F. C. Malby, "Dead Drop"

F. C.Malby graduated with a first-class joint honours degree in Geography and Education. She has travelled widely and taught in the Czech Republic, the Philippines and London. She writes novels, short stories and poetry. Her debut novel, Take Me to the Castle, won The People’s Book Awards. Her debut short story collection, My Brother Was a Kangaroo, includes award-winning stories published in literary journals and magazines worldwide. She is a contributor to anthologies including In Defence of Pseudoscience: Reflex Fiction Volume Five (Reflex Press), Unthology 8 (Unthank Books), and Hearing Voices: The Litro Anthology of New Fiction (Kingston University Press) alongside Pulitzer prize winner, Anthony Doerr. Her website is here.

About Dead Drop

Liesl is an art thief and an exceptionally good one. She steals priceless paintings from Vienna’s art galleries and delivers them to wealthy private collectors. This life of anonymous notes and meticulous planning, of adrenaline-fuelled dead drops and dramatic escapes, suits her restless spirit and desire for solitude and anonymity. But when Leisl finds a body on Stephansplatz underground steps instead of the expected note, she understands that she’s involved in a deadly game and that her own life is in danger. This fast-paced, intelligent thriller exposes the undercover world of art heists and takes us on a journey through Vienna’s galleries and museums until Leisl comes up against a truth that makes her question everything she knows.

You can read more about Dead Drop on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From Dead Drop, by F. C. Malby

I hear the roll and clunk of the train’s wheels on the steel tracks below, feel its vibrations in my toes and through my thighs as it leaves the platform. The wind rushes into the tunnel from Stephansplatz, its caress warm as it whips down the steps to the underground platform and fills the void. 

The Vienna spring brings with it cherry blossom and azure skies, the blues becoming celestial in the late afternoon light. Most count the short, hot summer months. I count the winter months until spring, and then when the leaves turn to a deep, burnt amber, I begin again. 

As I reach the top step, a body lies on the pavement, feet contorted, laces undone, socks pushing through holes in the soles. A red, woollen hat rests on the concrete slab by his head, hands clutch an empty bottle of Kaiser beer. Not a soul stops to look. A body littering the pavement is a familiar sight on this part of the underground. It’s not always clear whether the person is alive or dead. 

I am here for the note. Stepping closer to avoid the people coming up the steps behind me, I spot a corner of paper in his top jacket pocket and pull it free. Without reading the words, I slide it into my jacket. Checking the pocket on the other side of his jacket, I feel something hard and rough and pull out a brooch shaped like a star. I count the spokes, ten of them, and run my fingers across its surface. It lacks the pearls, but at a guess it would have been handcrafted by Hapsburg jeweller, Rozet and Fischmeister. I slip it into my pocket. An unexpected treasure. Reaching down and taking his wrist, I feel for a pulse. I should have checked it first but this is new territory for me. All signs of life have drained away and death was recent. A touch of heat still lingers on the skin, rough and calloused. I pull the hat down over his face. The beer bottle, I suspect, will have been planted to make this look like a natural event. He should have been alive when I reached him. 

K. L. Slater, "Missing"

 

Kim Slater is the number one bestselling author of seventeen psychological crime thrillers. She has sold over two million copies of her books worldwide. She has also written four Carnegie-nominated Young Adult novels as Kim Slater for Macmillan Children’s Books. Kim has an MA in Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University and lives with her husband in a small Nottinghamshire village. Her website is here. 

 

About Missing, by K. L. Slater

I've known him all my life. I know he has taken my daughter. His mother says she can help me. But she's the last person I can trust ...

Samuel lived next door when we were children. We were inseparable. But he didn’t like sharing me with my adored little brother. And one terrible night, he got rid of my brother forever …

Now, years later, he’s free. And my daughter is missing.

I turn on my baby girl’s unicorn nightlight and bury my face in her pillow, my heart breaking. I know Samuel has her – he blames me for ruining his life, and even after all this time, he still doesn’t like to share.

As darkness falls, there’s a knock at my door and I open it to see Samuel’s mother. She says she can help me.

I know I can’t trust her, but I don’t have a choice. With each step I take, my fear grows stronger. Can she help me find my daughter? Or does she know something about what really happened all those years ago? Something that could stop me from saving my baby girl …

From Missing

Prologue

Twenty-six years earlier, 1993

The disused warehouse was massive, but Jimmy was trapped in a tiny room within it.

Earlier, he’d climbed in through a broken window and looked around. The old metal machinery was still intact. It ran in lines up and down the vast floorspace. Some had been broken into bits by vandals, others had metal pieces stripped from them, but all towered above him like dinosaur skeletons.

