It’s June! This really is the perfect month for my detectives – because it’s not only Pride Month, but it’s National Crime Reading Month too!
I’m delighted to say that I’m one of the NCRM ambassadors again this year. It’s an initiative from the CWA and the Reading Agency, encouraging everyone to get out there and read more crime fiction, especially children’s crime fiction! If you’re on my website, you probably already read a lot of crime – but I do think that this is a great month to read or reread my series. They’re not only mysteries, they’re mysteries that star a lot of queer detectives – most notably, of course, Daisy Wells, who came out in my very favourite book of the series, Death in the Spotlight. Here’s an article I wrote about it – a few years ago, now, but I still stand by it!
To celebrate Pride Month I always create a Progress Pride flag made up of editions of my books from lots of different countries, to show my support for my queer fans all over the world. Here’s 2023’s version – I hope you can read with pride this month, and I hope that wherever you are you can have some moments of joy too. As Daisy shows us all, queer people make the world so much better just by existing in it!
If you want to meet me in June, I’ll be at Brighton Waterstones on the 24th at 12pm – it’s a free signing, and I’ll sign books old and new, so come along and say hello!
Oh, and I’m working away on the copyedit of the second book in my Ministry series, The Body in the Blitz. It’s coming out on October 12th this year, and I can promise a lot of mystery, plenty of murder and many, many queer characters …
