Bloody Barnes - It's Murder on The Green

 Friday 6th February to Sunday 8th February 2026

Bloody Barnes is a brand-new crime writers' festival in London. From 6-8th February this year, southwest London will play host to a fabulous array of authors, including Mark Billingham, Sophie Hannah and Vaseem Khan. There is also the announcement of the inaugural Cob and Pen Award for the crime book of the year.

The Programme

Friday 6th February

18.00 to 19.00: Death is Scent Amanda Carr with Sarah McCartney.

Find out how fragrance has been used to kill and get to sniff some deadly ingredients!

20.00 – 21.00: The Talk is all of Murder! Mark Billingham and Graham Bartlett.

Award winning author, Mark Billingham, creator of iconic homicide detective Tom Thorne in discussion with fellow author and ex-homicide detective Graham Bartlett.

Saturday 7th Feb

10.00 to 11.00: Who poisoned Bad Boy Bob? Hilary Whitehall .

Bob is a handsome, very naughty dog living on Barnes Common. Everybody loves him. Or do they? Listen to Hilary’s story, solve the clues and help Hilary and police dog Zippy uncover the poisoner. For 5+ year olds.

12.00pm to 13.00pm. Criminal Minds Martin Edwards, Antony Johnston with Victoria Dowd.

Victoria in forensic examination of two of our most thrilling, multi-award-winning authors.

14.00 to 15.00: A Party to Murder Trevor Wood, Graham Bartlett, Bernard O’Keefe.

Get together with these doyens of detection. It will be killing!

16.00 – 17.00: Abracdabra -it’s murder! Tom Mead with Victoria Dowd

Join these wizards of the locked room mystery to find out how they dunnit!

18.00 19.00: Dying in Place Mark Ellis, Barbara Nadel, Vaseem Khan with Anne Mullins

Anne will find that from London to Istanbul to Mumbai its murder all the way with these incomparable writers

20.00 to 21.00 : There is nothing like a dame! Sophie Hannah & Victoria Dowd.

Two award winning writers on murder at its trickiest.

Sunday 8th Feb

10.00 to 11.00 Crime for the young Sophie Cleverley with Sam Blake

‘Girls - and boys - just wanna have fun’ - and that’s what they get solving crimes with these two brilliant writers for the young.

12.00 to 13.00: What lurks beneath Bernard O’Keefe.

Find out just how bloody Barnes can be with O’Keefe’s DI Garibaldi.

14.00 to 15.00 Right Royal Murder S.J. Bennet & Sam Blake with Tom Mead

Tom Mead in discussion with the kick ass queens of detection.

16.00 to 17.00: The Trial for Murder Nick Waring.

Nick reads Charles Dickens’ spine-chilling short story.

18.00 to 19.00 Murder Most Noir Johana Gustawsson & Thomas Enger with Harriett Gilbert

Feel the chill as Harriet Gilbert talks to the scions of Scandi murder

20.00 to 21.00 I Spy Frank Gardner with Vaseem Khan

It’s live and let die! with Gardner’s spy Luke Carlton and Vaseem’s first of the Q mysteries.

Tickets are on sale now and can be bought here.

The 'Real' Locked Room Ghosts, Memory, and the House at Devil's Neck.by Tom Mead

“I get the willies when I see closed doors,” says Bob Slocum, narrator of Joseph Heller’s 1974 novel Something Happened. Of course it’s not really the doors that frighten Bob; it’s what they represent. It’s the idea of something secret going on in another room. The closed door symbolises Bob’s paranoia; his pathological fear of secrets and betrayal that will set him off on a path toward madness. The closed door—that single, seemingly innocuous image—takes us to the heart of the character’s psyche, and the root of his fear. 

Now, Joseph Heller is perhaps an unlikely reference point for a piece about a vintage-style whodunit, but I mention him here for a reason. You see, I’ve written a series of Golden Age-inspired mysteries which are built around my great fascination with the recurring motif of the locked-room mystery. For the uninitiated, the locked-room mystery is a subgenre of crime fiction dealing with so-called impossible crimes; typically murders with an air of something supernatural about them, as though the criminal possessed otherworldly powers. Inevitably, though, the solution to the mystery is rational, earthly, and eventually deduced by an ingenious sleuth via the process of ratiocination. 

