Backstabbers by Eliza Jabore

 My debut novel, Backstabbers, sees three best friends lost in the wilderness, desperately in need of help, stumble upon a creepy cabin in the woods. Sounds like the setup for a classic slasher, right? Well, it was also my terrifying reality once when one mistake proved nearly catastrophic for me and my friends in the Colorado Rockies. 

We planned a simple loop hike on a beautiful spring day. But it wasn’t long before the snow started. None of us had prepared for winter weather, dressed only in hoodies and hiking boots, but we didn’t want to turn back. This was an adventure after all! By the time we summited, the snow was ankle-deep, falling so fast that our foot tracks had already been buried.

We ate lunch and began our descent. There was a cute snowball fight in the forest, everyone laughing, ignoring the bitter cold seeping into our boots. We were most of the way back to my car when I dug my frozen fingertips into my pocket. My empty pocket. Strange. Had my pocket been empty before? Panic gripped me. Wasn’t that where my car keys had been? Why the hell would I put them in my hoodie pocket and not my backpack?

“Um, guys,” I muttered, “do any of you have the keys?”

I knew full well no one else had my car keys. But denial is a powerful thing, however fleeting.

There was a scrambled search through everyone’s pockets and backpacks, but the reality was grim and inescapable: my car keys were gone. I had lost them.

Our situation was dire. I could’ve dropped the keys anywhere along our hike. We were already almost back to the car, we’d eaten our food, finished our water, and were frozen through to the bone. It was still snowing hard. This was beginning to feel like the setup to a horror story, one where the doomed travellers froze to death on the mountaintop.

We retraced our already snow-covered steps. My husband heroically volunteered to race back to the summit while the rest of us combed through the forest where we’d had our snowball fight. Then we did something remarkably stupid. We split up. With so much snow, I managed to wander off trail and when I turned around, I couldn’t see my friends. I couldn’t even hear them. There was nothing but pine trees for miles. I called out and heard nothing in reply. I couldn’t feel my toes. And now, the sun had begun to set.

Yep! This was how people died.

Luckily, I found my friends again and when my husband returned empty-handed, we agreed that searching for the keys was a fool’s errand. We returned to the car, now buried in snow. Darkness crept in, bringing with it a new, numbing cold. We were going to freeze to death if we didn’t find shelter. We began trying to bust the car window so at least we could sleep in there for the night.

That’s when one of my friends said words straight from the slasher movie script, “Hey, I think I see a cabin over there.”

Across the snowy road, barely visible, was a house. The only house around for miles. Luckily, when we knocked, a kind (very strange) old lady answered. She let us wait in her garage and phone a friend to come rescue us.

“You’re very lucky,” she said in a raspy voice coated by years of cigarette smoke, “so many mountain lions up here, and you wouldn’t even hear ‘em comin’.”

My friends and I got lucky. But, if that house hadn’t been there with a kind woman to answer, who knows how it could’ve played differently. If say, the elements had bested us, or a creepy man had let us in. If our friendship hadn’t been solid, and festering resentments surfaced...These were the musings that first birthed Backstabbers. A novel where three best friends lost in the wilderness (and a serial killer’s old hunting grounds) need help and come upon an isolated cabin, where an all-too-eager man answers the door.

This trip on the mountain was just one of many personal nightmares that made it into my book. Traveling for the best part of ten years, I collected quite a few. After all, when you’re traveling, you open yourself up to incredible new experiences and the chance to rise to challenges, to surprise yourself by what you’re capable of. But being outside of your element does more than just broaden your horizons, it leaves you vulnerable, too, and utterly exposed. The stakes are higher so far from home, away from your safety net, and this is where our true characters are often uncovered. Because conflict doesn’t just build character, it reveals it, too.

That’s what my main character, Jade, learns the hard way.

Out there in the wilderness, you discover who you (and your friends) truly are.

 Backstabbers by Eliza Jabore (Little Brown Book Group) Out Now

Never turn your back on a friend. Jade, Stef and Zoe are hiking Washington's Bones Hollow Trail, braving cougars, snakes and the storms that roll in without warning. The friends' paranoia isn't helped by listening to a true crime podcast about the serial killer whose hunting ground they're hiking through. Then when Stef twists her ankle - badly - there's no one to hear them scream for help. The only sign of life for miles is a cabin that looks straight out of a horror movie, with an owner who's a little too eager to invite them in. The friends must soon find a way to survive as things spiral out of control. After all, who can you trust when your back's against the wall? But unfortunately for them, the only thing more twisted than this nightmare is their friendship...

You can find Eliza Jabore on Instagram @ elizajabore_theauthor and on X @KupcakeProse

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.

-------------

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

Wedding Thrills by A.E. Gauntlett

I’m forever struck by an old YouTube video I once saw in which some clever editor had taken the much-beloved Mary Poppins and created a new, truly 21st Century trailer. The result was strange, uncanny. Gone was the whimsical and heart-warming movie we all know and love – umbrellas in flight, an emotionally buttoned-up father driven back into the loving arms of his family, furious spit-spotting down bannisters in the wrapper of a feel-good sing-a-long for all ages – and in its place, dark and twisted, was what would previously have seemed impossible: a horror film. Mary’s gentle lullabies were now the songs of a demonic spirit, luring little children to their windows, and her fanciful magic now the torturous gifts of a punitive, child-hating entity who arrives on the wind one day and steals all joy from the world.

