Peter Robinson's absorbing new novel, Children of the Revolution, is our April Top Pick in Mystery! In his 21st novel to feature Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, the 30-year veteran launches into a sensitive investigation of a former teacher's death, which may be linked to his checkered past and sexual misconduct with one of his students. Amid the details of the case, Banks is facing new career choices: Does he accept a paperwork-heavy promotion, or risk being superannuated in his more comfortable position?

In a 7 questions interview, Robinson shares his thoughts on keeping his beloved character fresh, the Inspector Banks television series and more.

Describe your book in one sentence.
A disgraced college teacher is found dead, and when Banks’ investigation leads him to suspect the man’s radical past might play a part, he begins to encounter opposition from powerful and privileged establishment figures.

This is your 21st novel to feature DCI Banks. Do you still discover new things you love about his character?
That’s what keeps me going. I try to find something new about Banks, however minor, in each book. In Watching the Dark, for example, I discovered that he had a bit of a cruel streak by the way he played practical jokes on one of the characters. In Children of the Revolution he even surprises himself by some of his actions, but telling would be giving too much away!

Where do you do most of your writing?
While I do a lot of writing in my study in Toronto and work steadily when I’m over in Yorkshire, perhaps the place I get most done is a lake house in Northern Ontario. There are no distractions except a beautiful view, and I get about twice as much writing done there as I would during the same time in the city.

Do you have any unique writing rituals?
No, I just plunge right in. It’s easy to develop tools for procrastination, like entering the cold water slowly and feeling the chill creep up your legs. Best to dive right in and immerse yourself. You soon get used to it. I don’t require any weird objects on my desk or lucky charms to wear. Well, I do have a tiny skull made of jet on my desk.

Name one book you think everyone should read.
The Wind in the Willows.

Your Inspector Banks series has recently been adapted for television. Have you been a regular viewer?
I have seen all the episodes, and I must say I think Stephen Tompkinson is doing a great job in the title role. The rest of the cast is terrific, too. I do find the adaptations have diverged quite a bit from the books lately, but the result has probably been even better television programmes!

What are you working on next?
The 22nd DCI Banks book, called Abattoir Blues after a Nick Cave song. The title will probably be changed in the U.S., as “abattoir” is not a word you use, I’m told. I’ll probably call it Slaughterhouse Six! Anyway, my publishers weren’t too thrilled when I told them it was about a stolen tractor, but when I mentioned the bloodstained hangar, the burning caravan and the body parts, their ears perked up a bit.

After writing several acclaimed novels, British author Jill Paton Walsh was tapped by the Dorothy L. Sayers estate to bring back Sayers’ iconic detecting duo, Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. Walsh’s fourth Wimsey/Vane mystery, The Late Scholar, has just been published.

When did you discover the Wimsey novels, and what did you admire most about them?
I was about 14, I think, and voraciously reading everything I could lay my hands on. I loved the elegance and wit of both the detection and the characters, and fell hopelessly in love with Lord Peter. I still am.

Continuations of beloved series are seldom as beloved as the originals, yet your Harriet and Peter stories seem to be almost universally enjoyed. What do you think is key to your success?
I think I have a good ear for voices . . . the result of many years working as a novelist. Any novelist needs to be able to write different voices for different characters, and the narrative voice in a novel is one of the characters. The style of Sayers as a narrator is also a voice I remember hearing around me in educated adults when I was a child.

This is your fourth Sayers connection novel, and your second with no firm basis in Sayers’ notes or writing. Was it intimidating to “go off the map,” so to speak? 
Challenging, certainly. In some ways much easier because I could design the plot and episodes freely. But the task is not to write a novel of my own, using Sayers characters, the task is to write as Sayers would have done, or perhaps might have done.

In The Late Scholar, Harriet and Peter are drawn back to Oxford, the place where they got engaged (memorably, in Latin). You attended Oxford not too many years after this book is set. Did you enjoy revisiting it through your writing?
Oh, its been lovely for me to have an excuse to write about Oxford, and to bring Lord Peter very close to my own (nearly) adult experience. Oxford is extraordinarily beautiful, being built of local limestone which is a gorgeous golden colour that reflects even dull light like sunlight. Being a University city it is always full of dazzled and happy young people, of whom I was once one, and nobody ever forgets the happiness of their youth.

