I'm delighted to announce the great line up of best selling crime authors, crime experts and officers from Hampshire Police for CSI Portsmouth 2014, part of Portsmouth BookFest, where crime fiction meets crime fact, on Saturday 8 November.

This year joining me on the panel in the morning will be crime author M.C. Beaton with crime experts, Terrence Napier, Footwear Mark Examiner for Hampshire Police…

I'm often asked how I research my crime novels and in particular the police procedure and crime scene investigation side of things. I'm not married to a police officer or a former police officer (although I am married to a former fire-fighter) so I don't have inside knowledge except when it comes to fires, burnt bodies and serious road and other incidents which fire fighters attend, and they can all be incorporated into a crime novel, which indeed I have done.

So where do I…

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…

CSI Basingstoke, where crime fiction met crime fact, held on Saturday 6 July at the Basingstoke Discovery Centre in Hampshire, England, was a big hit with the audience. The sell out event was attended by a capacity audience of fifty crime fiction and CSI fans.

The event was modelled on the highly successful CSI Portsmouth, which I first organised in 2010. This year will be the fourth year of CSI Portsmouth,…

Crime authors Stephen Booth, Ann Cleeves, Matt Hilton and Pauline Rowson, and crime experts from Hampshire Police, the University of Portsmouth and the University of Surrey kept a packed audience enthralled at CSI Portsmouth on Saturday 3…

The Hampshire Police Fire Investigations Officer DC Terry Fitzjohn and Watch Manager Andy Earl of the Arson Task Force will be appearing at CSI Portsmouth 2012 on the morning panel along with Crime Scene Manager Carolyn Lovell from Hampshire Police and crime authors, Matt Hilton and Stephen Booth and myself.…

My tough and driven heroine, Emily Stone, from my two novels (Compulsion, Dead…

Recently, a few people have asked me about non-fiction books that I would recommend for reading more about crime scene investigation and serial killers.  Here are some of the top books that I refer to often in my work and I also find them extremely interesting. 

Case Homicides: Practical Investigative…

It is often thought that police forensics has been a relatively new contribution to interpreting, reconstructing, and solving crimes in our society.  Quite the contrary, police forensics, or more accurately described as forensic science, has been a part of history for more than a…

Aw, the fight scene. I've got three of them and I just wrote them to get through it. Now I have to go back and make it right. So I looked it up on the internet, my one-stop shop, and came up with good advice from many different sources. You get conflicting advice,…

TV shows like CSI are entertaining, but they give an unrealistic impression of how evidence is really collected and how crime scenes are managed. Catching crooks isn't easy--it takes a lot of work and effort on the part of the police and the lab.