What this brilliant bit of editing demonstrates is just how fragile the boundaries of genre are. Ancillary tropes that we take for granted as emblematic of specific genres are slippery and open to manipulation and reinvention. Put simply: one slight turn of the dial can transform a technicolour dream into a Ken Russell-esque nightmare. 

Two genres that have always seemed to me natural bedfellows under the right conditions are thrillers and romances – for a hungry, lustful relationship can so easily turn toxic, and what thriller is complete without the promise (or threat) of a romantic connection made (or broken)?

We're all familiar with the wedding as a backdrop to a rom-com - the final act; the joyful destination after a long, troubled-journey; an event to wash out the old and welcome the new; the fresh start; the happily-ever-after. It is the pinnacle of the rising tension, a restoration of equilibrium, the moment of arrival. Indeed, Hollywood's idea of the wedding has become so ingrained in us that, for the past half-decade, life has grown to imitate art. Weddings have become more lavish affairs, more choreographed, more pressured. And so, fiction has birthed reality. 

The union of two families bound by the ultimate expression of an enduring love mark weddings as quintessentially joyful, supposedly harmonious, occasions. But one upending of a familiar trope, and we're in very different territory. The bridal expectation can soon turn to dread, the coming together of the tribes can give rise to friction, long-buried secrets can bubble to the surface, and any last-minute doubts can cast a heavy pall across the entire occasion. Harried brides, nervous groomsmen, fractious families, and emotional guests. In many ways, the wedding is the perfect setting for a thriller.

It was no accident, then, that I chose a wedding as the focal point of my thriller, The Stranger at the Wedding. The book starts with a wedding, and it ends with one, though the two occasions are worlds apart and troubled for very different reasons. In our main event, we meet our mild-mannered, diffident protagonist, Annie, who is about to marry Mark, a surgeon, following a whirlwind romance. As they’re about to cement their love before a throng of well-wishers, Annie spots a face in the crowd she doesn’t recognise: a man, she suspects, who has come to raze to the ground all that she has built with Mark.

Who can say, hand on heart, that we have known every single person at our own weddings? Those we don’t recognise, we trust, were invited by our partners – work colleagues, distant relatives, rekindled friends, perhaps. Weddings have far too many moving parts for any one person to keep on top of every detail; I guess that’s why so many of us turn to wedding planners. Such occasions, fraught with both anxiety, excitement and doubt, allow the unexpected to rear its ugly head. Therein lies the potential for drama, both quiet- and explosive.

In The Stranger at the Wedding, though, it is not the uninvited guest who initially throws the event into crisis, but the groom himself, who turns to Annie, our not-so-blushing bride, and delivers the hammer blow at the end of the opening Act: we need to talk. But this comes as no great surprise to Annie; she had been expecting this. Both parties, it seems, have been concealing, and it is the public spectacle of the wedding itself that has forced them out of hiding. 

A writer is a little like a conductor, deciding which bits of the orchestra to dial up, and which to dial down at any given moment. A wedding – this wedding – could have gone one of two ways. I chose to dial up the tension, the element of the unknown, the fear of losing someone close to you. In another world, I could have foregrounded the couples’ love, their complete and utter joy, their journey off into the sunset, and that – much like a re-cut Mary Poppins trailer – would have told a very different story.

The Stranger at The Wedding by A E Gauntlett. (Bloomsbury Publishing) Out Now Annie never believed in true love. Not until she met Mark. It’s a whirlwind romance and Annie has never felt surer about anything in her life. But as she stands at the altar, she spots an unknown face in the crowd. Who is the stranger at the wedding? What really happened to Mark’s first wife? And is Annie really the person she says she is? The stranger at the wedding: whose side are you on?

The author can be found on X @albioneye

Mel Pennant on Miss Hortense

My protagonist in A Murder for Miss Hortense is retired nurse, keen gardener, renowned cook and fearless sleuth, Miss Hortense, a formidable woman from the Windrush generation. She emigrated from Jamaica in the 1960s and moved to the quiet fictional suburb of Bigglesweigh in Birmingham, where she was not immediately welcomed.   

She takes great pride in her home and is also quite observant about other peoples’, though she doesn’t care what other people think about her. She’s gots skills . . . She can tell when a Jamaican patty doesn’t include all the right ingredients and is an expert at uncovering secrets.

My husband describes Miss Hortense as ‘like water’ – she gets everywhere. She is fearless and will knock down walls to get to the truth. But Miss Hortense also carries a wound. Something very traumatic happened to her thirty-five years ago and when an unidentified man is found dead, her long buried past comes rushing back to greet her. She knows that, in order to solve the crimes of the current day, she must go back and solve the crimes of the past. 

At the heart of my novel is the Pardner. A Pardner, also called Box Hand or Sousou in the Caribbean community, is at its basic level a mutual saving scheme. A group of people come together and pool their resources, then the accumulated wealth is distributed on a regular basis amongst the contributing members.  

In the UK, the Pardner was and still is used by the Windrush generation (‘Windrush generation’ to describe the women and men who came to the UK between 1948 and 1971 from the Caribbean to assist in rebuilding the country after the Second World War, and who went on to make the UK their home). At that time, one of the reasons the Pardner was so prolific was because many Afro-Caribbean communities were excluded from traditional forms of credit and finance and/or distrustful of it.  