The locked-room mystery is the most ornate, labyrinthine construction in the crime fiction world; it’s a self-consciously surreal exercise in puzzle-making where logic and lateral thinking are paramount. But it’s also a surprisingly blank canvas for creative expression—at least, I’ve always found it that way. Once you’ve established the parameters of your puzzle, you can go pretty much anywhere. I tend to think this is the reason locked-room mysteries—more than any other crime subgenre—crop up in so many other fields of literature, including science fiction (such as Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel, or Adam Roberts’s The Real Town Murders) and fantasy (Randall Garrett’s Too Many Magicians). There is so much scope for imagination and flights of fancy that it is a positively irresistible challenge for writers of all genres. 

For me, the puzzle is important for several reasons. When done right, the locked-room mystery is a work of art akin to a perfectly constructed Swiss watch. Its moving parts all converge and coalesce to produce a single, immensely satisfying effect for the reader. But that’s not all; the solving of a mystery, or the restoring of earthly logic to a seemingly illogical world, is deeply cathartic. 

There is often talk of classic mysteries scratching our collective itch to see justice done, and to see the good guys foiling the bad guys. Maybe this is true in some instances, but to me it’s an oversimplification. I think the real thrill of a locked room comes from its exploration of a deeper psychological mystery. The seemingly impossible puzzle upends our understanding of the world; it makes us question our senses, our logic, our very selves. And by the time the solution to the mystery is presented, and we see how we have been tricked, we’ve gained a deeper philosophical understanding of ourselves. We see that our perceptions are shaped by our interactions with the world around us. The locked-room mystery places this strange dialogue between our inner and outer worlds at the heart of the narrative.

The same is true of classic ghost stories, which dredge up images from the depths of our collective unconscious and present them as physical manifestations. In a way, ghosts are memories; projections of our own fear and trauma. Which brings me to the unpleasant business at Devil’s Neck.

The House at Devil’s Neck is the fourth in my series of spooky, Golden Age-inspired puzzle mysteries featuring magician-turned-sleuth Joseph Spector. Like the other titles in the series, it’s intended primarily as an entertainment; a piece of escapism. But it’s also an excuse to explore deeper and darker territory—in an oblique way, of course. 

This time around, it is August 1939 and Spector travels out to a derelict mansion to participate in a séance. The date is highly significant, since the ghost who walks the halls of the house at Devil’s Neck is a soldier of the First World War. After the séance, circumstances begin to get out of control: one of the party is found dead; murdered in a locked room. Then another. And as the bodies pile up, the clock continues ticking, inching our characters closer and closer to the precipice of a fresh horror: the dawn of a Second World War. 

So you see, The House at Devil’s Neck is a mystery in more than one sense. It’s about solving impossible murders and catching a Machiavellian criminal. But more broadly speaking it’s also about the bleak inevitability of approaching conflict, while the shadows of a previous conflict still loom large: ghosts, memories, or whatever you want to call them. 

By the end of the book, the primary puzzles are solved. The “who” and the “how” have been deciphered, and the supernatural impossibilities unravelled. But the solution to the other, deeper mystery—an endless cycle of conflict, returning again and again like a vengeful spirit—remains elusive. It would take a greater detective than Joseph Spector to explain that. 

The House at Devil’s Neck by Tom Mead is published by Head of Zeus on 14th August at £20. 

This gripping locked-room mystery sees Joseph Spector investigate his most sinister case yet: murderous machinations at a haunted manor house. A former First World War field hospital, the spooky old mansion at Devil's Neck attracts spirit-seekers from far and wide.  Illusionist-turned-sleuth Joseph Spector knows the house of old. With stories spreading of a phantom soldier making mischief, he joins a party of visitors in search of the truth. But the house, located on a lonely causeway, is quickly cut off by floods. The stranded visitors are soon being killed off one by one. With old ally Inspector Flint working on a complex case that has links to Spector's investigation, the two men must connect the dots before Devil's Neck claims Spector himself as its next victim.

More information about Tom Mead can be found on his website. You can also find him on X @TomMeadAuthor and on Instagram @tommeadauthor. You can also find him on Facebook. 

Tom will be speaking at Manor Farm Library, Ruislip HA4 7SU with Barbara Nadel on 15th August at 3pm.  Tickets £2. For tickets see: https://tinyurl.com/fjf7esed.