The context of the times—moods, trends, current events and even the philosophy of the day—is important in the Wimsey mysteries. Sayers was writing them as contemporaries, though, and you’re doing so from a historical perspective. How do you bring in a contemporary texture?
If you mean how do I bring in a sense of what is contemporary now, I am trying not to do that!  No doubt some things I have not noticed will one day seem laughably 21st century, because when the present changes, so does the view of the past. But perhaps you were asking how did I make things seem as they would have seemed to people reading and writing in the early 1950s?  That is the sort of task a historical novelist has to get right, and I have written a number of historical novels. It involves research, and a kind of synthesis of what you have learned about the period you are writing about, and what you know about human nature now, and then. However, as you have noticed, the 1950s are not history to me, but memory. History is the period before the speaker was born!

When we originally meet them, Peter and Harriet have both been changed (and scarred) by World War I. You’ve had to bring them through World War II. How did this change the characters? 
Since they are “real” people in the world of Sayers novels, they must change as they grow older. To freeze them where Sayers left them would turn them into paper cutouts. Its very interesting to work out how they would change, and how they would remain the people they once were. That’s interesting in the real people we know, too. From Peter’s attitude to his rank, and Harriet’s attitude to his rank, I felt pretty sure they would in a way welcome the hardships of the war, and they way it leveled people in Britain. Everyone had a ration book, and bombs were indiscriminate. I think it would have been Bunter, the manservant, who minded it most, and that’s how I have written them.

One of the most appealing things about this series is the intelligence of the characters and the honesty with which they interact with each other. Did you find attempting to replicate that intimidating? Exciting? Both?
Exciting. And also inspiring. I have tried to live like that myself. And I have been lucky—my second husband, who died, alas, this year, could quote by heart like Lord Peter, and he knew his John Donne.

Peter and Harriet are one of the few detecting teams where the two detectives are equal. Do you think it presents more of a challenge to the reader when there’s not a “sidekick” acting as the reader proxy?
It is indeed a challenge to the reader—and a compliment. Sayers assumed her readers did not need a less-than-brilliant person to identify with. She was writing unashamedly for an elite. They share the mystification of the two detectives, and are entitled to feel satisfaction when the clouds of confusion part and the puzzle is solved. I like it as a narrative strategy, very much.

If you had a chance to meet Dorothy Sayers, what would you say to her?
I would ask her why she abandoned Lord Peter, and Harriet with him. Although I can guess—having brought her two protagonists a long way round into, at last, happy marriage to each other, Sayers had run out of her own experience. She herself, alas for her, had very little experience of a happy marriage.

Why do you think Sayers stopped writing the Wimsey novels?
See above. But also she fell in love again—this time with Dante, and began on her monumental translation of The Divine Comedy, which like the last Lord Peter novel, was unfinished at he death, and was completed for her by her friend, Dr. Barbara Reynolds.

You have said that Lord Peter is “in terms of sheer enjoyment, the best company who has ever lived in my inner world.” Do you still feel that way? Why?
He is complex and modest; he doesn’t take himself seriously, but he does take love and duty, good and evil seriously. And he is endlessly witty. I shall be devastated if he deserts me.

What’s next for you?
I’m thinking about that.

A version of this article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In a meteoric career that has produced two series and 13 crime novels in as many years, Georgia native Karin Slaughter rocketed to international bestseller status by granting women their rightful place at murder scenes and morgues.

Yet while her growing fan base eagerly awaits each new installment of her Atlanta series featuring Georgia Bureau of Investigation special agent Will Trent (Triptych, Fractured, Broken) and its country cousin starring Grant County medical examiner Sara Linton (Faithless, Indelible, Blindsighted), the restless Slaughter has kept busy crafting her new novel, exploring time travel—and bracing herself for space flight.

What!? Time travel? Space flight? Whose genre is this, anyway?

Slaughter admits her unquenchable thirst to break new ground has prompted a mid-career interest in exploring neighboring galaxies, literary and otherwise.

How did a small-town Southern girl wind up doing weightless somersaults aboard the infamous suborbital “vomit comet,” much less set her sights on a future space flight aboard the Virgin Galactic?