At the core of any Pardner there is a person who leads it, often a matriarchal figure, who provides discipline and keeps everyone in line; she is often called the Pardner Lady.  

The idea of the Pardner fascinates me. It was used as a solution to a problem encountered by my grandparents and their generation because of a lack of access to traditional forms of finance. I thought, what other problems might a community like theirs have encountered? What other ideas might they come up with to overcome them? It felt logical to me to extend the remit of Miss Hortense and her Pardner Network to solving crime – and so the Pardner Network of Bigglesweigh was born, originally a group of eight men and women whose mission was to find justice for those who couldn’t find it for themselves.  

The inspiration for A Murder for Miss Hortense partly came from my grandmothers, who were both phenomenal women and my paternal grandmother was even a Pardner Lady. As I’ve got older, I’ve become more in awe of them and their courageousness.

Golden Age crime mysteries were a big influence while writing A Murder for Miss Hortense, along with Barbara Neely’s Blanche White series, whose heroine is an African-American housekeeper turned sleuth and one of the first Black female fictional detectives who used the whodunit as a tool for racial and social commentary.  

A Murder for Miss Hortense is set in the 1960s and 2000s. I wanted readers to understand the history of Miss Hortense and how and why the Pardner Network was created as part of the grounding for what happens in the current day. I’m a firm believer that the past is part of our present.

I hope you enjoy being with Miss Hortense and the Pardner Network as much as I have. I’m really excited for what’s to come.

A Murder for Miss Hortense by Mel Pennant (John Murray Press) Out Now

Death has come to her doorstep . . .Retired nurse, avid gardener, renowned cake maker and fearless sleuth Miss Hortense has lived in Bigglesweigh, a quiet Birmingham suburb, since she emigrated from Jamaica in 1960. She takes great pride in her home, starching her lace curtains bright white, and she can tell if she's been short-changed on turmeric before she's even taken her first bite of a beef patty. Thirty-five years of nursing have also left her afraid of nobody - be they a local drug dealer or a priest - and an expert in deciphering other people's secrets with just a glance. Miss Hortense uses her skills to investigate the investments of the Pardner network - a special community of Black investors, determined to help their people succeed. But when an unidentified man is found dead in one of the Pardner's homes, a Bible quote noted down beside his body, Miss Hortense's long-buried past comes rushing back to greet her, bringing memories of the worst moment of her life, one which her community has never let her forget. It is time for Miss Hortense to solve a mystery that will see her, and the community she loves, tested to their limits.

More information about Mel Pennant can be found on her website. You can also find her on X @MelPennant, on Instagram @mel_pennant and on Facebook.

When Inspiration Strikes by Jenna Satterthwaite.

There’s a reason we have the phrase “inspiration strikes.” It really does feel like lightning–something unexpected and powerful–and in the case of my debut novel, Made for You, that’s exactly how the original idea came about.

I was taking a walk during my work break, along the Chicago river, in March 2022. I’d been watching the new season of Love is Blind on Netflix and I’d just finished reading The Ones We’re Meant to Find by Joan He (highly recommend) which had put Bots that are indistinguishable from humans on my mind. As I walked, ideas collided, and I thought “oooh, what if a robot that looked exactly like a human competed on a reality TV show?” It was a no brainer to add murder.

I took my first notes that very night, without knowing who the victim would be, and who the killer–but the idea felt so compelling to me that I was determined to figure it out.

I wrote the book in a kind of fever, and the first draft was complete in 7 weeks. Though it started as ‘just’ a fun idea, writing it quickly became an incredibly cathartic experience. My youngest sister was dying of cancer as I wrote it (she died right as the book was going out on submission to editors, summer 2022), and this book became a place for me to process my grief, my questions about purpose and pain and the isolation that intense suffering brings. During the cancer years leading up to writing Made for You, I was deconstructing a lot of the assumptions I’d made about life/existence/God from the Christian point of view, and that definitely came out as I explored the main character Julia’s relationship to Andy, her creator.

This started as a fun book—and I think it IS a fun book still—but it’s also my grief book and does go to some dark places. But in a light way! Kind of. I keep describing it as “suspense candy,” and I think that in spite of the heavy themes, it’s still mostly a frothy, light, murdery page-turner.

Of course, other questions snuck their way in that were less personal and more heady–like, what makes identity? Is it a core essence that’s inalterable, or is it our choices that shape us and define us? Social issues I care deeply about also started weaving their way in–the way our culture objectifies women, the toxic dynamics of the patriarchy, and the dark side of the narrative often woven around romance that we are ‘made for each other.’ Add to that an examination of social media, our obsession with image, the pressure of ‘relatability,’ and the ethics of Artificial Intelligence as it starts to encroach on ‘human’ jobs. In short, that original lightning strike sparked in many, many directions, and I had an incredible time 

Will you find answers about any of the above issues in this novel? (*laughs to self*) No. We fiction writers are lucky because, unlike our non fiction counterparts, we don’t have to actually answer the questions we pose. Our job is to just turn the prism on the issues we’re highlighting and show as many facets of a question as we can—which, for me, is the fun part.

The answers are up to you.

Made for You by Jenna Satterthwaite (Verve Books) Out now.