He will also be speaking at Death in the Dales Festival with Martin Edwards & Dolores Gordon Smith on Saturday 18th October at 3.15pm. For tickets for the day see: https://www.sedbergh.org.uk/view-event/death-in-the-dales-festival-of-crime-2/

Tom Mead On Sweet Revenge: The Dark Origins of Cabaret Macabre

My first novel, Death and the Conjuror, and the bulk of its sequel, The Murder Wheel, were written in 2020 at the height of the UK’s COVID lockdowns. They were attempts to channel the joy—the sheer delight—that I find in Golen Age mysteries and use it to create something new. As such, both books are love letters to my favourite authors: John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Helen McCloy, Christianna Brand, Nicholas Blake, Edmund Crispin, and so many others. But as well as direct references to the work of the greats, the first two Joseph Spector novels are conscious attempts to emulate their style—to create something with the feel of a novel that might have been written in the glory days of the 1930s, when the puzzle mystery was at its peak. 

When the time came to get started on the third Spector novel, I felt more comfortable and (dare I say it) confident with my characters and the overall style of the books. As such, I was a little wary of resting on my laurels, recycling the same themes and ideas. But I wanted to retain the elements which (to my mind, at least) define the series, namely: magic, the theatre, the Gothic, the locked-room mystery. So, I started thinking about other influences which would blend neatly with that already-established formula. This brought me to the classic Japanese murder mystery—the honkaku—and its contemporary counterpart, shin-honkaku. These are genres with copious Golden Age connections, but also a heightened, pointedly non-naturalistic approach, high body counts, eccentric families, and brutal, bizarre murders. Tropes which are shared by an entirely different, yet curiously analogous, field: Jacobean tragedy.

As a lover of theatre (The Murder Wheel is set primarily in the backstage corridors of a fictional West End theatre, The Pomegranate), I wanted my characters to leave theatreland this time around, but to bring a semblance of the innately surreal realm of the stage with them to the fresh environs of the snowbound house in the English countryside. So, I looked to Jacobean drama. Agatha Christie made copious use of Shakespearean quotations for epigraphs and titles (Sad Cypress, Taken at the Flood), while Sleeping Murder features the John Webster tragedy The Duchess of Malfi as a prominent plot point—as does P.D. James’s The Skull Beneath the Skin. Meanwhile, Caroline Graham’s The Killings at Badger’s Drift (adapted for television as the very first episode of the long-running smash hit Midsomer Murders) borrows significant plot elements from John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore. There is therefore significant precedent for the overlap of such seemingly disparate genres. After all, both classic mysteries and these classic dramas rely on complex and remarkably convoluted plots, large casts of characters, and an all-important preoccupation with the macabre.

I have always been particularly fascinated by The Revenger’s Tragedy—even its origins are shrouded in mystery: it has been attributed to both Cyril Tourneur and Thomas Middleton. And the theme of revenge is incredibly potent and evocative. Of course, The Revenger’s Tragedy is decidedly not a mystery—though the characters deceive each other, they never deceive the audience. But what if, I wondered, the plot was reimagined and reinvented—transmogrified into a whodunit and, more importantly, a locked-room mystery? This gave me the shape of Cabaret Macabre.

Instead of Vindice the eponymous revenger, we have the troubled Victor Silvius. Instead of Castiza we have Caroline. And instead of the wicked duke, we have the judge, Sir Giles Drury. This was the inspiration I had been waiting for—I could practically see my cast of characters assembling in front of me.

And, perhaps inevitably, this one idea stimulated a slew of others. References to real-life criminous cases and characters--including the Brighton trunk murders of 1934 and the controversial celebrity pathologist Bernard Spilsbury--found their counterparts in the perverse yet fiercely logical murder plot. One strange, impossible death led to another, and my tapestry of puzzles began to coalesce into a single, cohesive piece. And the identity of the killer was a thrilling enigma.

The aim of any murder mystery is to give the reader a thrill; to whisk them away to another world. Whether Cabaret Macabre meets these criteria is not for me to say… but what I do know is that the book gave me plenty of thrills when I was writing it, and I can only hope it has a few more in store for the reader.

