Chase Baker II is here. The followup to The Shroud Key which Suspense Magazine hailed with 5-Stars, Chase Baker and the Golden Condor is a full of action, romance, and a whole lot of crime down in the Amazon Jungle where life is precious but death is all too easy.…

Tide of Death introduces the enigmatic DI Andy Horton, whose patch is Portsmouth and the Solent area on the South Coast of England. The action opens on a foggy August Bank Holiday and to mark the occasion Tide of Death is on a special offer on Amazon Kindle for August Bank Holiday, only 23 - 26 August. So if you haven't met Andy Horton yet here's your…

The third in the DI Horton series (currently eleven) set on the South Coast of England in Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight is on a special Kindle offer for August only £1.99 or $3.34.

As Horton is forced to confront his past he's faced with a dangerous adversary who will stop at nothing to prevent the truth from coming out...

DI Horton is…

To celebrate international yacht racing and Cowes Week, Death Surge, the tenth in the DI Andy Horton series of police procedural crime novels, set against the backdrop of Cowes Week is on a special price promotion via Aerbooks.

At only £2.49 and $3.99  for one week only until 7…

Many of my crime novels are in unabridged audio book format, published by Isis and read by the very talented actor and voice artist Gordon Griffin.

They have received some lovely reviews including this one below.

Dead Man's Wharf Audio Book Review

Gordon Griffin's delivery enhances the story's setting, the Solent area of the south coast of England, with its atmosphere of mist and the scent of the sea. As gruff Inspector Andy…

Over a hundred people turned out to hear me talk about my flawed and rugged detective, DI Andy Horton on 11 June at Solent U3A.  I entertained members of the audience with tales of the dogged Portsmouth cop and explained how I plot, research and write my crime novels set on the South Coast of England.…

How far would you go to protect a secret? Would you risk your job for it, your friends your family? Would you kill for it?

The story behind the latest DI Andy Horton crime novel, Shroud of Evil number eleven in the series, explores the corrosive nature of secrets. It plunges the flawed and…

http://mitziszereto.com/blog/dorian-gray-strikes-again-riding-the-wave-of-decadence-with-penny-dreadful/

In May I'll be appearing at Crimefestin the UK. I'll be on a panel on Friday 16 May with fellow crime authors Elizabeth Haynes, Chris Longmuir, Lesley Thomson and Felix Francis entitled "What’s So Good About Crime?" It will be held between 17.10 and 18.00. CrimeFest takes place at the Bristol Royal Marriott Hotel, UK from 15 - 18 May 2014.

Then on Tuesday 20 May I will be entertaining the audience at Bognor Regis Library…

April sees the publication of the eleventh in the DI Andy Hortonpolice procedural crime series,Shroud of Evil.

In…

This week there is the chance to win a copy of DI Andy Horton number eight, Death Lies Beneath, which is being offered on the Crime Readers Association (CRA)…

On Thursday 20 February I was delighted to entertain the volunteers of the Southampton and District National Trust.



I talked about the inspiration behind the DI Andy Horton series of crime novels, where I get my ideas from, and how I write the…

Whose story is it? That is a question every writer needs to ask him or herself before starting to write a novel, or if not then certainly while writing and revising it. From whose viewpoint are you telling the story? Is it single viewpoint or multiple viewpoint? Is it male or female or a mixture of both? Beware the latter though and having too many viewpoints because that will not only muddle the story and slow it down but it will also confuse you, and more importantly the…

I had great time entertaining the ladies of the Young at Heart Club (part of Brandon Care) on Wednesday 5 February. They certainly lived up to their name. They were a very lively bunch.

Against the backdrop of fierce winds, torrential rain and thunder I talked about murder mystery and mayhem. Very appropriate

I spoke of how I get the ideas for my…

There are a lot of people who view all sub-plots with the gravest suspicion, regarding them at best as a pointless distraction from the main business at hand, and, at worst, as a dangerously amateurish self-indulgence.  Kill your darlings, they screech like dogma-drilled harpies, kill, kill, kill them all!  Needless to say, I disagree.

In a general sense, I’m all in favour of sub-plots.  In fact, I delight in them.  They offer so many exciting possibilities to writers of…

One of the many smaller pleasures of writing fiction is the fun to be derived from choosing the names of your characters.  There’s a lot of joy in nailing down the perfect name for your maverick cop/cerebral private detective/vampire overlord/super-soldier from Planet Zap, and just as much amusement in bestowing the names of people you dislike upon the seedy/degenerate/evil characters currently paddling around in the shallow end of your WIP’s gene pool.  But the truth is that the more you…

Severn House Publishershas bought World English language rights to the eleventh in the mystery crime series featuring the flawed and rugged DI Andy Horton.

Shroud of Evil will be published in the UK and Commonwealth in April 2014 in…

The Controversial Life of a Book: The Wilde Passions of Dorian Gray is now at Errant Ramblings: Mitzi Szereto's Weblog.

http://mitziszereto.com/blog/the-controversial-life-of-a-book-the-wilde-passions-of-dorian-gray/

Crime authors get to research all sorts of interesting things and last Saturday I spent a fascinating morning at the Fingerprint Bureau at Hampshire Police Support Headquarters at Netley, UK, learning how the fingerprints taken at the scene of crime and of people in police custody are identified. Although I'd researched this before and have had lots of advice from the Fingerprint Team I went there specifically to ask questions that relate to the…

Time frames in novels, and particularly when writing a series, as I do with the DI Andy Horton novels, are a tricky thing. There is ‘real time’ and there is ‘fictional time’.

In ‘real time’ I write two DI Horton novels a year whereas in ‘fictional time’ the current novels are set over a period of sixteen months, which means there are an awful lot of murders in Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, making it…