Hi. My name is Julia. I'm a Synth. And I'm here to find love... Julia Walden - a Synth - was designed for one reason: to compete on The Proposal and claim the heart of bachelor Josh LaSala. Her casting is controversial, but Julia seems to get her fairy-tale ending when Josh gets down on one knee. Fast-forward fifteen months, and Julia and Josh are married and raising their baby in small-town Indiana. But with haters around every corner, Julia's life is a far cry from the domestic bliss she imagined. Then her splintering world shatters: Josh goes missing, and she becomes the prime suspect in his murder. With no one left she can trust, Julia takes the investigation into her own hands. But the explosive truths she uncovers will drive her to her breaking point - and isn't that where a person's true nature is revealed? That is... if Julia truly is a person.

Jenna Satterthwaite's debut novel MADE FOR YOU (published by VERVE Books) is a page-turning, twisty debut that skilfully merges artificial intelligence, psychological thriller and reality TV.

More information about the author can be found on her website. You can also find her on X @jennaSchmenna and on Facebook.

The Power of The Outsider

I've always been fascinated by the out-of-place. The marginalised, the unsure, the people faking it 'til they make it, right down to the actual swindlers and imposters and con artists. If writing compelling narrative fiction is about tension, what's more tense than someone being where they believe (or someone else believes, if they knew the truth) that they don't deserve to be?

In my debut novel 'A Reluctant Spy', the protagonist Jamie Tulloch is a perennial fish out of water who turns his unease into a career. At the age of 23, a working class loner adrift at his Cambridge college, he agrees to become a Legend, part of a secret MI6 programme to recruit individuals willing to act as living cover stories. Sign up and you'll get a secret helping hand through life - access, job offers, nudges in the right direction. But at some point, you'll need to step out of your life for a few weeks while a lookalike agent uses your identity as bulletproof cover. Except, of course, something goes wrong and Jamie finds himself on a mission he's not trained, ready or even very willing to take on.

While I don't precisely share Jamie's life history (my upbringing was a whole lot less tough than his, and I very definitely didn't go to Cambridge), we do share a common experience of navigating social contexts, workplaces, relationships and friendships that crossed boundaries and left us feeling out of place. I was in my university's Officer Training Corps for three years and got partway through the process of applying to Sandhurst, which was my first serious brush with people from a dramatically different background. After that, I was lucky enough to get into a graduate scheme and move to London, where I brought a regional accent and a distinct feeling of imposter syndrome to the glossy world of IT consulting. I vividly remember ending up at parties with investment banking trainees and wondering how on earth I'd ended up there.

Unlike Jamie, though, I hadn't made a Faustian pact that dictated my future, so I was free to choose a different path. I returned to Scotland and developed parallel careers in digital design and writing. And as I did, an old fascination returned to me - the world of spies and spying.

When I was studying English Literature at the University of Aberdeen, I wrote my final dissertation on the topic of Paranoia in Modern Spy Fiction, focusing on Graham Greene and John Le Carré. I looked at the isolated, fearful lone spy, without gadgets or guns or even certainty about their mission, conducting morally compromised missions in dangerous, brutal and hostile territories.

That initial fascination with paranoia and fear in spy fiction then spent a couple of decades marinating in a whole slew of different takes on the world of espionage, from the betrayed and amnesiac human weapon of the Bourne books and films to the misfits and misanthropes of the glorious Slough House series by Mick Herron. So when I was in discussions with my agent and editor about my debut novel, I wanted to draw on that continually broadening spy fiction tradition. But what would I bring, personally? The answer seemed obvious - the feeling of being an ordinary person who is pretty sure they're not actually supposed to be where they are.

As I wrote the book, I realised that what I most wanted Jamie to experience was the same thing I had through various jobs, relationships and pursuits - the slowly dawning realisation that I was actually able to take on scary new roles, learn new skills, and that I did deserve to be there. And that far from being the deceitful and sinister infiltration of a Tom Ripley-esque character, the ability to adapt, to learn new social rules and to function in hierarchies and contexts you weren't born into is a serious life skill and advantage.

In the book, Jamie uses his chameleonic abilities to deal with rogue Russian mercenaries, CIA operatives, arms dealers and many more mysterious characters swirling around his target, Arkady Bocharov, while proving to himself that he might just have what it takes to be an effective covert agent. And in writing this book, I got to indulge that crucial question - what would would my price be to become a 'living cover story' like Jamie? And what would I do if I found myself in the same situation, thrown into the middle of an active mission?

My hope is readers will ask themselves the same questions. And I also hope they'll grow to love the often haplessly foolhardy Jamie Tulloch and the other members of the Legends Programme trying desperately to keep him alive.

A Reluctant Spy by David Goodman (Headline) Out Now

Jamie Tulloch is a successful exec at a top tech company, a long way from the tough upbringing that drove him to rise so far and so quickly.  But he has a secret...since the age of 23, he's had a helping hand from the Legend Programme, a secret intelligence effort to prepare impenetrable backstories for undercover agents. Real people, living real lives, willing to hand over their identities for a few weeks in return for a helping hand with plum jobs, influence and access. When his tap on the shoulder finally comes, it's swiftly followed by the thud of a body. Arriving at a French airport ready to hand over his identity, Jamie finds his primary contact dead, the agent who's supposed to step into his life AWOL and his options for escape non-existent. Pitched into a deadly mission on hostile territory, Jamie must contend with a rogue Russian general, arms dealers, elite hackers, CIA tac-ops and the discovery of a brewing plan for war. Dangerously out of his depth, he must convince his sceptical mission handler he can do the job of a trained field agent while using his own life story as convincing cover. Can Jamie play himself well enough to avoid being killed - and to avert a lethal global conflict?