More about that later, though in a way, the process accelerated with Cop Town, her first standalone novel, which takes place back in mid-1970s Atlanta when cops were men and women weren’t welcome. Slaughter first wrote about the period in Criminal (2012), in which she united characters from her two series.

“I had so much fun that I wanted to visit that time period again,” she explains.

Just one problem: “I couldn’t come up with a good reason to put my characters Will and Sara back there, mainly because they would have been children then,” she says. Slaughter herself was only 3 years old at the time.

So she created two very different protagonists: veteran patrolwoman Maggie Lawson, whose brother and uncle are part of the all-male good-ol’-boy network on the Atlanta force, and her new rookie partner Kate Murphy, a Jewish neophyte from a privileged background whose husband was killed in Vietnam. Together, they battle the blatant racism, sexism and cultural ostracism of the day, while working their way into the search for a serial killer who is targeting their ranks.

Slaughter called upon the best possible resource to bring her characters to life.

“I talked to six female police officers who are now retired and in their 60s. If you want to get the truth about something, talk to a 60-year-old retired woman!” she chuckles.

“I thought it would be really interesting to explore the lives of patrol officers, because that’s something I haven’t really done before; normally, they’re detectives. And because there was so little structure to Atlanta policing at the time, a lot of patrol officers did detective work. Sometimes they had to, because the detectives were passed out drunk in their cars. Honestly, that was a real problem!”

To prepare for her immersion into the disco era, Slaughter chose her bedside reading accordingly.

“One of the books I was reading while working on Cop Town was Fear of Flying by Erica Jong,” she says. “Reading it now, this line stuck out to me: ‘An unmarried woman is taking a vow of poverty.’ And for a lot of women today, that’s true. When you combine households and you have someone—a spouse or partner—it makes things easier. If you look at the number of single mothers who are trapped in poverty, it really resonated for me.”

So did the changes America was facing back then.

“It definitely mirrors what we’re going through today: coming out of a very disastrous war, the economy was in the toilet, women’s pay equality, homophobia, racism. It’s easier to talk about these things in the past, because if you talk about them in the present, then you’re kind of a whiny bitch. But if you say, hey, look how bad it was in the ’70s, then you can let people draw their own conclusions,” she says.

She was shocked to hear first-hand accounts of the outright sexism of the day, which was slowly crumbling, in large part due to federal intervention.

“It was a huge change, and like any change, most of the guys didn’t want it to happen,” she says. “In Atlanta, they were also dealing with the fact that the good-ol’-boy network wasn’t white anymore; it was black, and [women] were excluded from it. As Maggie says in the book, ‘The good-ol’-boy network is fine as long as you’re one of the good old boys.’ They didn’t like being left out.”

Why did the women pursue crime fighting? “I asked every woman I talked to why they did it when no one wanted them to, and every single one of them said they did it because someone told them they shouldn’t,” Slaughter says.

A similar instinct may have inspired the author’s interest in space flight. How in the world did she wind up on the vomit comet?

“I was talking to the people at Virgin Galactic about doing the space flight, but my dad said I would have to let a hundred people go up before I go up,” she chuckles. “But one of the things they sponsored was letting us go on the vomit comet. It was really wonderful! If you plan to do it, do it with somebody you know or make friends with somebody, because you can do stuff together in weightlessness, roll people in circles and all that. I had a really great time.”

Slaughter hopes to not only go up in space, but back to the future as well with sequels to Cop Town.

“Maybe every two or three [series] books, I could do one of these, and maybe take Kate and Maggie into the Atlanta child murders in the late ’70s,” she says. “A lot of women worked on the Atlanta child murders. Although they were still plainclothes officers at that point and weren’t really called detectives, they were given what were called ‘vagina crimes,’ so if it came into or went out of a vagina, a woman was the investigator.” After a series of child murders terrified the city, “Women were the ones who started to put the pieces together, and then, of course, the men said, ‘Oh, we need to take this over because it’s a serial killer.’”

Would she one day take the leap into that final frontier, science fiction?

“Oh yeah, absolutely,” she readily admits. “The Centers for Disease Control are right up the street from me, and my neighbors are doctors there, so I’d like to do something, maybe about a virus and some horrible mishap happens. I’d love to do that.”

