Reading Peace, Writing Granite by Nina Allan

‘As they left the Highbury pitch that afternoon, as the sporting men of Fulham shook their hands, slapped their backs and wished United luck, the very best of luck, Bobby had his head bowed, he did not speak, a few folk even said he looked distraught, though they could not think, not fathom why, why would he look distraught? United were in the final of the Cup, the FA bloody Cup, doesn’t get much better than that now, does it, Bobby lad? Come on, Bobby, smile, why don’t you smile? You scored a goal, you’re in the Final!’

My mother remembered Munich; she was fourteen when it happened. I first learned about the crash from when she happened to mention it to me, years ago. I have forgotten exactly what she said, but I know she talked about the Busby Babes, about the tragedy of what happened to Manchester United. The odd England game aside, my mother is not a football person, never has been. But she remembered Munich. 

On the afternoon of February 6th 1948, the plane carrying the team home from their European Cup fixture against Red Star Belgrade crashed at the end of the runway at Munich airport. Of the forty-four passengers on board British European Airways Flight 609, only twenty-one survived. Of the twenty-three who died, eight were Man United players. The team’s manager Matt Busby was so badly injured he took months to recover. 

At the time of the Munich Air Disaster, David Peace’s father, Basil Dunford Peace was in London studying to be a teacher. He attended the match United played and won against Arsenal at Highbury the week before. He judged it the greatest game he’d ever seen. Though Basil Peace was always a Huddersfield Town supporter, it was the Babes he talked about. When his father died in 2022, David Peace set aside the book he had been working on and began to write Munichs, a novel of the crash and of its immediate aftermath, a novel about football but also – equally, tellingly – about grief.

British society after the war was slow to change. Deferential and still massively class-bound, it was a society in which the traditional hierarchies of family, church and community were strongly upheld. In Munichs, the second world war is still tangibly close. The older men – the football managers, the sports journalists – have fought in the war. Some of them have fought in two. Bobby Charlton and his friend Duncan Edwards are still doing National Service. All the young players are encouraged to learn a trade – bricklayer, builder, plumber, sparks – in case football doesn’t work out. The idea of taking their game into Europe is still very new, and they feel nervous about venturing ‘behind the Iron Curtain’. More than one of the boys who ended up on that flight would have preferred to stay at home. 

Peace evokes a world in which it is still not unusual for only one house on the street to have a telephone, where families sit anxiously around the radio, waiting for news. Where women – especially working class women – are really only expected to be wives and mothers. Where young lads who’ve just been in an air crash are expected to be out on the pitch winning matches just a fortnight later. 

When you look at photos of Matt Busby’s team, what hits you in the gut is just how young they were. Several of those who died were barely in their twenties. Those who survived received no trauma counselling. They were not encouraged to talk, even by their families, about what had happened to them. And once they were home there were the match-day chants, shouts that they ‘should have died at Munich’, accusations that they were burn-outs, selfish for standing in the way of fresher talent. Jackie Blanchflower and John Berry, who survived the crash but who were too badly injured to continue in the game, were quickly asked to vacate their subsidised flats in order to make way for the players who would replace them.

There are intimations in Munichs of the increasingly commercial route football would follow. Even before the crash, Manchester United were sneered at for being ‘Hollywood United’, a team more interested in big names, big money and foreign travel than the home game. Matt Busby was criticized for taking the team into Europe in the first place. 

In some ways, what happened at Munich represents a dividing line between the 1950s and the 1960s. The more open, socially permissive era that followed the disaster promised greater freedom and openness but less security and fewer certainties. Less emphasis on moral values, more on getting ahead. It is a harsher time, a more ruthless time, and not just in football. Is it fanciful to suggest that Munich is where Thatcherism begins? Worth remembering that Thatcher was selected as the Conservative candidate for Finchley in April 1958, just two months after Munich, that she was elected to parliament less than eighteen months after that? 

There has to be something in this, at least for a writer. And for a writer the story of Munich is not all about Man United. Eight journalists as well as eight footballers were killed in the crash – a horrible symmetry – men who had known each other for longer than most of the players had been alive. In the world of sport they were famous. The funeral of Henry Rose, the most-read football columnist the Daily Express ever had, was bigger even than Duncan Edwards’s or Tommy Taylor’s. When these men died, whole lifetimes of knowledge and memory went with them, gaps that could never be filled and that marked the end of an era in British sports writing. 

There is also the broader question of what caused the crash. The inquiry into the accident went on for years, undermined by disagreements and conflicts of interest between British European Airways and the German airport authorities. The pilot, James Thain, was a former RAF officer and an experienced flyer. Thain, who had just turned thirty-eight at the time of the crash, was subjected to an ongoing barrage of vitriol hurled at him by the press and by a public who were desperate for someone to blame. BEA sacked him two Christmases later, anxious to cover their backs; the German authorities were determined from the outset that Thain was at fault. It took him ten years to clear his name. He died of a heart attack not long afterwards, aged just fifty-four.

I could spend a lot of time reading and thinking about this bitter aftermath. A large part of my passion for true crime literature is in my hunger for knowledge, an obsession with the question of what really happened. Munichs though is not so much an investigation as an exhumation, an evocation of a time as viewed through the lens of a single event. The novel captures the language and texture of a grief that is both national and personal, personal not just for the fans and families of Manchester United but for Peace himself. A means of replaying his father’s memories, reimagining the effect of those headlines, that heartbreak, the abysmal sense of shock. Of bringing his father back to life, even. A way to continue with a conversation that had been cut short. 

Peace’s present tense narrative rolls in a slow wave between crash survivors and the victims’ families, shellshocked staff on the ground at Old Trafford, newspaper reporters, doctors, older players coaxed back to the game by a desperate management, teenage reserves hurriedly brought on side. Hostile supporters of rival teams, keyboard warriors before their time. Taxi drivers, grieving brothers, even a monk. And of course the Dead, who haunt Peace’s account from its opening pages. Everyone has their own version of what happened at Munich. Some have more than one, hence Munichs plural, though that is not the only meaning of the novel’s title. 