More information about the author and his writing can be found on his website. You can also follow him on X @WordsByGoodman and on Instagram @davidgoodmanauthor

Creating Constantinople: Influences on a Victorian Novel

I started writing novels at a very early age. I was twelve when I wrote my first novel (a crime-thriller told from multiple perspectives in seedy LA), and fourteen when I wrote my second (an epic revenge Western)! Growing up in leafy Golders Green, novels were an escape from normal life – and that escapist urge still motivates my writing to this day.

Murder in Constantinople follows Ben Canaan, a troublesome 21-year-old in the East End of London in 1854. When we meet Ben, he is torn between a life of petty crime under the wing of a dockland gangster, and following his father’s footsteps as a tailor in the family workshop. But an affair with a beautiful stranger and a theft gone wrong results in Ben going on the run to Constantinople: capital of the Ottoman Empire on the eve of the Crimean War. Ben quickly finds himself caught in the crosshairs of a deadly serial killer terrorising the city, and must unravel a series of brutal murders in order to survive.

Murder in Constantinople began life when I graduated as an English student at Cambridge. My literary passions were the Russian giants of the nineteenth century – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev – as well as specialists in serialised storytelling including Dickens and Henry James. I particularly loved the Bildungsroman genre: coming-of-age stories such as David Copperfield and Great Expectations, focused on the personal growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood. 

I wanted to bring this type of storytelling to the detective genre. Our hero Ben is not a detective when we meet him, but over the course of the story, he becomes one. This explodes the conventional trope of detective novels: usually, we meet the detective once he already has his bag of tricks, his modus operandi, his view of the world (think Sherlock or Poirot). But in Murder in Constantinople, we see Ben start to fill his bag of tricks – we are watching the formation of a detective in real time.

The nineteenth century fascinated me not just because of my literary influences, but also because of my family history. Similar to the Canaan family of my novel, my ancestors were Jews who fled to London from Vienna in the mid-nineteenth century, setting up shop as milliners in the Jewish ghetto of London’s East End. I wanted to explore what it must have been like growing up in that world as an immigrant, but told from the perspective of a young man with my mindset: wanting to break free from these confines and chart his own course.

Ben, like many children of immigrant families, is saddled with his family’s rigid expectations – especially his father, who demands that he joins the family business. For Ben, the alternatives are stark: either he fully embraces life in London’s criminal underworld, or he embarks on an unexpected adventure into a warzone. Murder in Constantinople tells the story of how Ben makes this choice, and in the process finds his calling.

A major theme of Murder in Constantinople is colonialism and its legacy. Ben’s adventures are set against the backdrop of colonial conflicts, allowing us to see colonialism at work – its perpetrators, its winners and losers, the roots of modern conflicts, and how the practices of colonialism persist even today in a post-colonial age. 

The Crimean War is a powerful example of this which still resonates today. In the 1850s, Crimea was the epicentre of a violent clash between the Russian Empire and the empires of Europe. And now, in the 21^stcentury, that same region is the focal point for another violent clash between the “modern empires” of the Global East and the Global West.

A significant part of my research was devoted to understanding Constantinople, the location of modern-day Istanbul, as it existed in the 1850s. To do this, I read travel books from the 19^th century – old Baedekers and Murray’s Handbooks – to develop a nuanced sense of life in all its facets: the city’s topography, its rich array of languages, peoples and cultures, its architecture, its political hierarchies, its local economy, its laws. The goal was to portray Constantinople not as a place in history, but as a place that feels as present for readers as it is for the characters inhabiting it.

Murder in Constantinople is the first in a planned series of five novels, each exploring Ben’s adventures as a globe-trotting detective. I am currently writing the second book in the series – titled Death on the Pearl River, also for Pushkin Press – which takes an older Ben into even darker territory. The Ben Canaan Mysteries will chart the course of Ben’s entire life over several decades. So, on some level, these detective novels taken together will be a biography both of Ben and the century he lived in, as much as a series of crimes to be solved.

Murder in Constantinople by A E Goldin (Pushkin Press) Out Now. London, 1854. Twenty-one-year-old Ben Canaan attracts trouble wherever he goes. His father wants him to be a good Jewish son, working for the family business on Whitechapel Road, but Ben and his friends, the 'Good-for-Nothings', just want adventure. Then the discovery of an enigmatic letter and a photograph of a beautiful woman offer an escapade more dangerous than anything he'd imagined. Suddenly Ben is thrown into a mystery that takes him all the way to Constantinople, the jewel of an empire and the centre of a world on the brink of war. His only clue is three words: 'The White Death'. Now he must find what links a string of grisly murders, following a trail through king making and conspiracy, poison and high politics, bloodshed and betrayal. In a city of deadly secrets, no one is safe - and one wrong step could cost Ben his life.

More information about Aron and his work can be found on his website. You can also follow him on X @A.E.Goldin and on Instagram @a.e.goldin and also on Facebook.

