crime fiction

Coming soon… a new crime and suspense series

13th September 2021 by claireladds 3 Comments

I’ve had some questions recently about one or two posts I’ve included on social media that give a bit of an inkling that I’m writing a new series. Some readers have asked me what it’s going to be, so I thought I’d tell you a teeny weeny bit about it.

I have been working on a new series for a few months now, and I’m absolutely loving it! I’m not quite ready to reveal everything about it yet, but I can definitely tell you that it’s rooted in crime and suspense. This is no cozy mystery series (although I love those), but something that most definitely cranks up the darkness notch a fair old way. Twisted villains and flawed heroes/heroines, and some blurring of the lines where good and bad and right and wrong may mean different things to different people. Wrongs are righted and justice is served – only maybe not always in the conventional way…

Each book is linked by an overall series theme (which I’m keeping under wraps for a little while longer). As each book has different characters in it, each one is a standalone story, which also means that the series can be read in any order (handy to know that, if you come across book 6, you won’t have to hunt around to find books 1-5 beforehand, in order to make sense of the series!).

I’m still tweaking the details and doing all the behind-the-scenes stuff, so that’s all I can say about the series for now. More news on it coming soon…

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Free on Kobo for one week only!

15th August 2021 by claireladds Leave a Comment

Do you read your e-books on a Kobo device? Have you got the Kobo app on your mobile or tablet? And do you love historical psychological crime and suspense books? If so, you’re in luck!

I’m delighted to say that The Secrets That Haunt Us is included in a Kobo deal for crime, mystery and suspense books. For one week only, The Secrets That Haunt Us is available to download from Kobo, worldwide, for FREE from Monday 16th to Sunday 22nd August.

If you’ve not encountered the book before, let me enlighten you:

Dark and haunting secrets, lies, betrayal and vengeance.

A diary that holds an unbearable secret. Misplaced jealousy with devastating consequences. Threatening letters which unearth traumatic memories and have the power to destroy lives. One man, back from the dead, who has only one thing on his mind – vengeance.

Set in 1970s England on the day of the Women’s Liberation March, this is a novel of four people’s haunting memories, shadows of the past and truths that threaten to destroy them.

When the lines between memory and reality are blurred, and honesty is more devastating than the secrets that haunt us, what do you do? Do you ignore it? Do you try to protect those you love? Or do you seek revenge?

Some secrets can’t be forgiven.

PLEASE NOTE: This book was previously published as Baby up the Chimney.

You can find The Secrets That Haunt Us on Kobo here. If you’re searching for your free copy on Monday 16th, please allow time for Kobo to filter the price through to your country – time zones may skew this a bit!

Please do take this chance to download your freebie copy, and don’t be shy – tell your friends! I’d love the book to be read by as many readers as possible who enjoy historical psychological crime and suspense books. 😊

If you read on any other device and buy your e-books from a different store, you can still buy your copy (with grateful thanks from this author!). You can buy it on your preferred store here.

The Secrets That Haunt Us by Claire Ladds ebook

Join my Readers’ Club to get updates, news of works-in-progress and upcoming releases, sneak peeks and special offers that I have from time to time, as well as other crime, mystery and suspense-related snippets. When you join you’ll also receive a FREE gift to read!

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Spell the Month in Books: August

7th August 2021 by claireladds Leave a Comment

It’s August and here in the UK it’s the height of summer (as I write this it’s pouring with rain!). When I was a kid, I was often encouraged to go outside and play in the lovely weather. Truth be told, all I really wanted to do was to curl up in a corner and read a book, hoping that the summer holidays would pass quickly and I could go back to school. I absolutely loved school, and I couldn’t stand the hot weather, so six weeks off was like torture. Luckily, I loved being at home, too, and I created reading areas in the shade. One year, my neighbourhood friends and I used my dad’s trailer shelter as a den. It was pretty good reading in there, too, if somewhat dark! (This same den is fictionalised in my Hearts & Crimes novel, The Secrets That Haunt Us).

Suffice to say that summertime became a reading frenzy for me. If you’d like a bit of mystery-oriented summer reading, then just maybe I can help you out with my August Spell the Month in Books list.

Anthem for Doomed Youth – Carola Dunn

This is the 19th Daisy Dalrymple book, and I am hooked on them! I have really enjoyed following Daisy’s exploits and the developments in her life. Daisy herself is perfectly feisty and astute, while maintaining a great wit and managing her relationships with her “interesting” family members, and her romance with DCI Alec Fletcher.

Anthem for Doomed Youth sees Daisy visiting their daughter at school – to the relief of Alec’s boss who warns Alec to keep Daisy from meddling in their newest case. Three unidentified bodies have turned up in Epping Forest, shot through the heart and Scotland Yard wants it cleared up ASAP. But just because Daisy isn’t there, doesn’t mean she’s not entangled in murder. And she can’t really help herself because a teacher at their daughter’s school ends up dead…

If you like 1920s murder mysteries with a light-handed touch, then the Honourable Daisy Dalrymple might just be your cup of aristocratic tea.

Unexpected Guest (The) – Agatha Christie (play novelised by Charles Osborne)

I became a real fan of Agatha Christie’s plays a number of years ago, some of which I have as an original stage play, and some which have been novelised. My version of The Unexpected Guest is a novelisation of Agatha Christie’s play, written by Charles Osborne, but I’ve linked above to the original stage play.

A man manages to send his car into a ditch in South Wales on a dreadful foggy night. Having escaped the car, he seeks out shelter and finds an isolated house. When he enters through the patio doors, he discovers a woman standing over her exceedingly dead, wheelchair-bound husband, complete with a gun in her hand. The man says he will help her create a cover story. But it’s clear that the woman is not guilty of murder – so who is she protecting? There are a whole house-full of suspects, and it must be one of them. But who?

I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending this book. Christie’s original play is fantastic and this novelisation has been exceedingly well written by Charles Osborne. The mystery runs hand-in-hand with suspense. What I particularly love about this is that the narrator is not completely clean cut and innocent – after all, he does offer to concoct an alibi for someone who appears to be a murderer! I’m really glad I chose this book for my August list as the play itself had its debut performance on 12th August, 1958 and it’s been performed many, many times since!

Guilty Consciences – Ed. Martin Edwards

This is a crime collection I have had on my shelf for a while and am ashamed to say that I haven’t yet read from cover to cover. Of course, books of short stories have the advantage that you can read them (usually) in any order.

This anthology brings together seventeen stories by members of the Crime Writers Association, and includes stories by esteemed authors such as Ann Cleeves, Peter James and HRF Keating, among others. The stories I have read so far have all the hallmarks of great mysteries and I am absolutely sure that I’m going to love reading the entire collection.

I would have loved to have linked to this book for you, but I haven’t been able to find it at the time of writing. If I do come across a copy, I’ll add it in here as an update.

Unnatural Habits – Kerry Greenwood

I first came across Kerry Greenwood’s mystery novels set in 1920s Australia and which give us the exploits of the high society Phryne Fisher as a series on the TV. I enjoyed the Phryne Fisher Mysteries series so much that I began buying the novels, and I haven’t been disappointed.

Phryne and her maid-sidekick, Dot, get to investigate when young, pretty, blonde girls begin to go missing from the Magdalene laundry. All of them are pregnant and there’s a big cover-up afoot. But Phryne has no intention of allowing these girls to vanish into oblivion.

What I really enjoy about Phryne is her feistiness and her refusal to give up on anyone, regardless of race or class. She treats everyone equally and, despite social tensions, she has the ability to cross those invisible borders and isn’t above investigating the most heinous and lowlife of crimes. Her sense of justice is profound. She is one of my favourite high society female sleuths.

Something Wicked – David Roberts

Originally, I think I bought this book for two reasons: firstly, I had just completed my Masters dissertation which I wrote on Agatha Christie, and the main text that I worked with was the Tommy and Tuppence novel, By the Pricking of my Thumbs; secondly the title reminded me of the Ray Bradbury book, Something Wicked This Way Comes. It was a bit of a foregone conclusion, therefore, that I’d end up buying Something Wicked!

