Criminal Pursuits

Criminal Pursuits, edited by best-selling author Samantha Lee Howe, will be published on October 10th by Telos Publishing, and I am very happy to say that I have a story in it. The royalties are going to an excellent cause: to quote from their website: ‘POhWER is a charity which helps people who, because of disability, illness, social exclusion and other challenges, find it difficult to express their views or get the support they need. Our mission is to empower people to have a voice and make a real difference to their lives. We do this by speaking for them when they can’t and supporting them to speak for themselves when they can.’ It is a particularly appropriate charity for writers to support.

The stories cover all manner of criminal activity from the very first caveman detective to a woman who writes to the world’s worst killers. My own story, ‘Faceless Killer,’ begins with a woman who suffers from face-blindness witnessing a killer fleeing from the scene of a murder. She can’t identify him, but he doesn’t know that and her reluctance to admit to her condition puts her in terrible danger. The story was short-listed for the Margery Allingham Prize in 2016, but has never been published in the UK, so I’m delighted that it is going appear now in Criminal Pursuits. The other contributors are A A Chaudhuri, Raven Dane, Caroline England, Paul Finch, Samantha Lee Howe, Rhys Hughes, Maxim Jakubowski, Awais Khan, Paul Magrs, Sandra Murphy, Amy Myers, Bryony Pearce,  and Sally Spedding. I’m in distinguished company. I’m looking forward to reading their stories and I hope the anthology raises lots of money for this splendid charity.