2024 Ngaio Marsh Award Winners

 The Verdict Is In: 2024 Ngaio Marsh Award winners explore societal prejudices and characters under fire

A trio of superb Kiwi writers were honoured at WORD Christchurch Festival last night as they scooped the 2024 Ngaio Marsh Awards for novels offering readers insights into people and place alongside cracking crime tales

In the fifteenth instalment of Aotearoa’s annual awards celebrating excellence in crime, mystery, thriller, and suspense writing, Rotorua author Claire Baylis won Best First Novel for her harrowing examination of jury beliefs and biases in Dice (Allen & Unwin), while Scotland-based DV Bishop scooped Best Novel for his Renaissance Florence-set mystery Ritual of Fire (Macmillan), and Wellington writer Jennifer Lane joined rare company by winning Best Kids/YA for smalltown mystery Miracle (Cloud Ink Press).

“I’m stoked we have a special award this year recognising writers of crime, mystery, and thriller tales for younger readers,” says Ngaios founder Craig Sisterson. “Many of us owe any lifelong passion for books, and all the good that come along with that, to the children’s authors we read when we were youngsters ourselves. Aotearoa has amazing kids authors, across many genres. In future we plan to award our Best Kids/YA Book prize biennially, alternating with our Best Non-Fiction prize that returns in 2025.”

Last night, ‘Bookshop Detectives’ Gareth and Louise Ward interrogated several of the prime suspects, aka 2024 Ngaios finalists, in person and by video before a large crowd of witnesses in Tūranga, before revealing whowunnit. “It’s the kind of denouement Dame Ngaio may have enjoyed,” says Sisterson.

First up, Lane was stunned to find herself onstage accepting the 2024 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Kids/YA, adding to the Best First Novel prize she won in 2018 for All Our Secrets. She joins Paul Cleave, Jacqueline Bublitz, and Michael Bennett as winners of multiple Ngaio Marsh Awards. The judges praised Miracle, which stars a teenager trying to deal with devastating events and clear her father’s name after he’s arrested for a brutal attack, as “poignant and funny, with a complex storyline and memorable, well-developed characters including a fascinating heroine with her authentic adolescent voice”.

Lane’s fellow IIML graduate Claire Baylis was equally thrilled to win Best First Novel for Dice, a unique courtroom drama inspired by her research for the trans-Tasman Jury Project. Her debut gives readers insights into some harsh realities in our criminal justice system through the eyes and beliefs and biases of 12 jurors serving on a tricky sexual assault case. “Both timely and sensitively handled, there is so much that’s clever and surprising about Dice,” said the Ngaios judges. “Inventive, devastating, infuriating.”

The international judging panel for this year’s Ngaio Marsh Awards comprised leading crime fiction critics, editors, and authors from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK, and the United States.

The Best Novel judges praised Bishop for crafting great characters and “vividly evoking the glorious but menacing Medici-era Florence with convincing historical details seamlessly woven” into Ritual of Fire’s terrific story of Cesare Aldo, a gay court officer at a time when that was punishable potentially by death, trying to uncover the murderers of rich merchants burned to death in disturbing echoes of a religious sect.

“I’m delighted, and amazed frankly because the standard of the books on the longlist this year, let alone amongst the finalists, was incredible,” said Bishop over video from his home south of Edinburgh, when he was surprised with the news Ritual of Fire had won the 2024 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel.

For more information on any of our 2024 Ngaio Marsh Awards winners or finalists, or the Ngaios in general, please contact ngaiomarshaward@gmail.com, or founder Craig Sisterson, craigsisterson@hotmail.com

Miracle by Jennifer Lane (Cloud Ink Press)

Born in the middle of Australia’s biggest-ever earthquake, Miracle is fourteen when her world crumbles. Thanks to her dad’s new job at Compassionate Cremations — which falls under suspicion for Boorunga’s spate of sudden deaths — the entire town turns against their family. Miracle is tormented by her classmates, even by Oli, the boy she can’t get out of her head. She fears for her agoraphobic mother, and for her angelic, quake-damaged brother, Julian. When Oli plays a cruel trick on Miracle, he sets off a chain of devastating events. Then her dad is arrested for a brutal attack. Miracle takes the full weight on her shoulders. How can she convince the town of her dad’s innocence?

Rituals of Fire by D V Bishop (Macmillan UK)

Florence. Summer, 1538. A night patrol finds a rich merchant hanged and set ablaze in the city’s main piazza. More than mere murder, this killing is intended to put the fear of God into Florence. Forty years earlier on this date, puritanical monk Girolamo Savonarola was executed the same way in the same place. Does this new killing mean Savonarola’s vengeful spirit has risen again? Or are his fanatical disciples plotting to revive the monk’s regime of holy terror? Cesare Aldo has his suspicions but is hunting thieves and fugitives in the Tuscan countryside, leaving Constable Carlo Strocchi to investigate the ritual killing. When another important merchant is slain even more publicly than the first, those rich enough to escape the summer heat are fleeing to their country estates. But the Tuscan hills can also be dangerous places. Soon growing religious fervour combines with a scorching heatwave to drive the city ever closer to madness, while someone is stalking powerful men that forged lifelong alliances during the dark days of Savonarola and his brutal followers. Unless Aldo and Strocchi can work together to stop the killer, Florence could become a bonfire of the vanities once more . . .