However, I have not actually read this book (hence no recommendation link), but I can tell you what it is about. This is book 8 of a 10 book series about Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne. Verity has returned to England with suspected tuberculosis, and also now engaged to Lord Edward. She checks into a clinic where – surprise, surprise – Edward has to go and investigate a series of murders. He’s there because his dentist has died rather suspiciously, and so have two other patients. As war approaches and hangs over them all, Edward and Verity need to find out what, or who is casting a shadow of threat over them.

Two for Sorrow – Nicola Upson

This novel is part of the series of mysteries which fictionalise the author Josephine Tey as sleuth. In this novel, Josephine wants to write about the perpetrators of a thirty year old baby farming case. Her friend, Inspector Archie Penrose, is on a case involving the murder of a seamstress which at first glance seems to be part of a domestic fight. But it becomes clear that her death is linked to another murder – and someone wants the past to remain buried.

I find the Josephine Tey books to be extremely in depth and darker than a lot of “cozy” mystery fiction set in between the wars. Personally, I like this more sinister element of the cozy. To my mind, cozy crime fiction does not have to be light-hearted; its defining feature is that it does not have bloodshed “on the page”. Nicola Upson’s series delves deeply into the darker motivations and means of criminals, and it feels to me very much like historical crime fiction. Maybe it’s because my own work has a dark edge that I like the Josephine Tey series as much as I do.

Well, there you have it: my Spell the Month in Books for August. As always, for transparency, some of the books I mention contain my affiliate links for US readers. I only ever use affiliate links on books I have personally read and have enjoyed. You can search for the books without clicking through on this post, of course! 🙂

I hope that a book or two that I’ve mentioned here might encourage you to try a new author or a new crime and mystery-filled book, be it a novel or a short story collection. Have you read any of my August list, or are any of them among your favourites? Be sure to tell me in the comments.

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Joy is a bubble: complete crime short story

31st July 2021 by claireladds Leave a Comment

When a reader wants to try out a new author, or a new series by an author, I’ve often wondered what it is that makes someone want to give that book they’ve found online or in a bookstore a whirl. I know that, for me, it’s sometimes the cover that attracts me, and sometimes it’s the book title. The blurb on the back, or on the online store page, can be the factor that intrigues me, too. It’s also possible (because I’m human without an indefinite depth to my wallet, like many people) that I might well be intrigued by a price that seems reasonable to try out the book I’ve found. It may even be that I’ve managed to find a snippet of the book posted by the author and decided I really fancy giving the rest of it a go. I have to say that I’ve made a number of audiobook purchases by listening to the free sample first.

Like any author, I love people to want to read my books. I love to be able to tempt new readers to try out my series. Most of all, I love to find the right readers – those who feel that my books resonate with them. No matter what I write, whether it’s the Hearts & Crimes series, or the new crime and suspense series I have coming up soon, or the Victorian detective series that I’m planning to start releasing next year, all my books have the same qualities – something dark and unnerving lurking in the minds and hearts of the characters, suspense (sometimes strong and tense and sometimes subtle), a deep emotional connection of some kind, a twist, and a murder (or sometimes more!).

If you’ve never come across my short story collection, The Reason for Everything and other short stories, then I thought today’s blog post would be a good place to share a complete crime short story with you from this collection. So here you go…! 😊

***

Joy is a bubble

There’s a man sitting on the riverbank, gnome-like, with a fishing rod in his hand. All he needs, she thinks, is a pointy red hat and he’ll look just like the ugly little statue in next-door’s garden. She hadn’t noticed him as she went down to the newsagent, muttering her list of things-to-do to herself. She stands now, holding the newspaper, the packet of cigarettes she was expected to fetch hidden in her handbag, and a mental note to ask for the money this time, watching the little fairytale action taking place right below her.

The human gnome stranger casts his line then sits in silence, with a Tupperware box of sandwiches waiting their turn on top of the wicker fishing basket, not to be confused with the second tub containing a Dolly Mixture assortment of maggots. She hadn’t realised they came in so many colours. She can see them, wriggling en-mass in the tub, their sense of desperate urgency mimicking the squirming that’s going on just below the surface algae in the deep green secret land of ‘keep net’, while the white float with the psychedelic orange tip bobs half way across the water.