Cabaret Macabre by Tom Mead (Out Now) Head of Zeus

Bestselling author sleuth and illusionist Joseph Spector investigates his most complex case yet in this gripping new locked-room murder mystery, set in an English country house just before the Second World War. Hampshire, 1938. When prominent judge Sir Giles Drury starts receiving sinister letters, his wife suspects Victor Silvius, a man confined to a sanatorium after attacking Sir Giles. Meanwhile, Silvius’ sister Caroline is convinced her brother is about to be murdered... by none other than his old nemesis Sir Giles Drury. Caroline seeks the advice of Scotland Yard’s Inspector Flint, while the Drurys, eager to avoid a scandal, turn to Joseph Spector. Spector, renowned magician turned sleuth, has an uncanny knack for solving complicated crimes – but this case will test his powers of deduction to their limits. At a snowbound English country house, a body is found is impossible circumstances. Spector and Flint’s investigations collide as they find themselves trapped by the snowstorm where anyone could be the next victim – or the killer...

More information about Tom Mead can be found on his website. You can also find him on X @TomMeadAuthor, on Instagram @tommeadauthor and on Facebook.

             

Capital Crime Announces Fingerprint Award nominations!

 

OVERALL CRIME BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

THE MURDER GAME by Tom Hindle

NONE OF THIS IS TRUE by Lisa Jewell

THE SECRET HOURS by Mick Herron

IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE by Jo Callaghan

STRANGE SALLY DIAMOND by Liz Nugent

THRILLER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

FEARLESS by M W Craven

THE SILENT MAN by David Fennell

THE RULE OF THREE by Sam Ripley

THE ONLY SUSPECT by Louise Candlish

THE HOUSE HUNT by C. M. Ewan

HISTORICAL BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

DEATH OF A LESSER GOD by Vaseem Khan

THE SQUARE OF SEVENS by Laura Shepherd-Robinson

THE MURDER WHEEL by Tom Mead

THE GOOD LIARS by Anita Frank

THE HOUSE OF WHISPERS by Anna Mazzola

TRUE CRIME BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

NO ORDINARY DAY by Matt Johnson

MY GIRL by Michelle Hadaway

VITAL ORGANS by Suzie Edge

UNLAWFUL KILLINGS: LIFE, LOVE AND MURDER: TRIALS AT THE OLD BAILEY by Her Honour Wendy Joseph QC

ORDER OUT OF CHAOS by Scott Walker

AUDIO BOOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

THE RUNNING GRAVE by Robert Galbraith (narrated by Robert Glenister)

THE LAST GOODBYE by Tim Weaver (narrated by Joe Coen, Brendan MacDonald, Peter Noble, Dominic Thorburn and Candida Gubbins)

THE BEDROOM WINDOW by K. L. Slater (narrated by Clare Corbett)

CONVICTION by Jack Jordan (narrated by Sophie Roberts)

OVER MY DEAD BODY by Maz Evans (narrated by Maz Evans)

GENRE -BUSTING BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

INK BLOOD SISTER SCRIBE by Emma Torzs

THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF THE ALPERTON ANGELS by Janice Hallett

KILLING JERICHO by William Hussey

MURDER IN THE FAMILY by Cara Hunter

THE LOOKING GLASS SOUND by Catriona Ward

DEBUT BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

DEATH OF A BOOKSELLER by Alice Slater

THE LIST by Yomi Adegoke

GENEVA by Richard Armitage

THE BANDIT QUEENS by Parini Shroff

THIRTY DAYS OF DARKNESS by Jenny Lund Madsen

Voting is now open and you can vote for your favourite book here.

Back From The Dead: The Golden Age Revival by Tom Mead

In a field as diverse as crime fiction, “Golden Age” means different things to different people. To some, it’s an intractable term for murder mysteries written between the World Wars. Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley, John Dickson Carr, E.C.R. Lorac, Christianna Brand, et al are all exemplars of the Golden Age crime novel. But to others – myself included – it is in fact a considerably looser term which refers to a certain style of murder mystery, and one which has been enjoying a well-deserved renaissance in recent years. 

To me, the Golden Age is synonymous with the puzzle mystery, where a detective is tasked with identifying a criminal through the use of logic and deduction. There are bonus points, too, if the reader is able to play along and have a crack at solving the case themselves. 