Peace never feels the need to use elevated language. As a potter constructs a miracle from humble red clay, so Peace achieves poetry through paying attention to the sound and rhythm of ordinary words. The language heard on the street or down the pub. Of tabloid headlines, the cliches of condolence, the gulf that exists between what is spoken and what is felt. You hear this novel as you read it: the voices of the regions, the heft and weight of sentences, the way words work harder and divulge more secrets when they are put together in a particular way. 

Munichs is as much a piece of music as it is a novel, a battery of half-rhymes and assonance achieved through Peace’s habitual, repeated process of reading aloud. A symphony of sorrowful songs, a hymn to all of the Dead, including his dad.

I kept reading around David Peace before I actually read him. I remember seeing him on the 2003 Granta list and feeling drawn to what he was saying about how fact works in fiction. About how his first books had been inspired by the years-long, error-strewn hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. I have always been interested in true crime for its detailed evocations of particular memories, of particular times and places. I remember also the feelings of guilt and uncertainty I used to have around reading it. True crime was sensationalist and exploitative, the stuff of tabloid newspapers. It was OK to read Crime and Punishment and talk about how it was really a crime novel but reading about real murders was somehow taboo. At least if you were serious, at least if you had taste. 

Then I read an interview with Peace that upended my thinking and ultimately changed my direction as a writer. Speaking in 2010, Peace described the crime genre as ‘the perfect tool to understand why crimes take place, and thus tell us about the society we live in and the country we live in and who we are.’ I had heard similar arguments before, but Peace went further, saying that he was ‘drawn to when writers take on history, take on real crimes. There’s just so much that happens in real life that we don’t understand, that we can’t even fathom. I don’t really see the point of making up crimes.’

I remember feeling electrified when I read that. Peace was writing densely textured works that embodied the vision and freedom to experiment that fiction offers, but that were tied to experiential reality in a way that made them even more powerful. I felt energized and inspired. I was beginning to think in a new way about what I wanted to write. At the same time I felt deeply uncertain about whether I was truly capable of this kind of writing. Whether I could bring anything new to the table. Whether I could do justice to my subject matter. 

Neither could I help noticing that the field of work I was becoming interested in was dominated by men. Macho, in-your-face men like Norman Mailer and Peace’s own literary idol James Ellroy. James Ellroy is about as far from British self-deprecation as you’re going to get. But he has the goods to back up his words and in the end that’s all I care about, the quality of the writing. If Ellroy feels OK comparing himself with Beethoven then good on him, because he’s not far wrong. I wish I had his nerve. 

I have since come to realise that my uncertainty had less to do with not being Norman Mailer than with not being ready. I didn’t feel I had the technical ability and I was probably right. I took the slow way round, feeling my way towards stories that made sense for me to tell, pushing the envelope of my abilities with each new thing I tried. When I finally came to write A Granite Silence it still felt like a risk, the most difficult and challenging project I had yet attempted. But I had come to a point where I sensed I might be capable of solving the problems the book presented, and where the writing itself – the words on the page – stood a chance of reaching a standard I felt I could live with. 

I had arrived at the moment where the risk felt not just possible, but necessary.

In the autumn of 2021 I travelled to Liverpool to meet up with a friend I hadn’t seen in person since before the first lockdown. Just being in the city put me on a high. Rain fell heavily the night before I headed home again, and when I went to catch my train I discovered that the West Coast Main Line was partially flooded, that all services heading north were severely delayed. I was told to take a train to Preston and await further instructions. 

“What happens when I get to Preston?” I asked. No one could tell me, because nobody knew. When I got there the scenes I encountered were predictably insane. Trains arriving and disgorging hundreds of passengers with nowhere to go. People sweeping in tides from platform to platform as rumours of trains that might get us into Scotland flared up, spread like wildfire and then guttered out. The one that finally arrived had limped all the way from Plymouth. By the time it turned up in Preston it was three hours late. I crammed myself into a luggage stand, fenced in by people’s knees and a couple of bikes. As we crossed the border at Berwick-on-Tweed an announcement crackled through the overhead speakers that all passengers were now obliged to put on their masks. The woman sitting next to me – I’d managed to grab a seat just after Newcastle – asked me if I’d managed to catch what they were saying. She’d been on the train since Birmingham. I reluctantly broke the news. 

“Jesus!” she groaned. I told her if she didn’t feel like complying with Scottish law that was fine by me. We’d all been breathing each other’s air for several hours in any case. I was exhausted. I was increasingly pessimistic about making the last ferry. But what I remember most about that journey is reading David Peace’s 1980 and 1983, in a breathless six hours of immersion that were still ongoing. And how strange it was, that I was passing through the places I was reading about: those hard-nosed northern moorlands and back-to-backs, streaming past beyond the windows in a reel of silent film.

From the Redbeck car park back into Castleford – 

Silence in the black of the back of the van – 

Dim lights down black back roads – 

Sat in the back of the black of the van – 

Yorkshire, 1972:

You’ll wake up some morning as unhappy as you’ve ever been before. 

When David Peace started work on 1974 he did so with the youthful ambition to write the best crime novel ever written. That the Red Riding novels have become classics proves the strength of that ambition, though Peace now feels ambivalent about the first movement of his quartet. Perhaps he feels that it does not stray far enough from the roots of the genre. But whilst it is true that some of those roots are showing – Derek Raymond, Ted Lewis – how could it be otherwise? When you first start writing you’re lucky, not to mention talented, if anything you produce is entirely yours. Peace had written earlier, unpublished novels before finding his true direction, grounding the story he wanted to tell in the Yorkshire of the seventies and early eighties, a time that coincided with the beginnings of his desire to write and that in some sense formed it. 

He brought to it also some of the kitchen-sink sensibility of the previous generation of northern writers, whose novels he had been introduced to through his father’s book collection: Stan Barstow, who lived just a few streets away from Peace in his hometown of Ossett; Alan Sillitoe, who as well as being a novelist was also a poet. And there was something else too, something extra: the gritty, poetic rigour that marks Peace’s own style, a confidence around his material that increases as the sequence moves forward. 

