The longlist for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2023 has been announced today by Harrogate International Festivals. The search for the best crime novel of the past year gets underway as the public are now invited to vote for their favourites to reach the next stage.

The winner will be announced at the opening night of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival (20 July), which this year celebrates its 20^th anniversary. To mark the momentous occasion, for the first time the longlist includes twenty outstanding authors, rather than the traditional eighteen, competing for the UK and Ireland’s most coveted crime fiction writing Award.

With no further ado here is the longlist.

• The Murder Book by Mark Billingham (Little, Brown Book Group; Little Brown)
• The Botanist by M.W. Craven (Little, Brown Book Group; Constable)
• Into The Dark by Fiona Cummins (Pan Macmillan; Macmillan/Pan)
• The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley (HarperCollins; HarperFiction)
• The Locked Room by Elly Griffiths (Quercus)
• The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett (Profile Books; Viper)
• Bad Actors by Mick Herron (John Murray Press; Baskerville)
• The Family Remains by Lisa Jewell (Cornerstone; Century Fiction)
• Black Hearts by Doug Johnstone (Orenda Books)
• The Lost Man of Bombay by Vaseem Khan (Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Last Party by Clare Mackintosh (Little, Brown Book Group; Sphere)
• All I Said Was True by Imran Mahmood (Bloomsbury Publishing; Raven Books)
• Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister (Penguin Random House; Michael Joseph)
• 1989 by Val McDermid (Little, Brown Book Group; Little Brown)
• The Heretic by Liam McIlvanney (HarperCollins; HarperFiction)
• Blue Water by Leonora Nattrass (Profile Books; Viper)
• May God Forgive by Alan Parks (Canongate Books)
• Truly Darkly Deeply by Victoria Selman (Quercus)
• Reputation by Sarah Vaughan (Simon & Schuster)
• The It Girl by Ruth Ware (Simon & Schuster)

Read on for a description of each book.

Chief Executive of Harrogate International Festivals, Sharon Canavar, commented: “We are delighted to announce the 2023 longlist for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, with an exceptional collection of the UK and Ireland’s best crime fiction novels from the past year. The Award is an integral part of the Festival and with a gripping mix of subgenres nominated, from psychological thrillers to murder mysteries, we can’t wait to see how the public vote this year.”

Simon Theakston, Executive Director of Theakston, added: “Each year I eagerly await the long list announcement for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and every year I’m reminded of the phenomenal talent in the crime fiction writing world, whether a returning icon or a rising star. I’m looking forward to a celebratory toast of Old Peculier in July, but for now, we raise a glass to all the exceptional nominees as the shortlist vote is taken to the public.”

The longlist was selected by an academy of crime writing authors, agents, editors, reviewers, members of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival Programming Committee, along with representatives from the media partner, Daily Express. The award is run by Harrogate International Festivals sponsored by T&R Theakston Ltd, in partnership with Waterstones and Daily Express, and is open to full-length crime novels published in paperback between 1 May 2022 to 30 April 2023 by UK and Irish authors.

The public are now invited to vote to create a shortlist of six titles from 10am on Thursday 27 April at www.harrogatetheakstoncrimeaward.com. Voting closes on Thursday 18 May, with the shortlist announced and winner voting opening on Thursday 15 June. The winner will be revealed on the opening night of Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, Thursday 20 July, receiving £3,000 and a handmade, engraved beer barrel provided by T&R Theakston Ltd.

Find out more at:

–       Website: www.harrogateinternationalfestivals.com

–       Facebook: @HarrogateInternationalFestivals

–       Twitter @HarrogateFest

–       Instagram: @harrogatefestivals

www.harrogatetheakstoncrimeaward.com

#theakstonaward

About the books

Tom Thorne has it all. In Nicola Tanner and Phil Hendricks, Thorne has good friends by his side. He finally has a love life worth a damn and is happy in the job to which he has devoted his life…  He has everything to lose.  Hunting the woman responsible for a series of grisly murders, Thorne has no way of knowing that he will be plunged into a nightmare from which he may never wake.  And he’ll do anything to keep it.  Finally, Thorne’s past has caught up with him and a ruinous secret is about to be revealed. If he wants to save himself and his friends, he must do the unthinkable.