This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Malla Nunn's fourth Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper novel, Present Darkness, is our June Whodunit Top Pick! Set in 1953 Johannesburg during the early years of Apartheid, DS Cooper is grappling with the secret of his mixed race identity while aiding in a highly publicized murder investigation. But when one of the suspects turns out to be the son of Cooper's friend, Zulu DS Samuel Shabalala, Cooper can't shake the feeling that police corruption is playing a part. Our columnist, Bruce Tierney, can't get enough of Nunn's "fast-paced, intricate storylines . . .  deeply flawed hero and Oscar-worthy cast of supporting characters."

We chatted with Nunn about her Apartheid setting, her work as a filmmaker and more in a 7 questions interview.

Describe your book in one sentence.
When the son of Detective Sergeant Cooper’s best friend is accused of murder, Emmanuel plunges into the world of corrupt police, thieves and violent township gangs to find the truth.

What inspired you to set your Emmanuel Cooper series in 1950s, apartheid era South Africa?
The 1950s were brutal. My family (who are mixed race) lost jobs, land and relationships as a result of the hard line laws introduced in the early '50s. South Africa was divided into white and non-whites zones and activities that were previously frowned on (interracial sex for example) became criminal offences. I wondered how the police could enforce laws that were fundamentally criminal. The 1950s threw up huge moral choices for every South African and Detective Emmanuel Cooper is our guide through this tumultuous time.

What do you love most about Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper?
I love that Cooper, a World War II vet, views South Africa from an outside perspective. He’s seen the worst in humans and believes that, black or white, people are people and equally capable of kindness and cruelty.

What was your favorite book as a child?
A book of fairy tales by Hans Christian Anderson. Blood, tears, drama and suffering!

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
‘Finish the book.’

How has your work as a filmmaker influenced your writing?
My novels have a strong visual element and are essentially fleshed out films in book form.

What are you working on next?
A novel set in North Carolina about a kick ass female who saves the world. I’m loving the new location.

R.J. Ellory’s standout new novel, Saints of New York, is our July 2014 Top Pick in Mystery. Past and present storylines are equally compelling in this vast and beautifully written novel.

The characters in Saints of New York—from the corrupt cops to the good cops—are all extremely flawed. They’re also surrounded by a world that is extremely dark, and even the “saints” are far from saintly. Was this a difficult book to write?
I think it’s an honest book, and I try to imbue every book I write with that kind of analysis and exposure of the human condition. I do not want to write material that strains someone’s believability. I understand that we have to suspend disbelief, but I am of the opinion that if you create strong, realistic characters, characters that people can really identify with, then the situations you place those characters in become all the more credible and acceptable. It is people that I am interested in. Emotions, the internal world, the subjective, the relationships and mistakes and passions and aspirations of people . . . all this kind of thing. People are flawed, each and every one of us, and some quite dramatically flawed. I just wanted to write a book that portrayed a real person dealing with real situations, and even though his life is something like a car crash, he does have this one true thread of decency and humanity as an innate part of his own make-up, and this is the thing that keeps him together. The unsettling realities in the book are nevertheless realities, and as one character says, ‘Just when you think you’ve seen the worst that one human being can do to another, someone goes and does something worse.’

Perhaps my favorite parts of the book are when Frank is describing in detail the history of the New York Mafia. What kind of research did you do, and how much of this history is based in truth? (Essentially, are you in danger of getting whacked?)
I would hope that I am always in danger of getting whacked! From exposés of the CIA in A Simple Act of Violence to the government-sanctioned actions of the Mafia in A Quiet Vendetta to anything I have ever written about the police and organised crime, I think that you can’t escape telling the truth. Inevitably, some people are not going to appreciate the truth being told, but if you can’t upset a few people, then what’s the point of writing this kind of book in the first place? As for research, I am a research junkie, to be honest. The information is out there, and people will talk. Using the Internet—not as a source in itself, but as a means by which you can find credible and reliable sources—makes life a lot easier. I tend to operate with the journalistic tenet: Find a source, confirm it twice.

“Inevitably, some people are not going to appreciate the truth being told, but if you can’t upset a few people, then what’s the point of writing this kind of book in the first place?”

