Killer Twist

LoveReading Says

There’s something deliciously irresistible about a murder mystery set in the book world, the world in which we work. And so I was in: hook, line and sinker. Jo Furniss has a cracking time pummeling publishing, crime festivals, celebrity authors and the strange ecosystem that surrounds the industry. 

At the Crème de la Crime book festival, there’s one name everyone knows: Jakob Hök. A properly Big Name Author - inky suit, hygge smile, crisp consonants and, naturally, his name printed on his book covers in considerably larger letters than the title. Then there’s Aggie Catchlove, an anomaly among the festival’s crime-writing fraternity.

She writes books famous for their graphic sex as much as their bloody murder - crim-ance, as Aggie calls it, although nobody else does. Her novels shift Kindle-loads of digital copies and are the guilty pleasure, the Gu-pot end of the literary world.

Aggie is an absolute joy. A middle-aged woman with a selection of brightly coloured jackets specifically so people notice her, a vivid imagination and a deeply dubious search history. She's fierce, funny, flirtatious and I loved her. But she's also angry after a certain celebrity author borrowed That Twist from her last book. A book for which she was expecting award wins and had TV rights options.

Lawyer, politician, family man, widower, TV host and now writer, Kit Stirling is Oxford and House of Commons polished; young, handsome, populist and something of a national treasure. He’s just taken home the Book of the Year gong and announced the follow-up to his phenomenally successful debut. Which also just happens to be pinching its premise from Hök's latest outing.

When Kit is murdered, Aggie and her fellow writers find themselves trying to work out who killed him before the whole thing descends into a media circus. 

Furniss has enormous fun quietly casting everyone in the novel as a potential suspect, and I loved her wonderfully sharp descriptors and observations. Publishing itself gets some of the best lines. As one character observes, it may be a shitty business, but it’s their shitty business - something they continue to love even when it behaves rather like a gaslighting husband.

A hugely entertaining crime novel for anyone who loves books, writers and the wonderfully mad world of publishing. Perfect for fans of Benjamin Stevenson.

Deborah Maclaren

About Killer Twist

When a celebrity author is murdered at a crime writing festival, a Scandinavian writer of Nordic noir and an English 'crim-ance' novelist form an unlikely team to catch the killer of a man they both love to hate. Perfect for fans of Anthony Horowitz and Benjamin Stevenson

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