Andrew Taylor

Andrew Taylor is the award-winning author of a number of novels, including the Lydmouth and Dougal crime series, psychological thrillers, and the groundbreaking Roth Trilogy. He is the only author to receive the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award twice, the first time for The Office of The Dead, the third novel in the Roth Trilogy, and the second time for An Unpardonable Crime (published in the UK as The American Boy). His first novel won the John Creasey Award, and he has also been shortlisted for the Gold Dagger and the Edgar. In 2009 he was awarded CWA's Cartier Diamond Dagger, the international lifetime achievement award in the genre.

His new novel is The Anatomy of Ghosts.

Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

Kate Atkinson: Started Early, Took My Dog

Kate Atkinson’s latest novel is the fourth in her series about Jackson Brodie, the ex-soldier, ex-police officer and ex-husband who now works in a desultory way as a private investigator searching for missing children. Like its predecessors, Started Early, Took My Dog takes place in an exhilarating and occasionally infuriating version of modern Britain that reads as if designed by a theoretical physicist with a sense of humour.

The book occupies that shadowy territory between the crime novel and literary fiction. This one is not the best of the Brodie novels - Case Histories and When Will There Be Good News work better in terms of their narrative. But don’t let that put you off. For all its infuriating quirks, Started Early, Took My Dog is readable, compassionate and very funny. It’s too good to miss.

Both Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog and Andrew Taylor's The Anatomy of Ghosts, now available in the UK, will be released in early 2011 in the US.

View the video trailer for The Anatomy of Ghosts, and learn more about the book and author at Andrew Taylor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue