D Beddows, T Baker, J Wallace, M Webster:

Former solicitor turned successful author Joanna Wallace won the Crime Fiction Lovers’ Best Debut Crime Novel Award in 2023 for her hugely successful novel ‘You’d Look Better as a Ghost’, and was shortlisted for the Best Crime Author of the Year award. Described as ‘Brett Easton meets Killing Eve’, her first novel tells the story of Claire, a part-time serial killer who sees her victims as ghosts before they die. This dark comedy thriller, which may be a lesson to us all in how to deal with unjust and bitter disappointment, has been optioned to be adapted to TV. She followed this up with ‘The Dead Friend Project’, a novel of school gates intrigue, in which Beth, a single mother of three, looks beyond her own problems and seeks to uncover the truth behind the death of her best friend.

Describing herself as the daughter of a window cleaner and a fairground traveller, author, broadcaster, journalist and fitness professional, Tina Baker is perhaps best known as TV critic for BBC and MGTV during a thirty-year career in broadcasting. Yet another claim to fame is that this Leicestershire lass won Celebrity Fit Club. She has published four novels, including the Amazon No 1 best seller ‘Call Me Mummy’, a gripping thriller in which a childless woman abducts another woman’s child, with unexpected repercussions; ‘Nasty Little Cuts’, a tense portrait of two complex characters whose volatile marriage threatens to tear them apart, and ‘Make Me Clean’, a darkly funny story of Maria, a cleaner who doesn’t just clean her clients’ homes, but eradicates abusive people from their lives, too. Tina’s dark, twisty and sometimes grim thrillers are lightened by shafts of humour.

Following a career based in numerous overseas locations, and which saw her mortar-bombed, tear-gassed, held hostage and twice arrested, Denise Beddows nowadays experiences adventure vicariously through her writing.  Her Amazon No 1 best-selling international spy thrillers have won two readers’ awards; the two most recent – ‘The Kohat Connection’ and ‘The Nevsky Prospekt Affair’ – being set in Pakistan and Moscow respectively. Twice shortlisted (2024 and 2025) in the True Crime Awards for her non-fiction books ‘The Forgotten Forty-Four’ and ‘A Wronged Man’, she recently turned her hand to penning a new cozy crime series – The Misbourne Murder Mysteries. Set in the Misbourne Valley, featuring a band of Third Ager sleuths, and inspired both by local events and by Denise’s fellow U3A members, ‘Who Killed Emerald Isacson?’ and ‘Murder at the Festival’ are the first in a series of ten new novels.