It's none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way. Ernest Hemingway

This book will tell you how to write novels and narrative non-fiction for publication. It is not a creative writing textbook, but teaches the core skills of story-telling: story, character, prose style, and a whole host of attendant tools that you'll need in order to be successful and to please your agent, publisher and audience. It is designed for any novelist, or narrative non-fiction author, no matter what their genre or interest.

How to...

A young woman and her 6-year-old daughter have been found murdered in a squalid flat, the single clue a credit card belonging to a millionaire businessman who died in a plane crash 6 months before. Rookie detective constable Fiona Griffiths has secrets of her own - she is still recovering from a crushing psychological breakdown.

Late October, Cardiff. A human leg is discovered in a woman's freezer. The hunt for the rest of the corpse soon turns up body parts in kitchens, garages and potting sheds. The police conclude that the victim was a teenage girl killed some ten years earlier. But then other body parts start appearing, this time discarded carelessly, shortly after the victim - a man - was killed. Investigating the double crime draws DC Fiona Griffiths into a web of obsession, money, deceit - and acute personal danger. Which is exactly where she likes to be: in the middle of a gruesome puzzle with a pitch-black...

When DC Fiona Griffiths says 'yes' to her policeman boyfriend, it's an affirmation that she wants finally to put her psychological breakdown behind her, and become a resident of 'Planet Normal' like everybody else. But she still can't resist the challenge of an undercover policing course, and finding it remarkably easy to assume a new identity, she comes top of the class. So when an ingenious payroll fraud starts to look like the tip of a huge criminal iceberg, Fiona is selected to infiltrate the fraudsters' operation, posing as a meek former payroll clerk now forced to work as a cleaner. But...

A powerful psychological thriller featuring crime fiction's most unusual and engaging British Detective, DC Fiona Griffiths.

'Chilling, atmospheric and so gripping it hurts. The Dead House is a masterpiece. You won't read a better crime novel this year' MARK EDWARDS On a wild October night, the body of a young woman is found in a remote country churchyard. She's wearing nothing but a thin, white dress. There are no marks of violence and no obvious cause of death. Who is the victim? Why is she here? But another young woman went missing from the area a few years back, and DC Fiona Griffiths soon suspects a crime even more chilling than she first imagined. Will she unlock the secrets of the dead house? Or will she...