The Botanist by M.W. Craven (Little, Brown Book Group; Constable)

Detective Sergeant Washington Poe can count on one hand the number of friends he has. And he’d still have his thumb left. There’s the insanely brilliant, guilelessly innocent civilian analyst, Tilly Bradshaw, of course. He’s known his beleaguered boss, Detective Inspector Stephanie Flynn, for years as he has his nearest neighbour, full-time shepherd/part-time dog sitter, Victoria.  And then there’s Estelle Doyle. It’s true the caustic pathologist has never walked down the sunny side of the street, but this time has she gone too far? Shot twice in the head, her father’s murder appears to be an open and shut case.  Estelle has firearms discharge residue on her hands, and, in a house surrounded by fresh snow, hers are the only footprints going in. Since her arrest she’s only said three words: ‘Tell Washington Poe.’  Meanwhile, a poisoner the press have dubbed the Botanist is sending high profile celebrities poems and pressed flowers. The killer seems to be able to walk through walls and, despite the advance notice he gives his victims, and regardless of the security measures the police take, he seems to be able to kill with impunity.  For a man who hates locked room mysteries, this is going to be the longest week of Washington Poe’s life . . . 

The place: Seawings, a beautiful Art Deco home overlooking the sweep of the bay in Midtown-on-Sea. The crime: The gilded Holden family – Piper and Gray and their two teenage children, Riva and Artie – has vanished from the house without a trace. The detective: DS Saul Anguish, brilliant but with a dark past, treads the narrow line between light and shade.

One late autumn morning, Piper’s best friend arrives at Seawings to discover an eerie scene – the kettle is still warm, all the family’s phones are charging on the worktop, the cars are in the garage. But the house is deserted.

In fifteen-year-old Riva Holden’s bedroom, scrawled across the mirror in blood, are three words:  Make. Them. Stop.  What happens next? 

In a beautiful old apartment block, deep in the backstreets of Paris, secrets are stirring behind every resident’s door. The lonely wife. The party animal. The curtain-twitcher. The secret lover. The watchful caretaker. The unwanted guest. One resident is missing. Only the killer holds the key to the mystery… 

Forensic archaeologist Dr Ruth is in London clearing out her mother’s belongings when she makes a surprising discovery: a photograph of her Norfolk cottage taken before Ruth lived there. Her mother always hated the cottage, so why does she have a picture of the place? The only clue is written on the back of the photo: Dawn, 1963.  Ruth returns to Norfolk determined to solve the mystery, but then Covid rears its ugly head. Ruth and her daughter are locked down in their cottage, attempting to continue with work and home-schooling.  Happily, the house next door is rented by a nice woman called Zoe, who they become friendly with while standing on their doorsteps clapping for carers.  Nelson, meanwhile, is investigating a series of deaths of women that may or may not be suicide. When he links the deaths to an archaeological discovery, he breaks curfew to visit the cottage where he finds Ruth chatting to her neighbour whom he remembers as a carer who was once tried for murdering her employer.  Only then her name wasn’t Zoe.  It was Dawn.

Edith Twyford was once a world-famous children’s author, but now her only legacy is the rumoured existence of the Twyford Code: a series of clues hidden in her books leading to… what? No one knows – but that hasn’t stopped the speculation.  Steve Smith can trace nearly all the bad things in his life back to Edith Twyford. As a child he found one of her books, covered in strange symbols. He showed it to his teacher, Miss Iles, who was convinced it held the key to the code. Within weeks Miss Iles had disappeared, and Steve has no idea if she is dead or alive – or if she was right. Now he’s determined to find out.  But the Twyford Code hides secrets some would do anything to possess, and Steve isn’t the only one on its trail. The race is on to solve the mystery of the century. Could you get there first? 