The material by itself is challenging enough. Peace’s portrait of a corrupt and increasingly beleaguered police force offers none of the familiarity and consolation of traditional detective fiction, and few writers have come anywhere close to confronting the traumatic effects of violence and poverty as Peace has done. In terms of story, the Red Riding novels are masterpieces of ambiguity. But what makes these books truly groundbreaking is their insistence on being more than a story, on being words on a page. Peace’s language becomes increasingly codified, more condensed, so close to poetry in places there is really no difference. The language of 1983 especially gains a kind of transcendence, hammering the page like rain on windows, staining the paper like mould. 

You can feel it being written.

I first read TS Eliot’s The Waste Land in English class when I was fourteen. I count myself as lucky. I would bet the farm – if I had one – that they don’t teach Eliot now. My mother has always loved poetry. She used to read it aloud to me throughout my early childhood, and so I had the advantage of being familiar with how poetry works. I think even at fourteen I knew instinctively how to read The Waste Land, which I recognized as a country of the imagination as much as a symbolic portrait of the postwar landscape. 

I was so excited by what I read it made my heart race. I felt angry and frustrated with my classmates, who did not get it, who kept flipping back and forth between the text and the notes at the end, trying to discover the poem’s ‘meaning’ from references they had no hope of understanding. I didn’t understand the notes either – they were too esoteric, notes from a bygone era even then – but I knew enough to know that I didn’t need them. There was something happening between me and the words, and that was enough. I was discovering phrases and cadences and – more even than that – a way of looking at language that was to become the central strand of my writer’s DNA. 

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

There was something about Eliot’s images that made my teeth chatter. Over in my German class I was coming to know the stories of Wolfgang Borchert, who had worked with similar raw material, even though his register of language and lexicon of references are very different. I began to understand how one work of literature could inform another. Storming through Red Riding forty years later I became convinced that Peace must have experienced a similar epiphany. That mental thrill, which is also visceral. The narrowing of the gap between the thought and the word.

As an adolescent, Peace harboured a secret fear that his father might be the Yorkshire Ripper, that his mother might be the Ripper’s next victim. What is any writing but the stuff you are most interested in or obsessed by? Ideas you keep having. Stories you keep noticing. Ambitions that won’t keep quiet or go away.

Finding a path towards your material can be a tortuous process. I had ambitions to write a novel based around true events for most of ten years before I found myself at work on A Granite Silence. It happened almost without my realizing it – as I describe in the novel itself, the story I had set out to write was very different. Allowing aspects of that story to keep resurfacing became essential to the narrative as it developed.

Every novel is a set of problems waiting to be solved. Paying attention to how other writers have solved their problems may not help you solve your own – the problems you have will be different, or should be – but it should at least hold out the hope that a solution is possible. David Peace’s work continues to speak to me directly. The chord it first struck was so powerful it has never died away. 

A Granite Silence by Nina Allan (Quercus Publishing) Out Now

A Granite Silence is an exploration - a journey through time to a particular house, in a particular street, Urquhart Road, Aberdeen in 1934, where eight-year-old Helen Priestly lives with her mother and father. Among this long, grey corridor of four-storey tenements, a daunting expanse of granite, working families are squashed together like pickled herrings in their narrow flats. Here are Helen's neighbours: the Topps, the Josses, the Mitchells, the Gordons, the Donalds, the Coulls and the Hunts. Returning home from school for her midday meal, Helen is sent by her mother Agnes to buy a loaf from the bakery at the end of the street. Agnes never sees her daughter alive again. Nina Allan explores the aftermath of Helen's disappearance, turning a probing eye to the close-knit neighbourhood - where everyone knows everyone, at least by sight - and with subtlety and sympathy, explores the intricate layers of truth and falsehood that can coexist in one moment of history. Full of echoes, allusions and eerie diversions, A Granite Silence is an investigation into a notorious true crime case, but also a stylish, imaginative inquiry into who gets to tell a story, how it is told, and why.

Nina Allan is a highly acclaimed and inventive novelist and short story writer, whose work has won multiple prizes including the Novella Award, the British Science Fiction Award and the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire for Best Translated Work. A Granite Silence won the prestigious CWA Historical Dagger Award and was long-listed for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. More information about Nina Allan can be found on her website.

Simon Mason on The Dangerous Man

The Dangerous Stranger is the fifth story in a series featuring a pair of mis-matched detectives in Oxford, both called Wilkins. Ryan Wilkins is Oxford born and bred, white, a chav who grew up on what the Americans would call a ‘trailer park,’ badly dressed, badly behaved, semi-feral in fact, with a chip on his shoulder and anger-management issues generally brought into play by encounters with privileged elites. Ray Wilkins is a member of the privileged elites, London-Nigerian, privately educated with a double first in PPE from Balliol College, Oxford, handsome, nattily dressed, articulate and suave, the golden boy of Thames Valley Police – until, much against his will, he was paired with Ryan. They are not related. They do not get on.

Oddly, what they get are results.

This new story is a thought-experiment. What if Oxford – gentle city of poets and scholars – had experienced a riot, as so many cities in the UK did, after the Southport murders? An out-of-control crowd lobbing Molotov cocktails at a hotel housing asylum seekers. And also: what if a young refugee was actually burned to death? (It’s an Oxford tradition, after all, if in abeyance for many centuries and formerly restricted to Jews and archbishops.) And furthermore: what if the victim then turned out not to be a refugee at all?

Perhaps it sounds very political. But the impulse wasn’t to discuss politics; the story seemed to arise naturally out of the anger and fear. There is action, for sure, but as Chandler said, what counts is emotion; and it seemed to me that there were unusual amounts of this arising, unstoppably, chaotically, from the basic situation I imagined.

This emotion affects all the characters, in different ways. Because it’s the fifth book in a series, some of the characters have naturally been around for a while. Little Ryan, for instance, Ryan’s four-year-old son. And his father, Ryan Senior, released early from prison (overcrowding issues) and now resident, to his disgust, in a hostel for rehabilitating prisoners. The Wilkins’s Superintendent is familiar too, fresh, steely and blonde as ever, but having to cope with a disciplinary enquiry, which tests her considerable reserves to the limit, and the Chief Constable, a massive, battered, malevolent presence, who openly hopes to get rid of those Wilkins ‘clowns’.