Jimmy had been in the place about ten minutes when he’d heard shuffling noises and a funny strangled noise like someone had coughed and tried to cover it up. He’d run further inside the wide-open space of the warehouse and seen a door standing open over on the far wall.

When he’d got closer, he’d spotted an old sign hanging lopsided on it. Jimmy was the best reader in his class, if you didn’t count the new boy. He’d held the sign straight so he could see it properly and pieced the sounds together. He’d said slowly to himself: ‘Re-frig-er-ation unit.’ Everyone knew it was dangerous to hide in a fridge in case the door shut by accident and you got trapped.

Jimmy had pushed the sign hard to watch it whizz round on itself and it had flown off, clattering to the concrete floor. He’d looked around in panic, watching and listening for movement but all was still. He’d stuck his head through the gap and squinted into the gloomy unit. There was no fridge in there.

The shuffling sound had seemed like it was getting closer. Jimmy had stepped inside the unit and waited for his eyes to adjust. There were no windows in here. The room was very dusty, bare shelves all around it and rusty metal hooks hanging from the ceiling. The door had been weirdly thick and heavy when Jimmy had pulled it to behind him, leaving just a tiny gap.

People at school said the warehouse was haunted by two burning women. Once a food manufacturing plant, lots of people had died here ten years ago when there was a fire and a big explosion. Nigel Burley in Year 6 had said he’d seen the two women in the Easter holidays last year. Everyone had sat quietly in a corner of the playground, listening as he’d told how they’d rushed past him screaming, their hair smoking, the flesh melting from their faces. Nigel had told them he’d thought they were real people until they both ran through a solid wall and disappeared, leaving nothing behind.

So Jimmy had held his breath when the shuffling sound had drawn closer and he’d bit his knuckles to stop himself crying out. If the burning women pulled open the door, he would put his head down like a Spanish bull and charge forward. Ghosts weren’t real, they were like fog. You could walk right through them.

He’d heard heavy breathing and then the door had begun to open. Jimmy had caught a scream in his throat and balled his fists ready to run. Then the door had been pushed hard from the outside, like someone had their shoulder against it. When it had closed with a clunk, the space was plunged into pitch black.

Jonathan Wilkins, "Utrecht Snow"

About Jonathan Wilkins, by himself

I am sixty-six. I have a gorgeous wife Annie and two beautiful sons; I love to write. I am a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstone's bookseller, and former Basketball Coach. I taught for twenty years and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously.

Up until Covid, I regularly taught Creative Writing workshops in and around Leicester and also via zoom. I currently take notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester University.

I have always loved books and reading, but nine years at Waterstone’s nearly put paid to that!

I’ve had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council, and had several non-fiction pieces published traditionally as well as fiction online. I have had some of my work placed in magazines and anthologies and also exhibited in art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station Waiting Room. I have my writing on various blogs. I love writing poetry.

I enjoy presenting papers at Crime Fiction conferences. It keeps my mind active through the research process and is a great way to meet new people and gain fresh ideas for writing.

As well as my Utrecht Murders Trilogy, I am writing a crime series set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s. 

My website is here. 

About Utrecht Snow, by Jonathan Wilkins

In Utrecht Snow, a crime novel initially written as my MA Creative Writing dissertation, we meet widow Caes Heda, Hoofdinspecteur at Kroonstraat police station, and his daughter Truus, a student at the local University. Caes is head of crime whilst his daughter is fed up with her studies and links up with private investigator Thijs Orman. Girls go missing from Utrecht and the police and Truus investigate kidnapping and murder. This is the first of a trilogy set in the beautiful city of Utrecht.

From Utrecht Snow

Caes Heda was normally about six foot two inches tall; but today he was hunched up against the cold and felt like a goblin, at half his normal size. He shivered yet again and breathed out the cold air, imagining it freezing on his neatly trimmed beard and moustache.

Caes could just see the Gothic Dom Bell Tower outlined against the grey morning sky. It was towering above everything, and it made him smile. Even as the snow feathered down it was still the centre of their universe. It watched over Utrecht from a height of what, over one hundred and ten metres, and could more or less be seen in Utrecht from wherever anyone stood, whatever the weather. True, it was a bit faint today, covered as it was in snow. No melting due to no heat leaving the building, the Dom was always cold, always frozen, it mirrored how he felt. Cold and alone, he just wanted to be alone. All of a sudden, Caes just didn’t fancy going to work. He just wanted some peace and quiet and to be left on his own, to wallow in his sudden misery.

