Welcome to this week’s Tracy Talks To… and I am delighted to be chatting to MJ Arlidge, author of the Helen Grace series, Gillian McAllister, author of several brilliant standalone legal based thrillers and Anya Lipska, author of the Kiszka & Kershaw series.
Anya Lipska / AK Turner
Living in East London with its big Polish community gave Anya Lipska (a pen name) the inspiration to create a tough but educated Polish private eye/fixer, who came to the UK to escape communist rule in the Eighties. A journalist by background, Anya was able to draw on her contacts among murder detectives, pathologists and lawyers. ‘Sometimes those research conversations in the pub get overheard and we get some very funny looks!’
The series quickly won critical acclaim and led to Anya being chosen for ‘Queen of Crime’ Val McDermid’s New Blood panel at Theakstons Crime Festival – Europe’s biggest crime writing event – in 2013. The series has twice been optioned as a potential TV series.
Under her real name A K Turner, she has now written the first of a new series launching a Goth girl crime-solving mortuary technician which is winning some rave reviews. Val McDermid called Body Language, the series opener, ‘spellbinding storytelling’.
Anya also makes documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4, and international broadcasters like Discovery Channel. She’s made programmes on everything from true crime, to plane crashes, and covered the hunt for Cleopatra’s lost tomb. ‘My TV day job keeps me buzzing with ideas that I can work into my fiction,’ she says, ‘but nothing matches the excitement of creating characters and weaving plot.”
Anya’s website is at anyalipska.com
Gillian McAllister
Gillian McAllister is the Sunday Times Top 10 bestselling author of Everything But The Truth, Anything You Do Say, No Further Questions and The Evidence Against You.
How To Disappear is her latest release, a witness protection thriller.
All of her novels are standalone and can be read in any order. She is published in ten countries around the world. The Good Sister is her US debut, released by Penguin USA, and is the American title for No Further Questions. The Choice is her second American release which is the US title for Anything You Do Say.
You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @gillianmauthor. She also blogs at http://www.gillianmcallister.com.
M.J. Arlidge
M. J. Arlidge has worked in television for the last fifteen years, specializing in high-end drama production, including the prime-time crime serials Torn, The Little House and Silent Witness. Arlidge also pilots original crime series for both UK and US networks. In 2015 his audio exclusive Six Degrees of Assassination was a Number One bestseller.
His first thriller, Eeny Meeny, was the UK’s bestselling crime debut of 2014.
It was followed by the bestselling Pop Goes the Weasel, The Doll’s House, Liar Liar, Little Boy Blue, Hide and Seek and Love Me Not. Down to the Woods is the eighth DI Helen Grace thriller. In 2019 he published a standalone thriller, A Gift for Dying.