But there are new characters too. A sly criminal from Rotherhithe who hates Oxford even as his job keeps him there. An eager new DC, William, who simply won’t shut up and is a little too naïve for his own good. ‘Milky’ Nolan, twelve years old, excited to find himself at his first riot. Yemi Kosoko, world food grocery shopkeeper in Oxford’s ethnic Cowley Road and his friend, the chess-playing eccentric academic Nicholas Kinghorn, who dyes his beard lilac to remind him of weddings in Ghana. And finally, most important of all, Jallo (other names unknown, age unknown, country of origin unknown) who finds himself sleeping rough in Oxford’s nooks and crannies, and knows himself to be in horrible danger.

I like Oxford’s nooks and crannies, I must admit. I like the city’s double nature. Its deep Englishness (dons and quadrangles, meadows and river), and simultaneous air of foreignness (all those foreign post-grads, language students and care workers). I like its strange blend of permanence (we who live here) and transience (those who arrive and go, students, tourists). And I like its rooted elderly and great waves of youth. It seems to me excitingly unstable. Perhaps it’s that quality that gives rise to stories, not all of which it wants to tell.

The Dangerous Man by Simon Mason (Quercus Publishing) £16.99 Out Now

On a warm and pleasant evening in Oxford, gentle city of poets and scholars, rioters outside a hotel full of asylum seekers set a young refugee on fire. The city - the country - convulses in shock. Is this who we are? It's international news of the very worst kind, and the Chief Constable demands immediate and exemplary action in bringing the perpetrators to justice. The detectives leading the investigation fill him with misgivings, however: DIs Ryan and Ray Wilkins (no relation), Thames Valley's detective pantomime horse, one Oxford-educated, the other Oxford-trailer park. He doesn't understand why they work together. 'Do they even get on?' 'Somehow that doesn't seem necessary,' their Superintendent replies. Who burned the boy alive? Was it a far-right extremist? Was it an ordinary person who had simply gone along to watch and got caught up in the emotion? Could it even be one of the children who were there? Deploying a range of investigative skills, some standard, some unconventional and some frankly nuts, the Wilkinses do what they do: results with chaos. But when they discover that the victim was not an asylum seeker after all, or even a resident of the hotel, the whole investigation kicks into a completely different configuration.

The Shots review of The Dangerous Man can be found here.

Forthcoming books from Quercus Books (Including Maclehose Press)

 January 2026

They know she killed them. They've just never known why. Connie Cross was a trusted pharmacy assistant when she was arrested for the gruesome murders of at least seven strangers. Now, she's serving a whole-life order for the shocking crimes she refuses to explain. Olivia Lang never forgot Connie, the awkward teenager from a south London estate she first met while working for the police. Twenty years later, Olivia is desperate to understand what made Connie turn into a murderer. But as she begins to uncover the truth about the UK's most notorious female serial killer, Olivia risks revealing secrets she's kept hidden for years. Connie is by Charlotte Duckworth.

Darling Mine is by Romy Hausmann. She went missing decades ago. He is still looking for her . . . Julie Nowak has been missing since 7th September 2003. It broke her family. Only her father, Theo, doesn't give up on her. On the 20th anniversary of her disappearance, Theo is contacted by podcaster Liv. She's come across a new lead. But if Theo wants to find out the truth he must be quick before his progressing dementia smothers everything in darkness. Who has taken his daughter? Why does Julie's ex-boyfriend Daniel keep his mother's bedroom door locked, years after she passed away? And is there anything more gruesome than the uncertainty of not knowing what happened to your own child?

True Blue is by Joe Thomas. New Year's Eve 1988. An illegal rave in Hackney. Acid House has arrived in the UK. But the Second Summer of Love is no golden era for Britain. A decade of Thatcher is starting to bite and her planned "Community Charge" will only rub salt in the wounds. Privatisation has lined shareholders pockets, but at what cost? A nation stripped of its assets, going for broke. DC Patrick Noble is assigned to a task force working out of Stoke Newington, gathering evidence of police corruption to use against his new colleagues. But this is a dangerous game. And his underlings - spycop Parker and reluctant civilian Suzie Scialfa - are getting restive. Turns out blackmail and intimidation can only get you so far. Meanwhile, council solicitor Jon Davies is once again lifting stones that shouldn't be lifted - this time plumbing the depths of the deal to privatise water. As the country hurtles towards disorder, in the form of riots that even the Iron Lady can't withstand, Noble walks an inexorable path towards his own inescapable fate. Things can only get better. But first they have to hit rock bottom.

February 2026

The Killing Floor is by Elly Griffiths. Ali Dawson is a police detective who leads a unit that investigates cases so cold her team must travel to the distant past to solve them. But Ali and the team haven't been allowed to time-travel ever since their technical expert, Jones, got stuck in Victorian London, never to be seen again. To distract herself from meaningless tasks, Ali decides to look into a present-day case - an apparent suicide of a young man who fell to his death from a high building. She believes the death is linked to a psychic medium called Barry Power, who convinced the boy he could fly. Ali goes to one of Power's shows where he claims to be in contact with Jones. When Ali notices that evening that her cat, Terry, has gone missing, she decides to go back in time just long enough to prevent Terry from escaping through his open cat flap. A dangerous plan which backfires, and she finds herself once more in Victorian London, where she meets Jones, as well as Power, and the darkly mysterious Cain Templeton with whom Ali has unfinished business from her previous visit to the past . .

Cromarty, The Black Isle, 1831. As seagulls shriek and rise on the coastal winds, a circulating library in the bustling port town of Cromarty is meeting for the first time. Ostensibly united by a love of books, the demands of social convention have brought together a disparate group of people. Charlotte Mackenzie, the remote and fragile wife of the local laird, seeks an escape from a loveless marriage; her best friend, Rachel Mackay, a former governess who is ardently in love with her own older husband, the town's minister; the young schoolmaster, John Learmonth, newly arrived from Edinburgh with secrets in tow; and the gentle bank clerk, Ludovic Cameron who dreams of a new life across the ocean, far from his erstwhile schoolmate, the malevolent Farquhar Hossack. When the laird befriends a wounded officer, a chain of events is set into motion that threatens to upset the delicate equilibrium of the community. Against the backdrop of mass emigrations, an encroaching cholera epidemic, political unrest and the campaign to abolish chattel slavery in the British Caribbean, the people of Cromarty must negotiate their new world and each other, flitting in and out of each other's lives through one extraordinary year. The Cromarty Library Circle is by Shona Maclean.

