Michael Ridpath's Blog, page 9

Traitor's Gate published this weekend

Traitor's Gate is published on 1 June. It's a big departure for me, a spy novel set in Berlin in 1938. It's about a real plot to overthrow Hitler. It's also about idealism, loyalty to your country and loyalty to your friends. I loved writing it.

It was difficult, though. I started researching in 2005, and finished the 3rd draft in 2007. I sent it off to publishers, who turned it down. So I set it to one side and concentrated on my Icelandic books.

Then, in 2011, I pulled out the manuscript - the 5th draft - and read it through again. It really wasn't bad, but it wasn't quite the book I had set out to write. So I went through previous drafts and found that in the 2nd draft Conrad de Lancey, the hero of the book, was much stronger, but the plot was flabbier. So I took the first third of the 2nd draft and the last two thirds of the 5th draft, joined them up and polished. Conrad was a little too emotional, so I stiffened his upper lip a bit: this is 1938 after all.

And I am very pleased with the result, which is now seeing the light of day.

But not in America, I'm afraid, at least not yet. Sorry. It's available in English elsewhere, in hardcover and ebook.

I really hope you like it.

The Icelandic Chapter of the Crime Writers' Association

Dagger in the Library

I'm very pleased to say I have been longlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Dagger in the Library Award for 2013. This Dagger is awarded for an author, not an individual book. The nominations come from library users and librarians, and the judges are all librarians.



http://www.thecwa.co.uk/daggers/2013/...

Flickr page for Iceland research photos

One of the great pleasures of writing a crime series based in Iceland is the need to travel there on reserach trips. Whenever I do this I mumble into a tape recorder and take photographs. Fortunately the tape recordings are lost to posterity (I just record on the same tape over and over), but I do keep the photographs and often refer to them while writing. In fact, taking a photograph seems to fix a particular scene in my mind.

Anyway, I have uploaded some of these photographs of locations in my Iceland book to a Flickr page:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelr...

Take a look!

Marketmaker at 99p on Kindle

The Marketmaker is now on sale for 99p on Kindle (in the UK - $1.48 in US)and it has a brand new cover, which I rather like. Strangely, covers are just as important for e-books as they are for physical ones.

The Marketmaker is my third financial thriller about, first published in 1998, about a young graduate in Russian who joins the emerging markets trading desk of an aggressive investment bank and is sent to Brazil. He ends up in Rio in big trouble. If you buy it, I hope you like it; I really enjoyed writing it.

This is the Kindle page for the UK: http://amzn.to/1567v8r
And for the US: http://amzn.to/WsLsrP

Meltwater out in paperback

Today Meltwater is published in paperback in the UK. It's the third in the Fire & Ice series. It is 2010 and a group of Internet activists go to Iceland to edit a controversial war crimes video. They claim they are journalists covering the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull. One of their number is found stabbed on the rim of the volcano, and Magnus has to figure out who did it. It came out in hardback in June last year.

I'm afraid I still don't know when it will be out in the US.

Kindle titles lowered over Christmas

For those of you with Kindles, the prices of three of my financial thrillers have been lowered over Christmas to $1.59 or £0.99. These are "Free To Trade" (bond trading), "On The Edge" (collapse of the euro)and "See No Evil" (South African newspapers, as much politics as finance). We will probably raise them again in a couple of weeks.

My US amazon.com kindle page is http://amzn.to/Uk994P

My UK Kindle page is http://amzn.to/TaiOwi

3 more financial thrillers on Kindle

I have just put three more of my previously published financial thrillers up on Kindle:
The Marketmaker is about a trainee bond trader and Brazil;
Fatal Error is about a dotcom company's boom and bust in 2000;
See No Evil is the second Alex Calder novel about a South African newspaper tycoon whose wife was murdered in the last days of Apartheid.
Here are the links for UK Kindle:
http://amzn.to/SbQchT
http://amzn.to/XZg2ux
http://amzn.to/105sdWc

They are looking a little lost at the moment, so please add a brief review once you have read them.

Making Magnus

I have written a blog entry to launch the publication on Kindle of an anthology of the first two Fire and Ice novels, Where The Shadows Lie and 66 Degrees North. The blog is called Making Magnus, and it is about how I created his character. If you have read either Shadows or 66 North, don't buy the anthology, but if you want both books on Kindle, you can get them for almost the price of one - search for Fire and Ice Anthology.

http://www.atlantic-books.co.uk/conte...

Whose Iceland Is It Anyway?

This is a guest blog I wrote for James Thompson. Like me he writes novels set in a foreign country, although unlike me he has been living in Finland for 18 years.

http://www.jamesthompsonauthor.com/blog/