Unfortunately, all his defence mechanisms didn’t stop the woman from sitting next to him - well, almost sitting on him in fact, as the bus picked up from Bleekstreet. She wedged Caes against the window and started talking to herself, or was it to him? He opened his left eye and taking a closer look, saw what it was. Dirty faux fur coat and then the sickly smell of snowy dampness and then, yes it was urine. Caes had to start breathing through his mouth to try to avoid the smell. He couldn’t get his arm away from her; he was stuck and she muttered on, words incomprehensible to him, Greek? Russian? He couldn’t tell, maybe it wasn’t a language at all; he was suddenly too tired to think. The half hour it took the bus to get to his office on Kroonstraat was a torment, where had she arrived from? He’d never seen her before on this route, though to be honest he did spend most of his journeys to work with his eyes closed.

It was such a welcome relief when she stood and got off the bus. Her smell, though, was hanging in the air. He hoped it wouldn’t hang on his clothes. The pressure on him at last relented as she moved; typical, it was also his stop. She shambled to the exit. Caes followed the smell.

He got off and found himself trailing the woman as she shuffled across the road and through the snow. Her muttering increased, talking to no one but everyone. People avoided her, even in the snow they could see her and they must have thought she was mad. She was going his way; in fact, she was going all the way. She entered the Bureau at Kroonstraat. Caes followed.

Caes Heda was Hoofdinspecteur in Utrecht. Thirty-nine and in charge of Crime at Kroonstraat Police Bureau, not committing it obviously, but tidying up after it had been committed. If he could catch them great, but he felt there was not much chance of stopping them all. It was a full-time job!

He did enjoy it, though, it was a bit like a game, but he was never sure who was winning. They had success and then the criminals had a win. They locked some up, but more and more were getting community service and prisons were closing due to lack of customers. He had always thought that saving money this way was a false economy as there seemed no deterrent anymore, but there again, he was but a simple policeman.

Charlotte Barnes, "All I See Is You"

Charlotte “Charley” Barnes is an author and academic from Worcestershire, UK. She is a Lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at the University of Wolverhampton, and has guest lectured at a number of other West Midlands institutions including the University of Birmingham and University of Worcester. 

Charley has published a number of poetry works, most recently her debut full collection, Lore: Flowers, Folklore, and Footnotes (Black Pear Press, 2021). Alongside this, she writes crime fiction under Charlotte Barnes. Charley is predominantly interested in representation of (violent) women in contemporary crime, and this is reflected heavily in her fiction. 

Her most recent publication, All I See Is You, was published by Bloodhound Books in May 2021. Charley’s next novel, forthcoming with Bloodhound Books, is due for release in August 2021.

 

About All I See Is You, by Charlotte Barnes

All I See Is You is a psychological thriller narrated by M. 

Hinged on memory lapses, misplaced characters and suspected murder, the novel follows M as she tries to locate memories that have been misplaced through childhood and into adulthood.

While M is working with a counsellor to try to recall these missing experiences, she is also trying to nurture a new romantic relationship with Caleb who lives across the street from her. 

But Caleb doesn’t yet know M exists …

The book is an intricate narrative packed with twists and unreliability, making it the perfect read for fans of a narrator you can’t trust. 

Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

 

From All I See Is You

It seems strange to confess to something that you don’t know for certain you’ve done.

At heart, I’m an honest person. One of my earliest memories is of finding a man’s wallet on the pavement, not fifty yards up the road from our house. I picked it up and, without looking inside it, I took it home to my father. He glanced inside and made a show of checking the cards. But, when he thought I wasn’t looking, he took a slim fold of notes from the back of the wallet and stashed them into his trouser pocket.

‘Dad?’

‘Kid?’ He raised his eyebrow. At the age of nine, this felt like a challenge.

‘Nothing,’ I said, then went back to my business of identifying flowers along the roadside, which probably felt more important to me at the time anyway.

At heart, I’m an honest person, yas. But I’ve never been especially big on confrontation. One of the reasons this is one of my earliest memories is that my parents spent the majority of my formative years arguing with each other – not over me, I hasten to add. I was never a troublesome child – at least, not that they were aware of. But over pretty much everything else there was to argue about.

‘Did you pay the water bill?’

‘What do you mean you didn’t get beef?’

‘How are you breathing so damn loud?’

Minor issues, really, in the grand scheme of things. But it doesn’t take a therapist to work out that the issues they were arguing over probably weren’t really the issues they were arguing over. It did take a therapist to reassure me it wasn’t unusual that I couldn’t remember it all though. The first time I relayed my pick-and-mix childhood to a counsellor – at some point during my three years at university, when well-being is shoved down your throat – I asked whether it was normal, to have misplaced these things so easily.

‘What is normal?’ she asked.

I hate people answering a question with a question. But I said, as plainly as I could, ‘Being able to hold on to your childhood memories, for a start.’