The Widows is by Anna Smith. One false move could get them killed. Ruby, Bella and Cissy are used to the high life. Married to gangland bosses at the top of their game, the riches of Costa del Sol are at their fingertips, the world at their feet. But when Cissy's husband is brutally murdered, everything changes. With his lifelong friend - the notorious drug lord Tommy Mallon - hellbent on revenge, the three women are forced to go on the run. Soon they find themselves caught up in an explosive struggle for money and power. A new life awaits - but only if they can outrun the one they've left behind.

March 2026

The Move is by J P Delaney. Few beginnings can be deadly . . .  Kate and Matt Crowther are finally moving out of London, in search of a better life for their young family. Trade Cottage seems to be the house of their dreams - and they immediately hit it off with the sellers, Rosemary and Paul Finch, who brought up their own family there.  When Kate and Matt move in, they're pleased to discover the Finches still very much in evidence: offering advice, introducing them to the local community, and becoming honorary grandparents to Will, 11, and Tilly, 9. But when the Finches take exception to Kate and Matt's renovations, relations with the neighbours sour, and Kate and Matt find themselves subjected to a vicious campaign of hate. But Kate isn't giving up her dream home without a fight. And it turns out Trade Cottage has secrets of its own to reveal - secrets that may endanger the very family Kate has moved there to protect .

Vital Signs is by Kate Webb. Can a killer leave no trace? August 2010. The Tobins - a happy, well-off family - spend a sunny afternoon at a birthday party with friends. By dawn, most of them are dead. It's a crime that grabs headlines and shocks the nation. The key suspect, Aidan Tobin, was known as a loving husband and father, but his desperate attempt to take his own life is as good as a confession. The case begins and ends with him. August 2021. A survivor of the attacks regains a memory of that horrific night. Chloë Tobin never believed her father was guilty. Only six at the time, she is the sole witness to the brutal attacks. Now, she insists that somebody else was involved. Could she be right? DI Matt Lockyer and DC Gemma Broad of Wiltshire Police's cold case unit aren't so sure. But as they begin to investigate, they soon discover there's more to this case than meets the eye. After all, why would a man who had everything destroy it all?

The Dangerous Stranger is by Simon Mason. On a warm and pleasant evening in Oxford, gentle city of poets and scholars, rioters outside a hotel full of asylum seekers set a young refugee on fire. The city - the country - convulses in shock. Is this who we are? It's international news of the very worst kind, and the Chief Constable demands immediate and exemplary action in bringing the perpetrators to justice. The detectives leading the investigation fill him with misgivings, however: DIs Ryan and Ray Wilkins (no relation), Thames Valley's detective pantomime horse, one Oxford-educated, the other Oxford-trailer park. He doesn't understand why they work together. 'Do they even get on?' 'Somehow that doesn't seem necessary,' their Superintendent replies. Who burned the boy alive? Was it a far-right extremist? Was it an ordinary person who had simply gone along to watch and got caught up in the emotion? Could it even be one of the children who were there? Deploying a range of investigative skills, some standard, some unconventional and some frankly nuts, the Wilkinses do what they do: results with chaos. But when they discover that the victim was not an asylum seeker after all, or even a resident of the hotel, the whole investigation kicks into a completely different configuration.

April 2026

Laura never meant to lie, but old habits die hard. When Annie Adams heads to London to visit her mother, Laura, the last thing she expects to find is a dead body. Least of all for it to be Fliss, the budding artist Laura had just taken under her wing.  Annie is no stranger to murder - after all, she's solved a few cases already. And something about the way Fliss died feels familiar. She's seen a case like this before. Or read about it, rather, in the journals of her dead Great Aunt Frances, whose close friend was killed in the 1960s in the exact same way: with her heart surgically removed from her chest. As threats pile up on Laura's doorstep, it soon becomes clear that she's next, and that she's hiding something . . . With her mother's life on the line, can Annie find the killer before it's too late?  From the gritty streets of 1960s Soho to the lofty galleries of present-day West London, follow Annie and Frances as they race to bring a killer to justice. How to Cheat Your Own Death is by Kristen Perrin.

Fresh from case of the stolen heart, one that shattered his belief in the regime he works for, Samson Kolechko is confronted with a mystery that borders on the impossible. How could a squad of Red Army soldiers have disappeared from the Galician bathhouse, leaving only their boots and their uniforms as evidence they ever existed? Faced with such a fantastical conundrum, Samson resorts to fantastical investigation method: stitching his operative severed ear into a bathhouse worker's jacket, he is able to eavesdrop on his every move. But he discovers far more than he bargained for, uncovering human remains in the stoves and the presence of a sinister religious cult in the city. With his quick-witted new wife Nadezhda at his side, Samson must not only solve the case but navigate the political turmoil that still grips Kyiv as civil war looms and trust between neighbours and comrades is eroded day by day. The Lost Soldiers is by Andrey Kurkov.

May 2026

Just Kill is by Remi Kone. London during a blistering heatwave. A man wakes in the middle of the night, hearing noises from downstairs. He assumes it's a burglar - nothing prepares him for what he finds. Across the city, DI Leah Hutch and DS Benjamin Randle are called to a murder scene outside their jurisdiction. A woman has been killed - the only suspect, a friend from Leah's past who refuses to speak to anyone but her. Meanwhile, fourteen-year-old Zed Okoro's mother has vanished. He will do anything in his power to find her - even if it means risking his own life. As Leah and Randle investigate, they discover a conspiracy with roots far from home. Three incidents. One connection. What secrets make people kill?