In MI5 a scandal is brewing and there are bad actors everywhere.  A key member of a Downing Street think-tank has disappeared without a trace. Claude Whelan, one-time First Desk of MI5’s Regent’s Park, is tasked with tracking her down. But the trail leads straight back to Regent’s Park HQ itself, with its chief, Diana Taverner, as prime suspect. Meanwhile her Russian counterpart has unexpectedly shown up in London but has slipped under MI5’s radar.  Over at Slough House, the home for demoted and embittered spies, the slow horses are doing what they do best: adding a little bit of chaos to an already unstable situation.  In a world where lying, cheating and backstabbing is the norm, bad actors are bending the rules for their own gain. If the slow horses want to change the script, they’ll need to get their own act together before the final curtain.  Includes the short story ‘Standing by the Wall: A Slough House Interlude’.

LONDON. Early morning, June 2019: on the foreshore of the river Thames, a bag of bones is discovered. Human bones.  DCI Samuel Owusu is called to the scene and quickly sends the bag for forensic examination. The bones are those of a young woman, killed by a blow to the head many years ago.  Also inside the bag is a trail of clues, in particular the seeds of a rare tree which lead DCI Owusu back to a mansion in Chelsea where, nearly thirty years previously, three people lay dead in a kitchen, and a baby waited upstairs for someone to pick her up.  The clues point forward too to a brother and sister in Chicago searching for the only person who can make sense of their pasts.  Four deaths. An unsolved mystery. A family whose secrets can’t stay buried for ever …

Death is just the beginning… The Skelf women live in the shadow of death every day, running the family funeral directors and private investigator business in Edinburgh. But now their own grief intertwines with that of their clients, as they are left reeling by shocking past events.  A fistfight by an open grave leads Dorothy to investigate the possibility of a faked death, while a young woman’s obsession with Hannah threatens her relationship with Indy and puts them both in mortal danger. An elderly man claims he’s being abused by the ghost of his late wife, while ghosts of another kind come back to haunt Jenny from the grave… pushing her to breaking point.  As the Skelfs struggle with increasingly unnerving cases and chilling danger lurks close to home, it becomes clear that grief, in all its forms, can be deadly… 

As Inspector Persis Wadia and Metropolitan Police criminalist Archie Blackfinch investigate the case in Bombay, they uncover a trail left behind by the enigmatic Ice Man – a trail leading directly into the dark heart of conspiracy.  Meanwhile, two new murders grip the city. Is there a serial killer on the loose, targeting Europeans?  Rich in atmosphere, the thrilling third chapter in the CWA Historical Dagger-winning Malabar House series pits Persis against a mystery from beyond the grave, unfolding against the backdrop of a turbulent post-colonial India, a nation struggling to redefine itself in the shadow of the Raj.

On New Year’s Eve, Rhys Lloyd has a house full of guests.  He’s celebrating the success of his lakeside holiday homes and has generously invited the village to drink champagne with their wealthy new neighbours.  By midnight, Rhys will be floating dead in the freezing waters of the lake.  On New Year’s Day, DC Ffion Morgan has a village full of suspects.  She grew up in the tiny community, so the murder suspects are her neighbours, friends and family – and Ffion has her own secrets to protect.  With a lie uncovered at every turn, soon the question isn’t who wanted Rhys dead . . . but who finally killed him. 

I didn’t kill her. Trust me. When Amy Blahn died on a London rooftop, Layla Mahoney was there. Layla was holding her. But all she can say when she’s arrested is that ‘It was Michael. Find Michael and you’ll find out everything you need to know.’ The problem is, the police can’t find him – they aren’t even sure he exists. Layla knows she only has forty-eight hours to convince the police that bringing in the man she knows only as ‘Michael’ will clear her name and reveal a dangerous game affecting not just Amy and Layla, but her husband Russell and countless others.  But as the detectives begin to uncover the whole truth about what happened to Amy, Layla will soon have to decide: how much of that truth can she really risk being exposed? 

It’s late. You’re waiting up for your son.  Then you spot him: he’s with someone. And – you can’t believe what you see – your funny, happy teenage boy stabs this stranger.  You don’t know who. You don’t know why. You only know your son is charged with murder. His future is lost.  That night you fall asleep in despair. But when you wake . . . it is yesterday. The day before the murder.  Somewhere in the past lie the answers – a reason for this crime.  And your only chance to stop it . . .

