I’m absolutely thrilled to show you the cover of my upcoming psych thriller One Bad Thing – and, oh, what a classy thing it is.
The story of a radio agony aunt whose past comes back to haunt her, One Bad Thing is out February, but of course you can do the clicky thing and pre-order it right now. I hope you love the cover as much as I do!
Hi everyone, I’m thrilled to be able to tell you my new crime novel THE BAD PLACE is out now!
It’s the first in a new series about Sasha Dawson, a detective inspector with Essex Police. Sasha leads up a Major Investigation Team on the Essex coast. She’s an easy-going investigator and a harassed mum with a noisy family. I’m a little bit in love with Sasha – and I think you’ll fall for her too.
In Sasha’s first investigation she races against time to find a teenage girl who’s gone missing – and discover the connection to the notorious abductions that happened at The Bad Place…
Here’s the blurb:
‘The newspapers called it The Bad Place. A remote farm out on the Thames estuary, where six children were held captive for two weeks. Only five came home.
That was twenty years ago. Now adults, they meet up annually to hold a candlelit vigil for their friend who died. The only rule is that no-one can talk about what happened the night they escaped. But at this year’s event, one of them witnesses a kidnapping. A young girl, Sammi, is bundled into a van in front of their eyes.
Is history repeating itself? Is one of them responsible? Or is someone sending them a twisted message? DI Sasha Dawson, of Essex Police, is certain that the key to finding Sammi lies in finding out the truth about The Bad Place. But she also knows that with every second she spends trying to unlock the past, the clock ticks down for the missing girl…’
The Bad Place is out in hardback and as an ebook, with the paperback coming in March ’20. You can get your copy right now from Amazon and Kobo, and at your local bookshop.
I hope you enjoy it!
I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve got a new three-book deal with Head Of Zeus. We’re talking a brand-new crime series featuring a fab new heroine and a creepy psychological thriller! Here’s how The Bookseller reported it…
Hands up who’s ever found themselves staring into a stranger’s house late at night?
You’re strolling along the street, say, minding your own business – taking the dog for a walk, or on your way home – and your attention is caught by soft lamplight coming from inside a home. The curtains are open so you can see right inside, you see everything. You slow. The dog may helpfully stop to sniff something on the pavement, giving you the excuse to stop in front of the house.
Your eyes drink in all the details of someone else’s life. The flowers in a vase on the dining table, the photos on the mantelpiece of friends and family. The room is filled with knick-knacks accumulated over a lifetime. There may be a flickering fire and a comfortable armchair with a paperback laying open on the arm. You can’t help but wonder who lives there, and what it must be like to be them. You want to know how it feels to relax in that cosy armchair, feel its worn fabric beneath your fingertips, in front of that crackling fire.
If you’re unlucky, you might get busted. Someone will walk into the room, or appear suddenly behind the curtain, silhouetted in the light behind them, to glare at you for staring into their house. They’ll pull the curtains shut to hide their personal space from your prying eyes.
Have you ever done that, stood outside a stranger’s house staring in…
Oh. Only me, then.
It’s like that one time. I was house-hunting – this was years ago – and for some reason the only time I could view a particular property was late one winter’s night. I remember standing alone in a stranger’s bedroom, surrounded by all their personal things, their bedclothes folded neatly on the duvet, all their cosmetics neatly arranged on a dressing table, a full moon shining in the window, and I had a weird sense of dislocation. For a moment, I felt like I already lived there, that it was my room – in my home.
Oh dear. I’m not coming out of this very well, am I?
Point is, it’s those fleeting moments, those tantalising glimpses into the personal space of other people, that inspired my second novel, It Was Her.
I wanted to write about a cuckoo in the nest. Someone who slips into other people’s houses when they’re empty, like a modern-day Goldilocks. To take a bath, watch a bit of telly, eat the lovely food in the kitchen cupboards, curl up in bed. I wondered what would make them do such a thing? Perhaps they need to go into other people’s houses because their own happy home was once taken from them. And, of course, I wanted to discover how such a creepy obsession can lead to murder.
And the more I thought about it, the more it was obvious that it was exactly the kind of fucked-up investigation that my enigmatic detectives Ray Drake and Flick Crowley would get their teeth into. So that’s It Was Herin a nutshell.
But, anyway, if you ever see some guy staring in the front window of your house looking in, don’t worry, it’s probably just me taking the dog for a walk.
Except I don’t have a dog.
*It Was Her is available to buy here and at all good bookshops.*
My acclaimed crime debut Two O’Clock Boy has been relaunched today – March 1st – with a new title, His First Lie, and a startling new cover, courtesy of my lovely publishers Sphere. And for a short while the ebook is on sale at only 99p. If you’ve stumbled across this post in 2027, I’m afraid that offer has almost certainly expired.
I’m thrilled about this relaunch, and the bonus is that at the end of the ebook you’ll get a tantalising taste of the next book in the Drake series, called It Was Her, which comes out in May. The ebook for that is only £1.99 in the run-up to launch, so I strongly suggest that you take advantage of that offer, too.
Both covers were designed by Bekki Guyatt, and as you can see, the ‘twins’ manage to be both colourful and sinister…
My new DI Drake novel is out in May, published in both paperback and ebook, and if I say so myself, the cover is a thing of beauty. More details on It Was Her – and some other exciting news – is coming very soon…
Crime Thriller Fella 