In a brilliant feat of literary detective work Master of Lies by Piers Blofeld tells the extraordinary untold story of Anthony Blunt's life as a spy. Based on extensive research into newly released files he is revealed as not simply "the fourth man", but the most dangerous spy of the twentieth century. During the war, as the fate of the world hung in the balance, Blunt's intelligence was being fed straight on to the desks of Hitler, Stalin and Churchill. His hand was secretly guiding our collective fate and his treason led to the deaths of tens of thousands. He casts a shadow which looms large to this day. The official narrative is that Blunt was the least of the Cambridge spies - and yet he was the one who got away with it. While the rest drank themselves to death in dingy Moscow flats, Blunt revelled in his brilliant career as an art historian, Surveyor of the Queen's pictures and Knight of the Realm. He was protected not just by his many friendships with the great and the good, but by the brilliance with which he played the game - his was a secret too big to be told.

June 2026

These are your neighbours. One is a killer. Reeling from a very recent divorce, Frankie has moved into a glamorous London neighbourhood. This is a new chapter in her life. She's decided to put down roots with the beautiful Persian cat she left her marriage with named Blue. But little niggles with her perfect new life start to grow and when Blue returns one night from slipping into places he shouldn't, Frankie's concerns solidify. Two words are roughly scratched into his collar: HELP ME. Unsettled and unwilling to ignore the incident, Frankie roots out an old unused "Cat Cam" collar. What slowly begins as a voyeuristic fascination with her neighbours and the secrets they're hiding soon turns into a perilous quest for the truth that threatens to bring untold terrors to her doorstep. These are your neighbours. One is a killer. Reeling from a very recent divorce, Frankie has moved into a glamorous London neighbourhood. This is a new chapter in her life. She's decided to put down roots with the beautiful Persian cat she left her marriage with named Blue. But little niggles with her perfect new life start to grow and when Blue returns one night from slipping into places he shouldn't, Frankie's concerns solidify. Two words are roughly scratched into his collar: HELP ME. Unsettled and unwilling to ignore the incident, Frankie roots out an old unused "Cat Cam" collar. What slowly begins as a voyeuristic fascination with her neighbours and the secrets they're hiding soon turns into a perilous quest for the truth that threatens to bring untold terrors to her doorstep. Nine Lives is by Catherine Steadman

After Bruno misses several phone calls from Pamela, he worries that something has happened to his beloved horse he keeps at her riding school. But her reason for calling is entirely unexpected: Pamela’s new lodger has been murdered. Bruno knows that Pamela isn’t capable of killing anyone, but then who’s the culprit? And what’s the motive? The dead woman had only just moved to town to take a job at the local nursing home—she had no enemies in the village, and no friends, either. As Bruno wrestles with these complications, the force realizes that Bruno can’t be impartial when Pamela is involved, and assigns the case instead to their rising star rookie, Fabien. Bruno is happy for Fabien to take the lead. After all, Bruno’s been distracted—by his foundering relationship, by a documentary crew determined to transform the sleepy Vézère Valley into a tourist hotspot, by a group of opinionated small businesses Bruno wants to help organize a logistically complicated night market. He can’t seem to catch a break. But when Fabien realizes that the victim is connected to his past, Bruno has to step back in to help. The village has never felt more crowded, and the clock is ticking: Will Bruno and Fabien be able to catch a killer? A Murder in Springtime is by Martin Walker. 

Remi Kone - From TV Drama Producer to Crime Thriller Author

My first job in television was making up stories for a soap. I couldn’t believe such a role existed - I had loved telling stories all my life, and I was going to be paid for something I had been doing since I was a child. I joined a team of story liners and, over the course of a year, I wrote numerous stories about characters of all ages and backgrounds - some of whom had appeared on screen for decades; others whom I helped create. It was the best training I’ve ever had and, when I sat down to write my debut crime thriller novel, INNOCENT GUILT, those lessons I had learned at the start of my TV career proved invaluable.

INNOCENT GUILT began with an image: a woman covered in blood, carrying a baseball bat walks into a police station. She doesn’t say a word; she’s not injured, and the blood isn’t hers. Is she the victim or the perpetrator? Who is she? What has she done? I wasn’t sure at first, but I wanted to find out.

My lead character, Detective Leah Hutch, is outside the police station when the mute woman appears, and we mainly follow the investigation through her eyes. After several years of working in series television, I have first-hand experience of how attached audiences can become to characters, developing allegiances that bring them back to a TV show, season after season. I wanted to create a central character with whom readers would want to go on a journey across multiple books. I spent a while pondering who Leah is and how she sees the world, but it wasn’t until I started to think of the chapters as scenes that she really came to life. As I wrote, I imagined her in each scene - how would she react to each conflict - big and small? How did that drive the story forwards? The chapters became shorter and sharper, and the words started to flow. Sometimes Leah surprised me, and I had to change course from what I had originally planned. With each draft, I got to know her better and discovered layers I hadn’t envisaged. 

We mainly follow the story through Leah’s eyes, but hers isn’t the only point of view in the novel: A journalist called Odie Reid receives a mysterious tip-off about a dead body in a park. She has history with Leah and tries to link the dead body to the mute woman, determined to solve the case before Leah does. Thus begins a cat and mouse game between two women who don’t like each other, as they investigate the case in parallel.

When it came to structuring the novel from two different perspectives, I turned to the world of television once more. Since my days working on a soap, I have primarily worked on returning drama series. I have spent hours helping screenwriters plot multiple story strands across several episodes, building to the season climax, and I approached INNOCENT GUILT in much the same way. The main difference was that now, as opposed to working in a team, I was on my own. I have a fantastic agent and editor, but in those early stages, it was just me and the blank page.

I am often asked how working on a book differs from producing television drama and which I prefer: Writing books is in many ways solitary, whilst TV is more collaborative, particularly when it comes to the practicalities of TV production. Having said that, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how useful my TV experience has been, and I’m thankful for those early days spent sitting in a room with my fellow story liners, creating imaginary characters and talking about their lives as if they were real.