Even after the Golden Age officially ended, this type of mystery did not go away. Throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century, several high-profile authors produced numerous works that fall within that category. For example, Simon Brett’s Fethering mysteries feature amateur sleuths in a village setting – thematically speaking, pure Agatha Christie. Meanwhile, Paul Doherty’s mysteries are set hundreds or even thousands of years in the past, but nonetheless employ classic Golden Age plotting techniques, such as the “closed circle” of suspects, the sifting of alibis, and the “impossible crime.”

Other authors have interpolated Golden Age-style puzzle plotting in contemporary police procedurals. Think of Peter Lovesey’s Peter Diamond series, Martin Edwards’s Lake District mysteries, or Kate Ellis’s Wesley Peterson series. All of these bear the deductive hallmark of the Golden Age, albeit subtly. 

As for my own experience, I grew up in a house full of Agatha Christie novels; they were among the first "grown up" books I actually read. So the Golden Age was a constant presence throughout my formative years, both in book form and on TV thanks to the ITV Poirot adaptations, plus the frequent repeats of films like Murder on the Orient Express. But when I went to university and studied English lit and creative writing, there was a tendency to lean away from "genre" fiction and toward the more overtly literary. 

However, the Golden Age has a funny way of creeping back into your conscious mind. Inevitably, I delved into the past, and returned to the authors I’d loved when I was younger. To my surprise and delight, I found that I enjoyed them more, not less. But not only that; there were heaps of “new” authors (new to me, anyway) whose works had been out-of-print for almost a century but were now enjoying posthumous rediscovery. Authors I’d never heard of before, like John Bude and J. Jefferson Farjeon. 

This boom in Golden Age reissues over the last ten years or so has been largely spearheaded by Martin Edwards’s British Library Crime Classics series and Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics series. Coupled with certain high-profile critical reassessments by genre scholars like Edwards himself (The Golden Age of Murder), John Curran (The Hooded Gunman), Curtis Evans (Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery), and Jeffrey Marks (Anthony Boucher: A Biobibliography) – not to mention A-list Hollywood movies like Knives Out – it’s fair to say the Golden Age whodunit is back with a vengeance. 

Anthony Horowitz, for instance, has recently commenced a wonderful new series which is not only Golden Age in style, but about the Golden Age. I’m talking about Magpie Murders, where a vintage mystery pastiche is coupled with a present-day murder plot, perfectly encapsulating the spirit of the revival. Meanwhile, authors like Janice Hallett and Vaseem Khan write complex puzzle mysteries which offer the same level of reader satisfaction as the classics. Pleasingly, the trend appears to be global, with authors such as Sulari Gentill (Australia) and Ovidia Yu (Singapore) combining the puzzle plot and the historical fiction milieu to excellent effect. Additionally, the way in which the Golden Age style is evoked can be startlingly diverse – ranging from the cosy crime of Robert Thorogood to the Scandi-noir of Ragnar Jonasson.

Whichever way you look at it, there is a steadily growing crowd of authors who are endeavouring to recapture the style, the distinctive characters, the period detail, and the great plots that made the Golden Age golden. My own books Death and the Conjuror and The Murder Wheel are my attempts to engage with this revival. As both a writer and a reader, I’m eager to see where we go from here. 

The Murder Wheel by Tom Mead (Head of Zeus) Out of Now

In London, 1938, young and idealistic lawyer Edmund Ibbs is trying to find any shred of evidence that his client Carla Dean wasn’t the one who shot her husband dead at the top of a Ferris Wheel. But the deeper he digs, the more complex the case becomes, and Edmund soon finds himself drawn into a nightmarish web of conspiracy and murder. Before long he himself is implicated in not one but two seemingly impossible crimes.

First, a corpse appears out of thin air during a performance by famed illusionist “Professor Paolini” in front of a packed auditorium at the Pomegranate Theatre. Then a second victim is shot dead in a locked dressing room along one of the theatre’s winding backstage corridors. Edmund is in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time, and attracts the suspicion of Scotland Yard inspector George Flint. Luckily, conjuror-turned-detective Joseph Spector is on the scene. Only Spector’s uniquely logical perspective can pierce the veil of deceit in a world of illusion and misdirection, where seeing is not always believing.