1989 by Val McDermid (Little, Brown Book Group; Little Brown)

1989. The world is on the brink of revolution and journalist Allie Burns is a woman on a mission. When she discovers a lead about the exploitation of society’s most vulnerable, Allie is determined to investigate and give voice to the silenced.  Elsewhere, a ticking clock begins the countdown to a murder. As Allie begins to connect the dots and edges closer to exposing the truth, it is more shocking than she ever imagined. There’s nothing like a killer story, and to tell it, Allie must risk her freedom and her life . . .

The Heretic by Liam McIlvanney (HarperCollins; HarperFiction)

Glasgow, 1975. A deadly fire. An arson attack on a Glasgow warehouse causes the deaths of a young mother and child.  Police suspect it’s the latest act in a brutal gang warfare that’s tearing the city apart – one that DI Duncan McCormack has been tasked with stopping. A brutal murder. Five years ago he was walking on water as the cop who tracked down a notorious serial killer.  But he made powerful enemies and when a mutilated body is found in a Tradeston slum, McCormack is assigned a case that no one wants. The dead man is wearing a masonic ring, though, and Duncan realizes the victim is not the down-and-out his boss had first assumed. A catastrophic explosion. As McCormack looks into both crimes, the investigations are disrupted by a shocking event.  A bomb rips through a pub packed with people – and a cop is killed in the blast.  The cases are stacking up and with one of his own unit now dead, McCormack is in the firing line. But he’s starting to see a thread – one that connects all three attacks…

New Year 1795, and Laurence Jago is aboard the Tankerville mail ship, en route to Philadelphia. Laurence is travelling undercover, supposedly as a journalist’s assistant. But his real mission is to protect a civil servant, en route to Congress with a vital treaty that will stop the Americans from joining the French in their war against Britain.  When the civil servant meets an unfortunate – and apparently accidental – end, the treaty disappears, and Laurence realises that only he can keep the Americans out of the war. Trapped on the ship with a strange assortment of travellers including two penniless French aristocrats, an Irish actress and a dancing bear, Laurence must hunt down both the lost treaty and the murderer, before he has a tragic ‘accident’ himself…

May God Forgive by Alan Parks (Canongate Books)

Glasgow is a city in mourning. An arson attack has left five dead. Tempers are frayed and sentiments running high.  When three youths are charged the city goes wild. A crowd gathers outside the courthouse but as the police drive the young men to prison, their van is rammed by a truck, and the men are grabbed and bundled into a car. The next day, the body of one of them is dumped in the city centre. A note has been sent to the newspapers: one down, two to go.  Detective Harry McCoy has twenty-four hours to find the kidnapped boys before they all turn up dead, and it is going to mean taking down some of Glasgow’s most powerful to do it . . .

Twelve-year-old Sophie and her mother, Amelia-Rose, move to London from Massachusetts where they meet the charismatic Matty Melgren, who quickly becomes an intrinsic part of their lives. But as the relationship between the two adults fractures, a serial killer begins targeting young women with a striking resemblance to Amelia-Rose.  When Matty is eventually sent down for multiple murder, questions remain as to his guilt — questions which ultimately destroy both women. Nearly twenty years later, Sophie receives a letter from Battlemouth Prison informing her Matty is dying and wants to meet. It looks like Sophie might finally get the answers she craves. But will the truth set her free — or bury her deeper?

Reputation: it takes a lifetime to build and just one moment to destroy. Emma Webster is a respectable MP. Emma Webster is a devoted mother. Emma Webster is innocent of the murder of a tabloid journalist. Emma Webster is a liar. Reputation: the story you tell about yourself, and the lies others choose to believe… With everything at stake, his death could be the end of her.  

Everyone wanted her life. Someone wanted her dead. It was Hannah who found April’s body ten years ago. It was Hannah who didn’t question what she saw that day. Did her testimony put an innocent man in prison?  She needs to know the truth.  Even if it means questioning her own friends. Even if it means putting her own life at risk. Because if the killer wasn’t a stranger, it’s someone she knows.  

Do you have a favourite? Who do you hope to see make it to the shortlist and eventually win? Do let me know. And if you see me wandering the grounds of the Old Swan during the festival, do come and say hello.