Innocent Guilt by Remi Kone (Quercus Publishing) Out Now

Victim or murderer . . . Can she discover the truth? On a misty autumn afternoon, a woman covered in blood clutching a baseball bat walks silently into a London police station. The two officers assigned to her case are DI Leah Hutch and DS Benjamin Randle. But the woman refuses to speak. She is not injured and the blood on the bat is not hers. What has she done? Is she the victim or the perpetrator? As Leah and Randle start their inquiry, a man is found battered to death in a nearby park. Journalist Odie Reid receives a tip off and is determined to solve the case first, trying to link this death to the woman held in custody. Leah and Odie have history and very quickly their cat and mouse game becomes personal, leading them both to the very darkest corners of their pasts.      

A review of Innocent Guilt can be found here on the Shots Mag website.

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British Nigerian Emmy-nominated producer, Remi Kone has worked on a number of well-known television dramas, such as KILLING EVE, SPOOKS and LEWIS. She lives in London, and INNOCENT GUILT is her first novel.

 

Instagram: @remikonewriter

Fish and Fowl: Categorizing the Genre-Bending Novel

I am a native-born Scot with a Nigerian surname, a US passport and an English accent.  If some librarian of humanity were to place me on the shelf beside my brothers and sisters, where, I wonder, would I be filed?  In the fiction section, perhaps.  Possibly under cryptids.

When it comes to categories, I’m a bit of a nightmare.  And yet it’s a fundamental of human nature that everything must be sorted, catalogued and put into boxes.  A nice, compact label to sum up the entirety of a thing in all its nuanced glory.  Even something as ostensibly descriptive as blonde or brunette is freighted with sub-text.  It is highly unlikely, for instance, that the persons generated in your mind by the previous sentence were male.

Categories are fundamental to who we are for a reason.  We need shortcuts to get us through the day, otherwise the one-and-a-half kilos of fat sheltering behind our eyeballs would cook itself into render.  Imagine going through life treating every pedestrian crossing you come across as something you’ve never seen before; or wondering if the unaccompanied two-year old bawling their eyes out in the park is a lost and frightened child, or merely some very tiny, very upset grown-up.  Life would very quickly grind to a halt.

Publishers, shocking as it may seem, are human too.  When it comes to books, they like to categorise them.  They need to categorise them.  If the reader is looking for a fast-paced thriller, they do not want to wade through historical textbooks on the Serene Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire in order to find one.  That would be . . . not efficient.  So, publishers make it easy.  We have thrillers, and sci-fi, and cosy crime, and romance, and paranormal romance and the list goes on.  Pick your category and start browsing.  Job done.

But the list is not endless.  What if someone has written something that is two or more of these things?  What then?  What bookshelf could possibly be home for a mutant creation like that?

I’m asking for a friend.

This friend likes to write stories.  If he has a great idea for a story, he’ll write it.  But the deluded fool never bothers to think about the type of story he’s writing.  It’s enough for him that it’s a cool story.  He wrote a sci-fi adventure called Braking Day, then a murder mystery called A Quiet Teacher, and a follow-up called Two Times Murder.  And then . . . then he wrote Esperance, a police procedural that turns weird.  About a cop who’s in way over his head, wondering how someone can drown in seawater on the 20^th floor of a Chicago apartment block hundreds of miles from the ocean.  About a woman who materialises out of nowhere in Bristol, England asking questions about a ship that set sail in 1791.  About how each, unknown to the other, has set out on a path where human justice and inhuman crimes will crash into each other with dire consequences.  How does one label a book like that?  On what shelf does it fit?  It is part crime novel, part thriller, part sci-fi, with a dash of historical fiction thrown in for good measure.  Exactly the sort of hot, buttery mess that might be written by a native-born Scot with a Nigerian surname, a US passport and an English accent.

Not that I did, of course.  I’m asking for a friend, remember?

My friend’s publishers have decided to run with “speculative fiction”, by which I think they mean a novel set in the “real” world with science-fiction (“speculative”) elements.  On the other hand, Library Journal in the US described Esperance as “recommended for readers who love intricately blended genre stories that ask big questions”.  And if one were to open up the programme for this year’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, one would find said friend described as, you guessed it, a “crime writer”.  You pays your money and takes your choice, I guess.

Which kind of brings me back to the question we started out with.  On what shelf does one put a native-born Scot with a Nigerian surname, a US passport and an English accent?

So, here’s the thing.  I am not Scottish or Nigerian or American or English.  I am all of these things.  At the same time.  I know, right!  But now we can answer the question.  My librarian of humanity should keep me on all of those shelves.  Everywhere all at once, so to speak.  That way, I’m easy to find and always where I belong.  Similarly, whether the reader happens upon Esperance as speculative fiction, or sci-fi, or crime, or thriller, or anything else, I hope they’ll give it a try, regardless.  It’s a cool story.

Not that I care, really.

I’m only asking for a friend.

Esperance by Adam Oyebanji (Quercus Books) Out now.

An impossible death: Detective Ethan Krol has been called to the scene of a baffling murder: a man and his son, who appear to have been drowned in sea-water. But the nearest ocean is a thousand miles away. An improbable story: Hollie Rogers doesn't want to ask too many questions of her new friend, Abi Eniola. Abi claims to be an ordinary woman from Nigeria, but her high-tech gadgets and extraordinary physical abilities suggest she's not telling the whole truth. An incredible quest: As Ethan's investigation begins to point towards Abi, Hollie's fears mount. For Abi is very much not who she seems. And it won't be long before Ethan and Hollie find themselves playing a part in a story that spans cultures, continents . . . and centuries.

More information about the author and be found on his website.

 

 

Extract from The Sins of Our Fathers by ,Åsa Larsson

District Prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson was standing at her height-adjustable desk when Sergeant Tommy Rantakyrö stuck his head in the door.

“What deep sighs those were,” he said.

Rebecka grinned. She hadn’t been aware she’d been sighing.

“Sign of age,” she said. “I’ve turned into my grandmother. She was always sighing. And they were very definitely those ‘if only the good

Lord would put me out of my misery’ kind of sighs.”

Tommy Rantakyrö laughed and put a paper bag on her desk.

“Afternoon snack,” he announced. “Raw food balls, one liquorice and one ginger and cinnamon. They’re a cure for sighing.”