You’ve described your writing style as being very organic—no outline or synopsis—which means your thrillers have the potential to surprise even you. Without giving too much away, what was surprising to you about Saints of New York?
I think the realness of it—the way in which I sort of pushed the characters forward only so far, and then they ran with the ball themselves. That may sound odd, but sometimes it really does feel as though the characters become so substantial as people that they influence the direction a novel takes. Speaking of working with no outline or synopsis, the first thing I decide when I embark upon a new book is What emotions do I want to create in the reader? or When someone has finished this book and they think about it some weeks later, what do I want them to remember? That’s key for me. Those are the books that stay with me, and those are the books I am constantly trying to write.

There are a million books that are brilliantly written, but mechanically so.  They are very clever, there are great plot twists, and a brilliant denouement, but if the reader is asked three weeks after reading the book what they thought of it they might have difficulty remembering it. Why? Because it was all very objective. There was no subjective involvement. The characters didn’t experience real situations, or they didn’t react to them the way ordinary people react. It was more of a mental exercise, a puzzle-solving exercise, than a real emotional rollercoaster. In fact, some of the greatest books ever published, the ones that are now rightfully regarded as classics, are those books that have a very simple storyline, but a very rich and powerful emotional pull. It’s the emotion that makes them memorable, and it’s the emotion that makes them special. Character is everything for me, so a book should be filled with the blood of the character, at least figuratively speaking!

In writing this book it changed along the way, as all my books do, and—as I said—they change because the characters become that much more real, and thus they actually begin to inform and influence the direction of the story. I don’t want that to sound pretentious, you know, but I am always working against an emotional barometer. If I don’t feel it, then the reader won’t. Personally, I have a major issue with central characters who are always right, who leap to the wildest conclusions about things, and are then proven right. People are not like that at all. They make mistakes constantly, and investigators and police are the same.

You’re born and bred British but write great, moody American crime. Why the fascination with the United States?
I think I grew up with American culture all around me. I grew up watching “Starsky & Hutch,” “Hawaii Five-O,” “Kojak,” all those kinds of things. I loved the atmosphere, the diversity of culture, the fact that every state is entirely different from every other, and there are 50 of them. The politics fascinated me. America is a new country compared to England, and it just seems to me that there was so much colour and life inherent in its society. I have visited many times now, and I honestly feel like I’m visiting my second home.

And I believe that as a non-American there are many things about American culture that I can look at as a spectator. The difficulty with writing about an area that you are very familiar with is that you tend to stop noticing things. You take things for granted. The odd or interesting things about the people and the area cease to be odd and interesting. As an outsider you never lose that viewpoint of seeing things for the first time, and for me that is very important.

Also many writers are told to write about the things they are familiar with. I don’t think this is wrong, but I think it is very limiting. I believe you should also write about the things that fascinate you. I think in that way you have a chance to let your passion and enthusiasm for the subject come through in your prose. I also believe that you should challenge yourself with each new book. Take on different and varied subjects. Do not allow yourself to fall into the trap of writing things to a formula. Someone once said to me that there were two types of novels. There were those that you read simply because some mystery was created and you had to find out what happened. The second kind of novel was one where you read the book simply for the language itself, the way the author used words, the atmosphere and description. The truly great books are the ones that accomplish both. I think any author wants to write great novels. I don’t think anyone—in their heart of hearts—writes because it’s a sensible choice of profession, or for financial gain. I just love to write, and though the subject matter that I want to write about takes me to the States, it is nevertheless more important to me to write something that can move someone emotionally, perhaps change a view about life, and at the same time to try and write it as beautifully as I can. I also want to write about subjects—whether they be political conspiracies, serial killings, race relations, political assassinations or FBI and CIA investigations—that could only work in the USA. The kind of novels I want to write just wouldn’t work in small, green, leafy villages where you find Hobbits!

What books have been the most influential to your work?
That’s a big question, but I would have to cite Conan Doyle, also Lovecraft, Poe, Ambrose Bierce, a whole host of British and American mystery and horror writers that I read as a child and a teenager.  And then on through Steinbeck, Hemingway, Capote, Carson McCullers, Mailer, DeLillo, Annie Proulx, Tim O’Brien, Cormac McCarthy. I am a huge fan of the different ways in which writers defy the “rules’ of writing.”  Language is so powerful that you can twist it and turn it and still have it hold fast. Nowadays, I spend a great deal of time looking for and reading writers who make me feel like a clumsy and inexperienced writer.

