the writing flow?

Kate:- The first three books I’ve completed (there’s an unpublished one of which we do not speak) have been meticulously plotted, but that’s mostly because they’ve had such complicated storylines. Things have changed as I’ve progressed through the books but I’ve worked out most of it beforehand, sticking to an excel spreadsheet to remind myself who knows what and when, and what has to be revealed at what point. The next one is going to be a bit more linear so while I’ll still have a clear plan, I’ll be a bit looser with it

Ayo:- Your characters Wren and Luke are very believable. Are they based on people you know in real life?

Kate:- Not so much with Wren, but Luke is a kind of composite of a few friends I had who were in care when I was a teenager, and a boy I met when I was undercover. I think teenage boys can get pretty demonised: there’s this image of them all being the same, being monosyllabic and angry. Of course they can be intimidating in groups, but a lot of the time, taken individually they’re really just little boys vying for a place in a pretty scary society. Boys like Luke don’t get to go home to a cosy house and the kind of unconditional love that allows them to take their armour off – he had to be on guard and tough, shields up, all the time. And that’s such a hard way to grow up. 

Ayo:- How would you like your characters to be remembered?

Kate:- Luke, to me, is the star of A Ruined Girl – I’d like people to remember him as someone who you’d cross the road to avoid if you saw him out at night, but to remember that once you get in his head he’s a vulnerable like everyone else. 

Ayo:- What made you decide to stop working in television and concentrate on writing?

Kate:- It’s not a very nice story: it was 5am on the morning of my birthday and I was working on a pilot fly-on-the-wall show following police officers in Oldham. We had a call that they’d been alerted to a suicide, so off we went with our cameras and filmed them cutting this poor guy down from a tree. As I was filming I just thought, what the hell am I doing? How is this in any way a positive thing? I put my energy into the writing a lot more after that.

Ayo:- What are you working on next, can you tell us about it?

Kate:- Well, I can’t tell you much at this point but it’s definitely going to be crime, and the undercover stuff is going to feature a lot more prominently! 

A Ruined Girl by Kate Simants (Published by Profile Books) Out now

On a dark night two years ago, teenagers Rob and Paige broke into a house. They beat and traumatised the occupants, then left, taking only a bracelet. No one knows why, not even Luke, Rob's younger brother and Paige's confidant. Paige disappeared after that night. And having spent her life in children's homes and the foster system, no one cared enough to look for her. Now Rob is out of prison, and probation officer Wren Reynolds has been tasked with his rehabilitation. But Wren has her own reasons for taking on Rob as a client. Convinced that Rob knows what happened to Paige, and hiding a lifetime of secrets from her heavily pregnant wife, Wren's obsession with finding a missing girl may tear her family apart...