“Too right! And now the good Lord won’t have to deliver me from evil quite yet.”

“Not for an hour anyway.”

(…)

“How’s it going, reviewing the case backlog?” he asked with a nod at the piles of paper on her desk.

Rebecka gave another of her grandmother’s sighs and raised her hands in supplication. Tommy sighed even louder. They both laughed at the little joke they had come up with and now shared.

Rebecka’s boss Alf Björnfot had taken all his accrued holidays, added a two-month leave of absence and gone off to Alaska. The trip he’d been dreaming of with his grown-up daughter. Seeing bears and fishing for salmon.

Rebecka’s colleague Carl Von Post had been appointed acting chief prosecutor. On the last day of work before his holiday, Björnfot had come into Rebecka’s office and put a yellow Post-it on her notice board.

“TRY NOT TO BE A PAIN”. Written only half in jest.

“Try to get along with Calle,” Björnfot had said. “I know he’s not your favourite person but he’s been here longest, so I’ve got to make him acting chief. But I don’t want anyone ringing me on the warpath and spoiling my trip.”

(…)

Von Post’s footsteps could be heard in the corridor. A few seconds later and he appeared in the doorway. Boyishly ruffled hair, neatly pressed shirt and not even a hint of a beer belly.

“Hi there, Tommy,” he said in comradely greeting and patted him a bit too hard on the back. “How’s it going, Martinsson?”

Rebecka froze. There was a difference between her and Von Post, or perhaps between her and the upper class. He was as pleasant as a television presenter to everyone he met, both enemies and allies. She, on the other hand, found it hard to disguise her true feelings and became curt and uptight, her neck stiff and her lips pressed tightly together. She found it difficult to look people she didn’t like in the eye. She despised herself for not being able to play the game. Condemned to being the psychological underdog.

Carl Von Post gave her a knowing smile. She could loathe him for all he cared. It seemed to please him that she failed to respond when addressed.

“How’s it going with the frozen goods?” Von Post asked, turning to Tommy.

“The corpse in the freezer? In the end we commissioned a helicopter that finally managed to land. And picked up both the freezer and the old guy who was dead in the house.”

“What?” Von Post exclaimed. “There were two dead people? Murders?”

“We don’t know yet. They’re both at the medical examiner’s now, so Pohjanen will be ringing when he’s got something to tell us.”

“Good, good. Anything new on that front take it up with me. Martinsson’s got her plate full with—”

“Yea, I know,” Tommy cut him off. “I brought her some goodies to cheer her up. That’s a hell of a pile she’s got to work through.”

Von Post’s smile got even wider.

“It’s really incredibly good for her, you know, to work through the backlog. She didn’t get her position as prosecutor the normal way, did she. I was a trainee prosecutor for nine months and then an assistant prosecutor for two years. So there are certain basics she lacks.”

Rebecka gritted her teeth and stared at Von Post. It was outrageous that he should be talking over her head while making it sound as though she were less qualified than him. In truth she was overqualified, and he knew it. She imagined he lay awake at night tortured by the realisation that she had given up what would be his dream job, a lawyer at Meijer & Ditzinger, for her current position in the Prosecution Service. And he’s bound to think they would welcome me back with open arms if I wanted, she was thinking. Though I’m not sure that’s true.

“Anyway, I really should let you get on,” Von Post said to Rebecka, and gave Tommy an encouraging look.

But Tommy made no move to leave. Rebecka leaned back in her chair and fished a raw food ball from the paper bag.

“Feel like sharing?” she asked Tommy. Von Post vanished down the corridor.

“That guy,” Tommy said. Rebecka gritted her teeth. Do not complain, she admonished herself.

(…)

“Screw Von Post,” she said as cheerfully as she could. “These balls are so delicious, shall we share another one? What was that about a corpse in a freezer?”

“Don’t know yet, it looks like it had been there for a long time.”

“Butchered?”

“No, apparently not. Shame you’re not going to be the lead on this

one, von Post is all psyched about it.”

“So you’re going to have fun together on a freezer murder,” Rebecka said. “Don’t think about me sending shoplifters and taggers and speeders to prison.”

“You’re a terror, you are,” Tommy said with admiration. “You know we all think that.”

“All but one,” Rebecka said, before adding, quick as a flash, “not that I’m bothered though.”

She rooted around the paper bag with exaggerated interest.

“She’ll get over it,” Tommy said. “You know what Mella’s like.”

Rebecka immediately lost interest in the bag and the raw food balls.

“Mella?” she asked.

“Oh hell, you meant Von Post . . .”

Tommy swallowed the rest of the sentence; his eyes turned towards the Post-it note on Rebecka’s wall.

“Mella!” Rebecka exclaimed. “Is Anna-Maria pissed off with me?

Why?”

“Forget it,” Tommy pleaded. “I thought she’d been in here to complain. Please forget I said anything.”

“Just what have I done to her?” Rebecka said, upset. “I mean, we haven’t even seen one another for . . .”

She dropped the bag on the desk and walked towards the door.

“There’s no need to say anything. It really won’t be that hard to find out.”

She strode noisily along the corridor. Tommy debated whether to rush after her but decided not to.

“No, I’m off home,” he said aloud. “This is about to blow.” 

The Sins of Our Father by Åsa Larsson (Translated by Frank Perry) (Quercus Publishing) Out Now £20.00

Forensic pathologist Lars Pohjanen has only a few weeks to live when he asks Rebecka Martinsson to investigate a murder that has long since passed the statute of limitations. A body found in a freezer at the home of the deceased alcoholic, Henry Pekkari, has been identified as a man who disappeared without a trace in 1962: the father of Swedish Olympic boxing champion Boerje Stroem. Rebecka wants nothing to do with a fifty-year-old case - she has enough to worry about. But how can she ignore a dying man's wish? When the post-mortem confirms that Pekkari, too, was murdered, Rebecka has a red-hot investigation on her hands. But what does it have to do with the body kept in his freezer for decades? Meanwhile, the city of Kiruna is being torn down and moved a few kilometres east, to make way for the mine that has been devouring the city from below. With the city in flux, the tentacles of organized crime are slowly taking over . . .