Research

If you want to write a murder mystery, you have to do some research... or pay someone else to do it for you.

In a luxury flat in Monaco, John Houston's supermodel wife lies in bed, a bullet in her skull.

Houston is the world's most successful thriller writer, the playboy head of a literary empire that produces far more books than he could ever actually write. Now the man who has invented hundreds of bestselling killings is wanted for a real murder and on the run from the police, his life transformed into something out of one of his books.

And in London, the ghostwriter who is really behind those books has some questions for him too...

“A quirky Hitchcockian fable that pokes savage fun at publishers, the book trade and the business of authorship - Spectator

This clever thriller is packed with sardonic one-liners and ribald humour - Sunday Mirror”

A quirky Hitchcockian fable that pokes savage fun at publishers, the book trade and the business of authorship Spectator
This clever thriller is packed with sardonic one-liners and ribald humour Sunday Mirror

Philip Kerr has written over thirty books of which the best-known are the internationally renowned and bestselling Bernie Gunther series. The sixth book in the series, If the Dead Rise Not, won the CWA Historical Dagger. His other works include several standalone thrillers, non-fiction and an acclaimed series for younger readers, The Children of the Lamp . Philip died in March 2018, days before the publication of his 13th Bernie Gunther thriller, Greeks Bearing Gifts . He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature shortly before his death.

Set in the South of France, a fiendishly clever thriller about the back-stabbing literary world, from the bestselling author of the Bernie Gunther series of prize-winning historical novels. Robert Harris's THE GHOST meets Patricia Highsmith If you want to write a murder mystery, you have to do some research... or pay someone else to do it for you. In a luxury flat in Monaco, John Houston's supermodel wife lies in bed, a bullet in her skull.Houston is the world's most successful thriller writer, the playboy head of a literary empire that produces far more books than he could ever actually write. Now the man who has invented hundreds of bestselling killings is wanted for a real murder and on the run from the police, his life transformed into something out of one of his books.And in London, the ghostwriter who is really behind those books has some questions for him too...

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