Dice by Claire Baylis (Allen & Unwin)

Four teenage boys invent a sex game based on rolling dice and doing what the numbers say. They are charged with multiple sexual offences against three teenage girls. Twelve random jurors are brought together in a trial to work out what actually happened. Only they can say whether crimes have been committed and who should be punished. How does the jury find?

Britains’s Biggest Crime Prize Searches For The Next Bestselling Writer of Colour

 

The Joffe Books Prize is looking for a talented new crime fiction writer of colour, with one of the UK’s largest literary prizes for the winner.

This year the Joffe Books Prize judging panel includes A.A. Chaudhuri, bestselling author of She’s Mine, and literary agent Gyamfia Osei from Andrew Nurnberg Associates.

The prize invites submissions from unagented authors from Black, Asian, Indigenous and minority ethnic backgrounds writing in crime fiction genres including: electrifying psychological thrillers, cosy mysteries, gritty police procedurals, twisty chillers, unputdownable suspense mysteries and shocking domestic noirs.

The winner will be offered a prize package consisting of a two-book publishing deal with Joffe Books, a £1,000 cash prize, and a £25,000 audiobook offer from Audible for the first book.

The submission period ends at midnight on 30 September 2024.

HOW TO ENTER

Entrants are invited to submit their full-length manuscript, written in English, along with a synopsis of the book and author biography, to prize@joffebooks.com.

This prize is open to UK residents and British citizens (including those living abroad) only. The opening date for entries is 15 May 2024. The competition closes 30 September 2024, 23.59 GMT. No entries received outside this period will be accepted.

Read the full Terms & Conditions here.

ABOUT THE PRIZE

The winner will be offered a prize package consisting of the following: a two-book publishing contract with Joffe Books on its standard author agreement terms; a £1,000 cash prize; a two-year membership to the Society of Authors; a £25,000 audiobook contract with Audible for the first book. The prize is a package and can only be accepted in its entirety.

The prize will be offered to the selected winner. Joffe Books may choose an alternative winner if acceptance is not confirmed within one week.

Northumberland-based Christie J. Newport won the inaugural prize in 2021, followed by Sam Genever in 2022 and Renita D’Silva in 2023. Christie’s winning entry and debut novel, The Raven’s Mark, is available online and in all good bookshops now!

THE JUDGES

The 2024 judges are A.A. Chaudhuri, Gyamfia Osei, Emma Grundy Haigh, Jasmine Callaghan, Jasper Joffe and Kate Lyall Grant. The winner of the competition will be selected by these judges based on the quality and commercial potential of the work.

A.A.CHAUDHURI, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SHE’S MINE: “I am so incredibly thrilled and honoured to be a Judge on the Joffe Books Prize Panel. Since its inception in 2021 this fantastic competition, which continues to go from strength to strength, has allowed a plethora of exceptionally talented writers of colour in the crime fiction genre to shine through, and I’m beyond excited to be a part of that process this year.”

GYAMFIA OSEI, LITERARY AGENT: “I'm delighted to be judging the Joffe Books Prize this year alongside A.A. Chaudhuri and Emma Grundy Haigh. The cohort of writers were brilliant last year so I can't wait to dive into the 2024 entries!”

EMMA GRUNDY HAIGH, FORMER EDITORIAL DIRECTOR AT JOFFE BOOKS: “The Joffe Books Prize, now in its fourth year, just keeps going from strength to strength. The prize is dedicated to amplifying #ownvoices and publishing truly excellent crime fiction. With Audible’s involvement, it is also the largest prize package for crime fiction in the UK. We have great plans for this year and the addition of Jasmine Callaghan as one of the judges is just the start!”

JASMINE CALLAGHAN, COMMISSIONING EDITOR AT JOFFE BOOKS: “I couldn’t be more excited to join the panel of the Joffe Books Prize. I feel honoured to be taking part in the competition, which is actively addressing the lack of diversity in publishing and amplifying underrepresented voices with real passion. I know this is going to be the best year yet.”

ABOUT A.A. CHAUDHURI

A.A. Chaudhuri is a former City lawyer, turned thriller writer. She is the author of The Scribe and The Abduction, featuring feisty lawyer Maddy Kramer. Her first highly acclaimed psychological thriller, She’s Mine, was named the L.J. Ross Book Club pick of the month. Alex lives in Surrey with her family. Besides being an avid crime fiction reader, she enjoys fitness, films, anything Italian and a good margarita!

ABOUT GYAMFIA OSEI

Gyamfia Osei represents an array of brilliant authors writing across adult and children's books, including Dean Atta, Busayo Mataluko and Frances Mensah Williams. She is a keen advocate of commercial fiction and, in the crime and mystery space, particularly loves cosy crime, domestic suspense and thrillers with a strong romantic thread. She is always looking for well-plotted, fast-paced narratives with authentic characters who lodge themselves in her mind long after she’s finished reading.

ABOUT JOFFE BOOKS

Joffe Books is one of the UK’s leading independent publishers of excellent commercial fiction, especially crime and mystery fiction. Joffe Books is renowned for working closely with authors from across the world to create fantastic books and turning them into bestsellers. Since 2014, Joffe Books has published more than 500 books by more than 70 authors and has sold over 10 million books. The publisher’s roster of award-winning authors and New York Times, USA Today and Amazon bestsellers includes Joy Ellis, Faith Martin, Robert Goddard, Rick Mofina, Volker Kutscher, Simon Brett and Stella Cameron. Joffe Books won Trade Publisher of the Year at the Independent Publishing Awards in 2023 and was a finalist for Publisher of the Year at the Romantic Novelists’ Association Awards 2023 and shortlisted for Independent Publisher of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2024 for the fifth year in a row.

