Critics’ New Blood

Always a sell-out, the New Blood panel provides a showcase for the year’s outstanding debuts as selected by the UK’s top crime fiction critics. It gives today’s readers a unique opportunity to discover the stars of tomorrow as the authors of four brilliant first novels discuss their books with Programming Chair Mick Herron.

A winter storm on Orkney’s Atlantic coast exposes a body and old wounds in Daniel Aubrey’s haunting thriller Dark Island. A.E. Goldin’s Murder in Constantinople is an immersive historical murder mystery set on the eve of the Crimean War. Tensions and suspicions broil murderously in suburban Australia in The Grapevine, the atmospheric debut from Kate Kemp. The unforgiving Antarctic landscape is the brutal setting for R.S. Burnett’s ingenious survival-thriller Whiteout.