Michael Pronko
Michael Pronko is an award-winning, Tokyo-based writer of murder, memoir and music. His writings on Tokyo life and his taut character-driven mysteries have won critics’ awards and five-star reviews. Kirkus Reviews called his second novel, The Moving Blade, “An elegant balance of Japanese customs with American-style hard-boiled procedural” and selected it for their Best Books of 2018.
Michael also runs the website, Jazz in Japan, about the vibrant jazz scene in Tokyo and Yokohama. He has written regular columns about Japanese culture, art, jazz, society and politics for Newsweek Japan, The Japan Times, Artscape Japan, Jazznin, and ST Shukan. He has also appeared on NHK and Nippon Television.
A philosophy major, Michael traveled for years, du
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Dan Laughey
Dan Laughey was born in Otley and bred in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, a hop and a skip away from the Leeds setting of his Chloe thrillers featuring no-holds-barred Detective Inspector Carl Sant. He now lives in nearby Guiseley and shares his time between England and Thailand, home of his in-laws. He lectures at Leeds Beckett University where he teaches a course called ‘Youth, Crime and Culture’. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Salford University and an MA in Communication Studies from the University of Leeds.
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C.B. McKenzie
Born in Texas, CB McKenzie has been a lifeguard, an haute couture model, carpenter, housepainter, waiter, farm hand, teacher and factory worker in a wide variety of locales around the world including Arkansas, Vermont, Hamburg, Miami, Milan, Tokyo and Tucson. He earned both an MFA and a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona and was full-time faculty at Pima Community College. Though he currently teaches at City University of New York, he still keeps his pick-ups in Tucson and Texas.
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Barbara Neely
Barbara Neely was a novelist, short story writer, and author of the popular Blanche White mystery novels. The first book in this series, BLANCHE ON THE LAM, won the Agatha, the Macavity, and the Anthony -- three of the four major mystery awards for best first novel -- as well as the Go On Girl! Book Club award for a debut novel. The subsequent books in the series, BLANCHE AMONG THE TALENTED TENTH, BLANCHE CLEANS UP and BLANCHE PASSES GO have also received critical acclaim from both fans and literary critics. Books in the Blanche White series have been taught in courses at universities as varied as Howard University, Northwestern, Bryn Mawr, Old Dominion, Boston College, Appalachian State University, Washington State University and Guttenber
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Toby Neal
Toby Neal was raised on Kauai in Hawaii. She wrote and illustrated her first story at age 5. After initially majoring in journalism, she eventually settled on mental health as a career and loves her work, saying, “I’m endlessly fascinated with people’s stories.”
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Toby credits her counseling background in adding depth to her characters–from the villains to Lei Texeira, the courageous and vulnerable heroine in the Lei Crime Series, to the wounds and psychological implications of the heroes of the Scorch Series.
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Neville Steed
Pseudonym of Norman Keith Sharam. He worked in advertising before setting up his own advertising agency. After six years he sold the business to become a novelist. He lives in Devon with his wife Kate Sharam.
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Martin Cruz Smith
AKA Simon Quinn, Nick Carter.
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Martin Cruz Smith was an American writer of mystery and suspense fiction, mostly in an international or historical setting. He was best known for his series featuring Russian investigator Arkady Renko, ten novels as of 2025, who was introduced in 1981 with Gorky Park and appeared in Independence Square (2023) and Hotel Ukraine (2025). -
Helen MacInnes
Helen MacInnes was a Scottish-American author of espionage novels. She graduated from the University of Glasgow in Scotland in 1928 with a degree in French and German. A librarian, she married Professor Gilbert Highet in 1932 and moved with her husband to New York in 1937 so he could teach classics at Columbia University. She wrote her first novel, Above Suspicion, in 1939. She wrote many bestselling suspense novels and became an American citizen in 1951.
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Robert Littell
An American author residing in France. He specializes in spy novels that often concern the CIA and the Soviet Union. He became a journalist and worked many years for Newsweek during the Cold War. He's also an amateur mountain climber and is the father of award-winning novelist Jonathan Littell.
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Keigo Higashino
Associated Names:
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* Keigo Higashino
* 東野 圭吾 (Japanese)
* 東野圭吾 (Traditional Chinese)
* ฮิงาชิโนะ เคโงะ (Thai)
Keigo Higashino (東野 圭吾) is one of the most popular and biggest selling fiction authors in Japan—as well known as James Patterson, Dean Koontz or Tom Clancy are in the USA.
