The Costa books in chronological order

Book Passage, Corte Madera, California

The annual Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference at the legendary Corte Madera store Book Passage, north of the Golden Gate Bridge, is, quite simply, one of the premier events in the world for people wanting to learn about writing.
I’ve been on this year’s roster for some time, but now there’s a fuller list of the [...]

Now out in Thailand…

It’s difficult to keep up with foreign language translations - there are a lot, and they are always out of sync with UK and US because of the way publishing works. But I’m delighted to say I’m now out in Thai through Nanmee Books, one of Thailand’s principal publishers, who have just produced the first [...]

Sunday Times makes Chopin audio book of the week

The UK’s Sunday Times is one of the first newspapers to review The Chopin Manuscript, declaring it ‘fabulous fun’.
Nice to see a British newspaper get in first! Here’s the review in which the work occupies the audio book of the week slot…..
This unusual thriller is composed by a series of bestselling authors who each [...]

An interview about The Promised Land

Vincent O’Donnell of Arts Alive, the Australian arts and culture radio station, was kind enough to track me down at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival last month for a chat about The Promised Land and how the book fits in with the Costa series (short answer: it doesn’t, it’s a standalone).
As usual in Australia, it was [...]

FAQs about The Chopin Manuscript

Seems I’m getting asked the same questions a lot about The Chopin Manuscript, the serial audio thriller to which I contributed a chapter alongside Jeffery Deaver, Lee Child and a host of others. I’ve put an FAQ on my website to cover the most common ones, but for the sake of convenience it’s reproduced below [...]

Scrivener: it just gets better and better

I wrote here back in August of how I’d moved my fiction writing to the wonderful and ridiculously inexpensive authors’ word processor Scrivener. But that was when I’d just completed the seventh Costa book, which was begun in Pages. Now I am starting from scratch, and determined to set up Scrivener to handle the task [...]

The Chopin Manuscript… a unique thriller

I hate sitting on things, and for the last few months I’ve been sitting on something very interesting indeed. Finally the news just broke today. I will give you more details shortly but if you want to get the quick scoop take a look here.
A bunch of authors under the leadership of Jeffery Deaver and [...]

Harrogate Crime Writing Festival

On tour… what it really means

Around the world in 22 days. Does that sound glamorous? Painful? Indulgent (the air tickets are, naturally, carbon offset, but it’s still a long way to go)?
At the moment it simply feels exhausting. Talk to any professional author about touring and he or she will tend to glaze over and tell you it’s a necessary [...]