The Murder Wheel by Tom Mead is published by Head of Zeus on 12th October at £20

More information about Tom Mead and his work can be found on his website. You can also find him on Facebook and on X @TomMeadAuthor and on Instagram @tommeadauthor

J L Blackhurst on Locked Room Mysteries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books from Head of Zeus

February 2023 

1936, London. A celebrity psychiatrist is discovered dead in his locked study. There seems to be no way a killer could have escaped unseen. There are no clues, no witnesses, and no evidence of the murder weapon. Stumped by the confounding scene, Inspector Flint, the Scotland Yard detective on the case, calls on retired stage magician turned part-time sleuth Joseph Spector. Spector has a knack for explaining the inexplicable, but even he finds that there is more to this mystery than meets the eye. As he and the Inspector interview the colourful cast of suspects, they uncover no shortage of dark secrets... or motives for murder. And when a second murder occurs, this time in an impenetrable elevator, they realise the crime wave will become even more deadly unless they can catch the culprit soon. Death and the Conjuror is by Tom Mead.

No Place to Hide is by JS Monroe. Adam lives a picture-perfect life: happy marriage, two young children, and a flourishing career as a doctor. But Adam also lives with a secret. Hospital CCTV, strangers' mobile phones, city traffic cameras - he is convinced that they are all watching him, recording his every move. All because of something terrible that happened at a drunken party when he was a medical student. Only two other people knew what happened that night. Two people he's long left behind. Until one of them, Clio - Adam's great unrequited love - turns up on his doorstep, and reignites a sinister pact twenty-four years in the making...

Storm Watch is by C J Box. When a prominent University of Wyoming professor goes missing, authorities are stumped. That is, until Game Warden Joe Pickett makes two surprising discoveries in his district. First, Joe finds the professor's vehicle parked on a remote mountainside. Then he finds the professor's frozen and mutilated body. When he attempts to learn more, Joe's investigation is obstructed by Federal agents, extreme environmentalists, and Governor Colter Allen. Meanwhile, Joe's associate, falconer Nate Romanowski, is approached by a shadowy group of local militant activists who are gaining in power and influence, and demanding that Wyoming join other western states in seceding from the Union - by force, if necessary. They ask Nate to throw in his lot with them, but should he trust them, or is he being set up? As a storm of peril gathers around them, Joe and Nate confront it in different ways - and maybe, for the first time, on opposite sides.

We live with our history, but it can kill us. Faces from the past appear from nowhere at a family funeral, and Will Flemyng, spy-turned-ambassador, is drawn into twin mysteries that threaten everything he holds dear. From Washington, he's pitched back into the Troubles in Northern Ireland and an explosive secret hidden deep in the most dangerous but fulfilling friendship he has known. And while he confronts shadowy adversaries in American streets, and looks for solace at home in the Scottish Highlands, he discovers that his government's most precious Cold War agent is in mortal danger and needs his help to survive.In an electric story of courage and betrayal, Flemyng learns the truth that his life has left him a man with many friends, but still alone. The Spy Across the Water is by James Naughtie.

March 2023

She says he's a victim. They say he's a killer. When an armed man massacres several people in central London, Claudine witnesses the whole thing. To her horror, one of the victims is her brother, Jethro. Driven by grief, Claudine retreats to the family home in the Fens, which is where the police find her. She is left reeling when they tell her Jethro orchestrated the attack. Why would a gentle, if troubled, middle-aged man cause such bloodshed - and why would he include himself in the list of victims? The truth could lie in Jethro's research on a mediaeval cult. If Claudine can't solve the mystery in time, more people will die... and the darkness will claim her too. Twist of Fate is by D L Mark.

What Have We Done is by Alex Finlay. The foster children of Savior House never knew the peace of a normal childhood. Raised in an institution, a group of four friends from the home have now grown and gone their separate ways. They haven't seen one another since they left those abusive foster-home halls, until, twenty-five years later, they are reunited for a single, inescapable reason: someone is trying to kill them. To save their lives, the group will have to revisit the nightmares of their childhoods and confront their past: a past that holds the key to everything.

Robert Ludlum's The Treadstone Rendition is by Joshua Hood. Adam Hayes has stepped away from the field for the very last time. He's promised his wife that he won't put his life on the line any more, and nothing will make him break that promise. Well... almost nothing. With America withdrawing from Afghanistan and the Taliban closing in, Abdul Nassir reaches out to his old partner, Hayes. Ten years ago, Nassir saved the American's life, and the time has come for repayment. Nassir is desperate to get his family out of the country. He is scared of the Taliban... but he can't trust the Americans either: his daughter witnessed a massacre committed by rogue CIA contractors. That only leaves one man who can get them out of the country: Adam Hayes.