Suddenly the white vanishes, and the man proves he’s better, cleverer than the fish; she watches, gripping tightly onto the newspaper as the scaly sliver whirls past her vision and into the man’s hand. She watches him remove the hook from the fish’s face then hurl the creature into the keep net to join the rest of the mystery in the green pool. Catching sight of a big stone, she has the urge to throw it and hit the man on the head – see how he likes being bashed about, having his skin damaged, cast aside to keep for later – but she knows she won’t.

Her fingers hurt and she realises how tightly she’s holding the newspaper that’s not for her, either. The sweat has seeped into the print and left grubby smears in regular oval patches on the front page. Something for him to have a go at her about over breakfast, and he won’t even need to look hard this morning. She starts to feel ever so slightly sick; it’s the empty belly, she tells herself. She needs to get some breakfast. She needs to go home. She sighs, but it’s an inaudible one because she’s used to making them that way. Her face adopts its invariable impassive ghostly expression, ready for the kitchen and the multitude of sins she’ll commit at breakfast.

But then, just briefly, she catches sight of something on the water. There, in the keep net, expanding on the river’s surface, a series of penny-sized bubbles catch the early morning shards of sunlight. They wink back up at her in a glorious rainbow of colour, and she smiles back at the sign of life under the water. As a kid she used to sit on the bank and watch the bubbles rise to the surface when the fish came up to gobble the air. Little bubbles; she’d had to concentrate to see them. Once she sat there for over an hour, waiting. She spotted one. It sat, alone on the surface, and a wet tear surprised her cheek as she smiled at it. Then he came along with his school shirt rolled up to his elbows and scudded a stone across the surface, and the bubble was gone. He shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t even notice she was there at first. Then he grinned, and scooted off on his bike. She didn’t see any more bubbles on the surface that afternoon.

Without warning, the fisher gnome gathers in his line, and grabs the keep net, hurling his captives back into the algae. All at once the bubbles are forced into the algae, too, and they burst on contact. And she thinks how sad it is that the bubbles must burst and that things must end.

She leaves the gnomish sadist and makes her way back along the dirt track where the grass bank stretches beyond her vision, then round the curbing pathway in front of the cul-de-sac of Council bungalows and its artificially planted beech trees, that grow haphazardly on the patches of grass in between the parking bays. The milkman is still out on his rounds, such as they are now, and she stops to listen, eyes closed momentarily, to the chink of glass against hard plastic as he lifts the bottles from the deep ocean blue crate and takes them to number 27. He catches her eye and smiles, waves, and she returns the gesture. He’ll have been to her house already and the milk will still be sitting in the doorway, already in the sun, by the time she gets home. It’s already heating up outside. Another scorcher due. She sighs. She hopes it won’t taste funny. He’ll let her know in no uncertain terms if it is. It’ll be her fault. And her job to clear up the cereal running down the wall, and the bits of broken bowl. She should have got home quicker. He’ll tell her that it’s not worth having the milkman, that they can get their milk from the supermarket. No one relies on the milkman anymore. But she does. He brings her what she needs every day. Just like the postman. Just for a moment she glances up and down the street, wondering whether he is already on his rounds, too.

[Read more…]

The Secrets That Haunt Us: a lovely 5-star review

9th July 2021 by claireladds Leave a Comment

I was absolutely thrilled to see this 5-star review pop up on Amazon from a reader who clearly loved The Secrets That Haunt Us. I have no idea which lovely reader wrote the review, but it’s extremely kind and means a great deal.

I find it very humbling when I know someone has read and enjoyed my books. In my heart of hearts, all I really want to do is write stories that people find fascinating, thought-provoking, terrifying at times, occasionally heart-wrenching, and satisfying. And crime-filled, of course!

The Secrets That Haunt Us will probably always be the book I have the softest spot for. It means many things to me.