While Joffe Books maintains open submissions for all authors, this competition is designed to offer an opportunity to Black, Asian and minority ethnic writers, who are particularly underrepresented in crime fiction publishing.

Jo Cunningham on Twenty years to publication - how not to become an overnight success

My debut novel, ‘Death by Numbers’ has just been published. It’s a cosy crime mystery that follows Una, a risk averse actuary, as she uncovers a series of mysterious deaths and must put herself in danger to find the culprit, even if it means losing the no-claims-bonus on her personal injury policy.

Please don’t think this is a novel that I simply turned my hand to during the lockdowns, or just ‘wrote itself’ after I decided to take the plunge. Getting to publication took me twenty years while I worked full-time in IT. 

If you want to achieve a similar level of delayed gratification here are my top three tips:

Tip 1 – Tell your work colleagues you’re writing a novel

Early on in my writing efforts, I disclosed to my colleagues that I was working on a novel. My fellow workers reacted by telling me, ‘You’re going to be the next Dan Brown!’, ‘The coffee round’s on you’ or in one case, ‘Why bother writing a novel? It’s all made-up. I only read non-fiction myself.’ As the years passed, the comments morphed into ‘Are you published yet?’ before ending up with a plaintive ‘Still writing?’. But workmates continued to ask, and joking aside, I appreciated people taking an interest, even if my updates became less enthusiastic. They still thought of me as someone who wrote, so perhaps I should too.

Tip 2 – Spend too much time uncritically consuming detective series 

I’m always happy to reach for a book that has a dénouement scene near the end. And I think it’s fair to say that ITV3 is my spiritual home. I even enjoy the adverts for cruises and recliner chairs. But it took me a long, long time to take a step back and start to analyse books and television programmes in order to become a better writer. 

I now find it difficult to switch-off when reading a detective novel - I’m churning over how the clues have been planted or when the first murder took place, or how the author is upping the stakes. Don’t get me wrong, I still love reading these books but I’m trying to push myself to improve by learning from writers who are better than me at their craft.

And I don’t just analyse cosy crime books – I might look at a thriller and think about how the author creates pace and a page-turning quality. Sci-fi can be a rich guide to world-building. Romance can show to build an emotional connection with characters. Obviously, I’m being a bit broadbrush and you don’t learn only ‘one thing’ from a book or genre – I just want to get across that I enjoy learning from books that are in a totally different genre from mine. I’m not sure how successful I am in translating my analysis back into what I’m writing, but that’s part of the process too.

Tip 3 – Don’t send your book out to agents

My first three novels went straight in the ‘bottom drawer’ i.e. a document folder on my laptop. Given how long it took me to fashion an IKEA desk from three brutal planks of MDF, I probably wouldn’t have the wherewithal to construct an actual bottom drawer, or even one of the middle ones.

I didn’t seriously consider sending these fledgling books out to agents. I think I was hampered by a fear of rejection and the more straightforward realisation that they weren’t good enough and would need a huge effort to bring them up to a decent standard. By the fourth attempt, I redrafted the novel multiple times and when I couldn’t take it any further, I send it out to a handful of agents. I received some personal rejections – the comments were gently encouraging but I knew this novel was missing something – it went in the bottom drawer. But I felt I’d made progress, and I started on Death By Numbers back in 2017. 

I was now on book five and painfully aware of my limitations as a writer. I had improved on the basics (reading back over early work told me that) but I’d also realised that I needed to be much more persistent and critical with redrafts. I really took my time reading many novels (Tip 2!), reading books on aspects of craft I was poor at (Setting! Show not tell!) and most of all redrafting until I was bored silly looking at my book. Then once more I psyched myself up to submit it to agents.

Some writers are gifted enough to be published with their first novel whereas I’ve had to graft to improve. By the time I was on my fifth book, I’d become so involved that I knew I’d continue writing novels, no matter whether or how they got published. And that’s another area that’s changed since I started writing, there are many more routes into publication now.

So, there you have my three tips on delaying publication of your novel.

Despite my terrible advice, there is a happy ending… eventually a lovely agent plucked my manuscript off the slush pile and took a chance on me. And having that one person say ‘yes’ made me forget all the ‘no’s’, for a good half an hour or so…

Death by Numbers by Jo Cunningham. (Constable, Little, Brown) Out Now

Una has always been more comfortable working with numbers than people. As an actuary for an insurance company, her job is to spot patterns that other people might miss. When the data for her latest project - into the predicted number of deaths in seaside resorts - shows a blip in her forecasts, Una's untarnished reputation at work is at risk. That is, unless she can work out why there's been an unusual spate of accidental deaths by the coast. Death by Hanging Basket? She's not seen that before. Where better to begin than her mother's hometown of Eastbourne, where strange fatalities are befalling her mother's bingo crowd. But as Una puts her spreadsheets aside and begins to investigate, a sinister pattern begins to emerge and she realises that there is nothing accidental about these casualties. Can Una stop the killer in this small seaside town, before she becomes a not-so-vital statistic?