Born in Osaka, he started writing novels while still working as an engineer at Nippon Denso Co. (presently DENSO). He won the Edogawa Rampo Prize, which is awarded annually to the finest mystery work, in 1985 for the novel Hōkago (After School) at age 27. Subsequently, he quit his job and started a career as a writer in Tokyo.
In 1999, he won the Mystery Writers of Japan Inc award for the novel Himitsu (The Secret), which was translated into English by Kerim Yasar and pu -
Jake Needham
JAKE NEEDHAM received the Barry Award at Bouchercon 2024, the world's largest convention of mystery readers, for BEST PAPERBACK MYSTERY OF 2024. He is a three-time Barry Award nominee, as well as a nominee for the International Thriller Writers' award for BEST PAPERBACK THRILLER OF THE YEAR.
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Needham is an American screen and television writer who has lived in Thailand for over thirty years. He started writing crime novels when he realized he really didn't like movies and television all that much. Since then, he has published fifteen popular mysteries and thrillers in two different series — The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels, and the Jack Shepherd Novels — as well as the international bestseller, THE BIG MANGO.
"Jake Needham is Asia's most stylis -
Michael Robotham
Two-times Gold Dagger winner (2015 and 2020), twice Edgar best novel finalist (2016 and 2020) and winner of the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger (2021), Michael Robotham was born in Australia in November 1960 and grew up in small country towns that had more dogs than people and more flies than dogs. He escaped became a cadet journalist on an afternoon newspaper in Sydney.
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For the next fourteen years he worked for newspapers and magazines in Australia, Europe, Africa and America. As a senior feature writer for the UK’s Mail on Sunday he was among the first people to view the letters and diaries of Czar Nicholas II and his wife Empress Alexandra, unearthed in the Moscow State Archives in 1991. He also gained access to Stalin’s Hitler files, which had -
Deon Meyer
Deon Meyer was born in the South African town of Paarl in the winelands of the Western Cape in 1958, and grew up in Klerksdorp, in the gold mining region of Northwest Province.
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After military duty and studying at the Potchefstroom University, he joined Die Volksblad, a daily newspaper in Bloemfontein as a reporter. Since then, he has worked as press liaison, advertising copywriter, creative director, web manager, Internet strategist, and brand consultant.
Deon wrote his first book when he was 14 years old, and bribed and blackmailed his two brothers into reading it. They were not impressed (hey, everybody is a critic ...)
Deon Meyer
Heeding their wisdom, he did not write fiction again until he was in his early thirties, when he started publishi -
Mick Herron
Mick Herron was born in Newcastle and has a degree in English from Balliol College, Oxford. He is the author of six books in the Slough House series as well as a mystery series set in Oxford featuring Sarah Tucker and/or P.I. Zoë Boehm. He now lives in Oxford and works in London.
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Lou Berney
Lou Berney is the Edgar Award-winning author of Double Barrel Bluff (November 2024), Dark Ride (2023), November Road (2018), The Long and Faraway Gone (2015), Whiplash River (2012), and Gutshot Straight (2010), all from William Morrow. His short fiction has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, the New England Review, and the Pushcart Prize anthology.
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Peter Colt
Peter Colt is currently a police officer in a small New England city where he has worked since 2007. He spent over twenty years in the Army reserve and was deployed to Kosovo in 2000, where he was attached to the Russian Army. He was deployed to Iraq in 2003 and again in 2008. He was fortunate to get to know many Vietnam vets and U.S. Army Special forces soldiers. He lived on Nantucket Island from 1973‑1986. He’s currently working on the next Andy Roark mystery.
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Paul Vidich
PAUL VIDICH is the acclaimed author of The Coldest Warrior (2020), An Honorable Man (2016) and The Good Assassin (2017), and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, LitHub, CrimeReads, Fugue, The Nation, Narrative Magazine, and others. He lives in New York.
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Praise for THE COLDEST WARRIOR:
A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Mystery/Thriller Pick for Spring 2020
Publishers Weekly and Library Journal STARRED reviews.