“Language is so powerful that you can twist it and turn it and still have it hold fast.”

What’s next?
Well, we have just released the 12th title in the UK, called Carnival of Shadows. I am currently close to competing the 2015 book for the UK, meanwhile working on numerous and varied music-related projects. I am releasing a graphic novel in France based on a trilogy of short stories called Three Days in Chicagoland, and starting the many and varied tours that happen during the summer and fall. I will be at Bouchercon in Long Island in November, and as for the title that is next to be released in the U.S., I am uncertain. We shall have to wait and see!

Antonio Hill follows up his Spanish sun-soaked crime debut The Summer of Dead Toys with his second Inspector Salgado mystery, The Good Suicides. A cryptic and unnerving message is sent to a select group of managers at a cosmetics company: a horrifying photo of dogs hanging from a tree accompanied by the line, "Never forget." Soon, those on the receiving end of the email begin committing suicide in grotesquely creative ways, and the rattled Salgado is thrust into the investigation.

We caught up with Hill and chatted about Barcelona's best (and not-so-great) qualities, his work in literary translation and more in a 7 questions interview.

Describe your book in one sentence.
After a woman in her 30s jumps in front of a subway train, Inspector Héctor Salgado will discover that one of her colleagues killed his own family and himself not long ago; besides their tragic deaths, working in the same company is the only thing both people have in common. . . .

What do you love most about Inspector Héctor Salgado?
There are a few things in Héctor that I like. For one, he’s stubborn—in the good sense of the word. He never gives up, and not only because he’s paid for doing the job. He is very sensitive to the idea of truth. Justice cannot always be achieved, but at least, for him, we owe the victims the effort of finding the truth and exposing it to the light. He is a good friend and tries to be a decent father, although he knows he’s far from being perfect. But for me, even his bad temper is becoming a good quality now that he’s learning to manage that anger in a positive way.

Both of your novels have been set in Barcelona. What makes Barcelona such a good location for a mystery?
Barcelona is a great location for any sort of story, but it’s been especially [great] in crime fiction, and I can’t explain it. In my case, I wanted to portray a city I love deeply with all its contradictions: Barcelona can be charming and elusive at the same time, and its biggest ambition—to stand out from Madrid, the capital of Spain—has made it a cosmopolitan place. It is perhaps the most “European” of all Spanish cities, but little by little the city has forgotten the needs of its real inhabitants and decided to show the world only a beautiful, modern and sunny façade. The fact that I used a cosmetics lab as a setting in The Good Suicides has something to do with that false idea of beauty that the city tries to project.

Name one book you think everyone should read.
The good thing about reading is that you can choose from millions of books. But if I had to name one or two, I’d pick up To Kill a Mockingbird and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

You have translated a great deal of acclaimed literary fiction from authors such as David Sedaris and Jonathan Safran Foer. What do you enjoy most about translation? 
There is something voyeuristic in translation. You get to know an author’s work even better than him/herself sometimes, [if] only because you have to deconstruct every sentence in order to write it again in a foreign language and, at the same time, keep the rhythm of the prose. It is very hard work and not always appreciated enough by readers and publishers.

What’s at the top of your summer reading list right now?
John Connolly. I cannot wait to read his last novel published in Spain: The Wrath of Angels.

What are you working on next?
I have just finished the third Salgado novel, Los Amantes de Hiroshima, and I plan to take a real break for a couple of months.

Author photo by Jaume Recoder

Agatha Christie's grandson, Mathew Prichard (left), gives the family seal of approval to the new Poirot mystery by writer Sophie Hannah (right).

Question: How does one possibly attempt to add to the crime canon of Agatha Christie, whose 80 mystery novels and short story collections have sold more than two billion copies, trailing only the Bible and her countryman William Shakespeare?

Answer: Very. Very. Carefully.

In fact, since Christie’s death in 1976, Mathew Prichard, the only child of the only child of the queen of crime fiction, who has overseen her literary estate for decades, was dead set against the idea of any author attempting a Christie continuation novel.

