France, renowned for delectable food and wine, art and romance, is also a popular setting for crime authors: the art world in Pip Drysdale’s The Paris Affair, a grand country estate in Anna Downes’s The Safe Place and the Alps in Allie Reynolds’s Shiver. Each lends a certain je ne sais quoi to the intrigue. Join us as we explore these settings and more along with award-winning short story writer, Jacqui Horwood, at our upcoming author panel.
The Paris Affair (Simon & Schuster), Pip Drysdale’s latest book, is set in the art world of Paris. Sassy British journalist Harper Brown is writing a feature about an artist, Noah X, who is implicated in the murder of his model muse. Harper soon finds herself at the centre of the police investigation and discovers an opaque, oh-so-very chic but deadly underbelly to the Parisian art world where nothing is at it seems…
Pip Drysdale is a writer, musician and actor. Her bestselling debut novel, The Sunday Girl, has been published in the United States, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Her second novel, The Strangers We Know, was also a bestseller and is being developed for television.
The Safe Place (Affirm Press), Anna Downes’s debut novel, was inspired by her experiences as a live-in housekeeper on a remote French estate. It features failed British actor, Emily Proudman, whose life is falling apart. So she is offered a live-in job with a wealthy family on the French coast, it seems like the perfect opportunity to start again. But her charismatic new employers are hiding dangerous secrets…
Anna Downes studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Her acting credits include EastEnders, Casualty, Holby City and Dalziel and Pascoe, as well as a long-running stage production of The Dresser in London’s West End.
Shiver (Hachette Australia), Allie Reynolds’s debut novel, is a propulsive, locked-room thriller. A weekend reunion in the French Alps turns deadly five friends discover someone has deliberately abandoned them in a deserted mountaintop resort. Think Agatha Christie set in a snow storm in the mountains…
Allie Reynolds is a former professional freestyle snowboarder who spent five winters in the mountains of France, Switzerland, Austria and Canada. Her short fiction has been published in magazines in the UK, Australia, Sweden and South Africa.
Jacqui Horwood works as a librarian at the State Library Victoria. She won the 2003 Scarlet Stiletto Award, the 2005 Award for Best Crime in Verse, and the 2016 Silver Stiletto Award. She was shortlisted for the 2015 and 2016 Ada Cambridge Biography in Prose awards and the 2019 Scarlet Stiletto awards. Her short stories have been published in anthologies and e-zines. Jacqui is a former convenor of Sisters in Crime and was a Davitt awards judge for ten years.