April 2023

A mid-air collision in the Alaskan wilderness between two small aircraft leaves ten people dead. Was it a bird strike, pilot error... or premeditated murder? Then an eleventh body is found in the wreckage: a man shot gangland style, twice in the chest and once in the head. In an investigation that reaches to the highest levels of government, justice may not be served, but Kate Shugak is determined that the truth will out, even at the risk of her life and the lives of those she loves most. Not The Ones Dead is by Dana Stabenow.

Death Comes to Costa Del Sol is by M H Ecclestone. Amateur sleuth Astrid Swift swaps the sporting summer in England for a British expat enclave in Spain, where everyone has a mysterious reason for leaving the UK. The sunniest days, the deadliest nights. It's the end of the summer season in the harbour town of Estepona. The holiday makers are heading home, leaving the British expats to reclaim their little corner of paradise. Among them is art restorer Astrid Swift's estranged father. She's sailed into town to reunite with him but has instead been tasked with catching an internet troll who's been threatening his wife online. Soon Astrid is entwined in the lives of these expats, from the boozy local heckler to the socially awkward beachcomber. And then she discovers a body in the bunker of the local golf course... Can Astrid uncover the 'Costa del Troll' behind the poison-pen campaign before they reveal everyone's secret past? Or will they tear this cosy community - including Astrid and her father - even further apart?

The Monk is by Tim Sullivan. The Detective DS George Cross has always wondered why his mother left him when he was a child. Now she is back in his life, he suddenly has answers. But this unexpected reunion is not anything he's used to dealing with. When a disturbing case lands on his desk, he is almost thankful for the return to normality.The Question - The body of a monk is found savagely beaten to death in a woodland near Bristol. Nothing is known about Brother Dominic's past, which makes investigating difficult. How can Cross unpick a crime when they don't know anything about the victim? And why would someone want to harm a monk? The past - Discovering who Brother Dominic once was only makes the picture more puzzling. He was a much-loved and respected friend, brother, son - he had no enemies. Or, at least, none that are obvious. But looking into his past reveals that he was a very wealthy man, that he sacrificed it all for his faith. For a man who has nothing, it seems strange that greed could be the motive for his murder. But greed is a sin after all...

May 2023

Sepulchre Street is by Martin Edwards. 'This is my challenge for you,' the woman in white said. 'I want you to solve my murder.' London, 1930s: Rachel Savernake has been invited to a private view of an art exhibition at a fashionable gallery. The artist, Damaris Gethin, known as 'the Queen of Surrealism', is debuting a show featuring live models pretending to be waxworks of famous killers. Before her welcoming speech, Damaris asks a haunting favour of the amateur sleuth: she wants Rachel to solve her murder. As Damaris takes to a stage set with a guillotine, the lights go out. There is a cry and the blade falls. Damaris has executed herself. While Rachel questions why Damaris would take her own life - and just what she meant by 'solve my murder' - fellow party guest Jacob Flint is chasing a lead on a glamorous socialite with a sordid background. As their paths merge, this case of false identities, blackmail, and fedora-adorned doppelgangers, will descend upon a grand home on Sepulchre Street, where nothing - and no one - is quite what it seems.

June 2023

The Inmate is by Sebastian Fitzek. A missing child. A desperate father. A terrible secret. Serial killer Guido T has already confessed to two horrific child murders and led the Berlin police to the horribly disfigured bodies. The police are sure he is also the kidnapper and murderer of six-year-old Max, who disappeared without trace a year ago. But now Guido T, who is being held in the high-security ward of a psychiatric prison hospital, is staying silent. The investigators have no reliable evidence. And without the prisoner's statement, Max's parents will have no certainty and will never be able to say goodbye to their son. But then an investigator from the homicide commission makes Max's desperate father an unbelievable offer: he will smuggle the distraught parent into the hospital where Guido T is imprisoned. Max's father will be listed as a fake patient, equipped with a fake medical record. He will be as close as he possibly can to the child killer, and plans to force the killer into a confession. Because nothing is worse than uncertainty. Or so he thinks. Until he, as an inmate, learns the gruesome truth...

Burning Bridges by Stephanie Harte is also due to be published in June