“Vidich . . . writes with the nuanced detail and authority of a career spook. With this outing, Vidich enters the upper ranks of espionage thriller writers.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A worthwhile thriller and a valuable exposé.”—Kirkus Reviews
"Vidich presents a fast-paced, historically accurate thriller, -
M.W. Craven
M. W. Craven was born in Carlisle but grew up in Newcastle, running away to join the army at the tender age of sixteen. He spent the next ten years travelling the world having fun, leaving in 1995 to complete a degree in social work with specialisms in criminology and substance misuse. Thirty-one years after leaving Cumbria, he returned to take up a probation officer position in Whitehaven, eventually working his way up to chief officer grade. Sixteen years later he took the plunge, accepted redundancy and became a full-time author. He now has entirely different motivations for trying to get inside the minds of criminals . . .
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M. W. Craven is married and lives in Carlisle with his wife, Joanne. When he isn’t out with his springer spaniel, or -
Matthew Legare
Matthew Legare has always loved reading, writing, and history. He’s combined his passions to tell stories set during little-known, but fascinating, events of the past. His style is a smooth blend of old pulp magazines and contemporary thrillers, which makes for a pulsating read.
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Matthew Legare
Matthew Legare has always loved reading, writing, and history. He’s combined his passions to tell stories set during little-known, but fascinating, events of the past. His style is a smooth blend of old pulp magazines and contemporary thrillers, which makes for a pulsating read.
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Mark Wightman
I was born in Edinburgh, Scotland and grew up in the Far East, first in Hong Kong and then in Singapore.
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After a successful career in media technology, I completed master's degrees in Creative Writing, first at the University of Edinburgh, and then at the University of East Anglia, where I received a distinction for my debut novel Waking the Tiger. I particularly enjoy exploring the elements of history that lay at the margins, where the recorded facts have either faded or been hidden.
I am delighted that Waking the Tiger has been longlisted for the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year 2021 and shortlisted for the Bloody Scotland Scottish Crime Debut of the Year 2021. -
E.M. Kelly
E.M. Kelly is an avid reader and award-winning author.
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He released his latest novel, Murder By Symbols: A Detective Colton Baker Thriller in November of 2024. It is the first book in the Detective Colton Baker series.
Currently he is working on the second book in the series titled, Two Lefts: A Detective Colton Baker Thriller. -
D.V. Chernov
D.V. Chernov is an award-winning author of historical and crime fiction. His debut novel Commissar was named Finalist for the prestigious Hemingway International Book Award. D.V. Chernov was born in Omsk, Russia and grew up in the Soviet Union during the final decades of the Cold War before immigrating to the US in 1991. For his crime fiction, Chernov derives inspiration from his 20-year career in the high-tech industry, with his extensive experience lending his thrillers a level of authenticity that is rare in the genre.
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J.L. Lycette
Writer of feminist medical thrillers and suspense. Author of THE ALGORITHM WILL SEE YOU NOW and THE COMMITTEE WILL KILL YOU NOW
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jennifer / JL Lycette is a novelist, award-winning essayist, rural physician, wife, and mom. Mid-career, she discovered narrative medicine on her path back from physician burnout and has been writing ever since. She is an alumna of the 2019 Pitch Wars Novel Mentoring program. Her first novel, The Algorithm Will See You Now, was published in March 2023. It was a 2023 SCREENCRAFT CINEMATIC BOOK COMPETITION FINALIST, 2023 READER'S FAVORITE BRONZE MEDAL WINNER in the Medical Thriller category, 2023 MAXY AWARD'S FINALIST - Thriller category, and 2023 PAGE TURNER AWARD'S FINALIST - Best Debut Novel categor -
Samuel Parker
Samuel Parker was born in the Michigan boondocks but was raised on a never-ending road trip through the U.S. Besides writing, he is a process junkie and the ex-guitarist for several metal bands you've never heard of. He lives in West Michigan with his wife and twin sons.
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T.R. Preston
Tyler Robert Preston was born and raised in Mississauga, Canada. He is passionate about Fantasy, Martial Arts, Philosophy, History, Science, and Storytelling in all its forms.
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His ultimate goal is to live in a cottage in northern Ontario, where he will write peacefully until the end of his days.
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You can follow his blog to keep up with writing updates and other things going on in his life: https://prestonstories.com/?page_id=23