If you would like to take a look at the book (including that first 5-star review since I re-released the novel with its new title), then you can find it on Amazon here:

Buy The Secrets That Haunt Us on Amazon

If you read on another device and buy your books from Kobo, Apple, Barnes & Noble and others, you can find the novel here:

Buy The Secrets That Haunt Us on your favourite ebook store

If you do read, or have, read it, or any of my work, I’d love to know what you think. Hearing from readers is always lovely. 😊 Please do consider leaving a review – or my books or on any author’s books that you enjoy. It really helps other people who might also enjoy them to find them more easily.

Happy reading!

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Short Story Month – I’m addicted to short stories!

27th May 2021 by claireladds Leave a Comment

May has been Short Story Month. Anyone who knows me well is aware that I’m a real short story fan, so I’ve loved this, and I’ve been popping images of short story collections that I own on Instagram on and off all month. That’s been great fun. At the last count, I have 79 paperback editions of short story collections, and if I add in those on my Kindle, then I’ve got way over a hundred! It won’t come as any great surprise that almost all of them are pretty dark in some way.

I grab them from anywhere: in bookshops, online – even once at a toddler group where they had a second hand bookshelf to raise funds. I remember the very first collection I read. I was ill and in bed as a twelve year old, and I was given a copy of Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. Each of the tattoos on the man tells an individual story. I loved these stories! They told a tale in a confined amount of space, and it made everything about each one really punchy, especially the end. This way of grabbing a moment in time and wringing it for every thought and emotion to create a powerful ending is what fascinated me, as did those which left me with a dark twist or consequence, and left me pondering the rights and wrongs.

As I got older, I became fascinated with the blurred lines of moral and emotional choices in collections by great writers such as Graham Greene, Jean Rhys, Ian McEwan, Carol Joyce Oates and Agatha Christie (who wrote many more short stories than you probably realise. I have 16 collections of her stories!). This blurring, and the inner wrangles of the characters, was the thing that got me totally hooked. People are complex, and those events, thoughts and emotions which lead up to a choice between what is right and wrong can make all the difference to the outcome.

It may well have been this endless collection and devouring of short stories (which I think might be my guilty, addictive pleasure) that has enabled me to be fortunate enough to get short stories published in magazines and anthologies worldwide, and to win several competitions. I even got a trophy once! But when I tried to ‘write to market’ for the women’s magazines, I just couldn’t get it right. Envelopes kept winging their way back and dropping through my letterbox, sometimes with explanatory letters that the stories were too dark for the women’s magazine market, and consequently only one or two were accepted (one of them twice in two different countries, which was pretty great!). I had much more success with the literary magazines and anthologies, where the topics can be much more varied, not to mention darker. This suited me perfectly.

The Reason for Everything by Claire Ladds ebook

When I began publishing my own work, I always knew that I would continue writing those dark short stories – the ones full of crimes of the heart, of moral and emotional grappling with right and wrong, and those in which ordinary people are driven to the edge and crime spills over into both reality and the dark deeds which follow. This is what I achieved with my first collection, The Reason for Everything. I’m truly proud of that book. There are stories in it that make me well up and give me chills and heart-thumping moments. Even better – if a reader can leave one of my stories thinking, ‘I woudn’t have done it like that. Would I?’, or ‘I totally get why they did that,’ or it leaves them pondering those blurred lines, then that’s what makes me feel I’ve succeeded in telling the story.

Readers have contacted me and told me which are their favourites, and this always fascinates me. For a start, it always makes me thrilled that someone has taken the time to read my work(!). What interests me are the stories that they pick as favourites. There is usually something that has caused that particular reader to identify with the character in the story – although I’ll add a caveat to that: if your favourite story turns out to be ‘The death of Mr Ackworth’ and you identify fully with the main character there, then I’m more than a little concerned about you! 😂

If you’d like to grab yourself a copy of the collection which left me dubbed with the nickname ‘Mistress of Melancholy’ (I really LOVE that description! I’m very proud of it! 😁), then you can find it on your preferred store here. If you’re quick, it might even be priced at 0.99. Or if you’d like to delve a little deeper into my collection, you can read a couple of the stories from it here.

If you’d like to see which short stories – and other stuff – that I’ve been posting on Instagram, you can find me here.