She laughed. ‘They’re unpleasant though. Why would you want to hold on to them?’

‘Is that how it works?’

‘Sometimes.’ She made a note of something. ‘Do you remember everything bad that’s ever happened to you?’

It felt like a trick question. ‘I mean, how would I know?’

‘Okay, do you remember everything good?’

‘No, I suppose not. How could I?’

‘So, with this limited filing system available to our brains, why would we use that space up by holding on to memories that are bad, when we don’t even have enough space for memories that are good?’

It didn’t seem like the most sophisticated explanation for the human psyche I’d ever come across, but it sort of made some sense. For the years after that, I never thought there was anything strange in misplacing things that didn’t fit inside the proverbial filing system of my mind. Argument with a friend? No, thank you. An exam grade I wasn’t happy with? Absolutely not. Being fired from a job? Eesh, pass.

There’s a problem with that though.

See, at heart, I’m an honest person. But I’m not exactly the most reliable …

Jonathan Wilkins, "Poppy Flowers at the Front"

Jonathan Wilkins is 65. He has a gorgeous wife Annie and two beautiful sons; he loves to write. He is a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstones’ bookseller and former Basketball Coach. He taught for twenty years and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. These days, he regularly teaches Creative Writing workshops in and around Leicester and takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester University. 

He has always loved books and reading, but nine years at Waterstone’s nearly put paid to that! He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and had several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He's had some of his work placed in magazines and anthologies and also exhibited in art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station Waiting Room. He has writing on various blogs. He loves writing poetry. He enjoys presenting papers at Crime Fiction conferences - it keeps his mind active through the research process and is a great way to meet new people and gain fresh ideas for writing. 

For his recent MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. It is part of a series of murder mysteries he has planned based in the Dutch city. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain and self-published both. Poppy flowers at the Front is the first of a crime series starting at the end of the Great War and meandering into the early Twenties. Poppy Blooms at Nemesis Hall  is the second part, Poppy Knows Best the third.

Jonathan is undertaking a Creative Writing PhD at Aberystwyth University where he will be writing about his Poppy novels and Golden Age Crime Fiction.

Jonathan is on Twitter @WriterJWilkins. His website is here. 

About Poppy Flowers at the Front

By Jonathan Wilkins

Two women fight on two fronts, prejudice and war.

With her father, Lord Loveday in the British secret service, and her brother Alfie in the trenches, is it any wonder that Lady Pandora Ophelia Loveday, Poppy to her friends, decided to volunteer to drive ambulances in France? We follow her adventures in France as she races to get wounded men to the Casualty Clearing Station and then the Base Hospital as safely as possible.

She finds Élodie Proux, a French nurse, at a roadside clutching the body of a soldier and takes her back to her base. Élodie becomes her dearest girl as they fall in love.

Poppy and Élodie meet a series of frightening adversaries during the closing weeks of World War 1: saboteurs at the Front, spies in Paris, a psychotic arsonist at home in Wales, all culminating in a frantic quest to save … No … I think you had better read the book ...

You can read a review of Poppy Flowers at the Front on Everybody's Reviewing here. Below, you can read an extract from the novel. 

From Poppy Flowers at the Front

 … it was the screaming that really got to me. I could put up with most things and to be honest I had done so these past few months. The sound of the bombs didn’t really faze me, nor the constantly falling rain and cloying mud. The fleas I found in my hair or clothes were just a nuisance as long as you caught them early. What I did hate was the screaming. It made my blood run cold, the screaming of men in agony, men who had lost their sight or had lost a limb. It ripped my heart out. Young boys in pain, a pain they did not deserve. Boys who screamed in terror, far from their homes and their mothers. Boys who screamed at things that weren’t there, at memories of falling friends. Boys who screamed when they should be at home having fun. The number of times I had lied to a dying boy with the words ‘mam’s here now, son’ were countless. I lied to help them, to reassure them, to remind them of their mother’s love, the love they would never feel again as they died in this foreign field. I often wanted a hug from my mother, I knew what they were missing. Writing this down seems so easy. Doing it all is rather more difficult. Like I am in two worlds. A world of the reality and nasty business of war and then this calmness that seems to envelop me when I write. So, rain and wind, snow, and ice, all this I can put up with. Incessant screaming, though, is another thing all together. It is unseen. They are behind me in the ambulance. Unless I have to load it up when we are an orderly short, all I do is hear them. Then when I park up at the Clearing Station or at the ambulance train I have the honour of seeing them. Mangled bodies, missing limbs, gas burns, trench foot, gangrene … all the pleasures of this so called modern war. All the pleasures plus the screaming that never seems to end.