But through “a very happy string of coincidences,” the literary world—including those diehard Christie enthusiasts who were “a bit nervous” about the prospect—is poised to fall in love with Dame Agatha all over again, thanks to The Monogram Murders, a darkly twisted new Hercule Poirot mystery crafted by best-selling psychological thriller writer Sophie Hannah (Kind of Cruel).

The Monogram Murders transports us to a coffeehouse in 1920s London, where the idiosyncratic Belgian detective’s supper has been interrupted by a woman who fears for her life. Poirot soon learns why: Three guests at a nearby hotel have been murdered by poison and carefully laid out with a single monogrammed cufflink tucked in their mouths. With Scotland Yard investigating officer and doubting-Thomas apprentice Edward Catchpool at his side, Poirot once again calls upon his “little grey cells” to suss the meaning of every delicious twist in the bizarre case.

Noted suspense writer Sophie Hannah puts her own spin on Christie's quirky Belgian crime-solver, Hercule Poirot.

Throughout, Hannah’s pitch- perfect dialogue and mastery of misdirection combine to weave a tangled tapestry that delights with its period detail, flashes of humor and grim glimpses into our darker nature.

The novel’s birth took an equally circuitous course, dating back several years to when Prichard was editing his grandmother’s letters and photographs for The Grand Tour, a travelogue of Christie’s 1922 yearlong tour of the British Empire.

“I suppose that editing those wonderful, charming letters of my grandmother that had never been published before drew my attention back and did have the effect of thinking about Agatha Christie anew,” he admits.

Slowly, his resolve against authorizing further works under the Christie imprimatur gave way to the realities of modern publishing.

“Our advice was that if we took our courage in both hands and allowed a new Poirot to be written and published, one of the big spinoffs would be a renewal of interest in the real Poirot books,” Prichard says. “So I think in some ways, this is a double event. Obviously, the publication of a new Poirot by Sophie Hannah is an event all on its own, but we also hope it will help renew interest in the real Poirot stories.”

As luck would have it, Hannah’s agent was speaking over lunch with a HarperCollins representative who mentioned in passing that the Christie estate was mulling over a continuation project.

“My agent knew I’d had a couple ideas in mind that I’d always thought of as Agatha Christie-ish, but I’d never quite gotten them to work in my regular titles,” says Hannah. “So when my agent suggested that I write a historical, that’s what won me.”

The happenstance sent Hannah back to the Christie collection that had inspired her own career trajectory. She knew she wanted to set half the book in London, the other half in a rural English village, with Poirot on the case rather than Christie’s venerable Miss Marple.

Prichard could not have been happier with the results.

“I think it’s her portrait of Poirot that is certainly one of my favorite parts of the book,” he says. “I think Sophie got Poirot exactly right; there is the humanity, the flashes of humor—and maybe, although she might deny this, even the occasional moment of irritation, which I think is very much a part of Poirot. Her great sensitivity to the various settings in the book, the hotel and the towns outside of London, are very like Agatha Christie. But some of my favorite bits are pure Sophie Hannah as well.”

The process of re-reading the Christie novels to prepare for the daunting task of filling the shoes of the queen of crime fiction left Hannah a changed person.

“It definitely made me realize afresh what a brilliant writer she is, and it helped change my attitude toward my own life,” she says. “If you do something very different from what you usually do, when you go back to what you usually do, you think about it more consciously. It’s been really good in that sense.”

One question weighs on everyone’s mind: Is the world ready for more Agatha Christie?

“We have promised ourselves to give the first one time to get launched and get a reaction, not only from critics but from the real fans as well, before making up our minds on what we’re going to do,” Prichard explains. “It would surprise me if, occasionally, we didn’t do something like this again, but don’t worry; it won’t be every year or anything like that. I don’t think that would be right.”

How would his famous grandmother have felt about The Monogram Murders?

“My grandmother was a very intelligent person, and I think if you had asked her five years ago whether she wanted someone to write more Poirot stories, she would unquestionably have said no,” Prichard admits. “But if you had told her that if she wanted to prolong the enjoyment that her readers still have for the stories she herself wrote, and that one of the modern ways of doing this was to publish a new version of her character by somebody who is a great fan and admirer of hers, I think that at the very least she would have understood the reasoning.”

So, somewhere Dame Agatha is smiling?

“I’m sure she’s doing that,” he chuckles. “She was very good at smiling.”

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.