Showing posts with label Winterlong. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Winterlong. Show all posts

Saturday, 17 October 2020

Carter Blake on Audible Plus

 If you're in the USA and a member of Audible Plus (kind of like the Audible version of Netflix), you can currently stream the first four Carter Blake audiobooks for free.

Go here to see them in the Audible Plus catalog.

Eric Meyers did a really great job narrating these books, and I'm reminded that the American audio covers are all pretty good. Audiobook jackets can be a total mess for rights reasons, but I think these all hold up well and bear some relation to the plot of each book.







Happy listening.

Monday, 5 February 2018

Soundtracks - Winterlong (The Time to Kill)



The book with two names.

I've written in another post about how Winterlong came to be retitled The Time to Kill for the UK market, so if you're interested in the background to that, you can read about it here.

The third book ties up some of the loose ends about Carter Blake's past, and follows him on a breakneck journey from coast to coast, using planes trains and automobiles, as he tries to stay one step away of a team of military-trained killers.

Perhaps surprisingly, there are opportunities for musical interludes.




Winterlong | Pixies



I've waited for you, Winterlong
You seem to be where I belong

The Neil Young original is great too, of course, but I heard the Pixies cover first, and when I think of this song I always hear it in Kim Deal's voice.

When I was editing The Killing Season, I was trying to come up with a cool, evocative codename for the special ops unit of which Carter Blake was once a member. Something like Jason Bourne's Treadstone, or even shady real-world mercenary outfit Blackwater. Two-word concatenations seem to be popular in both the real life and fictional list of such names.

Winterlong seemed perfect when I thought of it. It evokes the Cold War, and also sparked the idea for the opening scene of Winterlong, which takes place in the depths of a Siberian winter.

Bring it on Home to Me | Sam Cooke




My favourite song by one of my favourite singers. From the first time I heard it I thought it would work great in a quiet moment in a movie, perhaps with two characters dancing in a motel room while it rains outside. I decided to put it in my own movie. Carol and Blake listen to this the last time they're together before he's called back to the war.

Fortunate Son | Creedence Clearwater Revival



No one actually listens to this song in the book, but Blake makes a throwaway reference to the title in one of the Afghanistan chapters. It's a standard in Vietnam movies, and it was a subtle way of drawing a parallel between the two conflicts, each intractable for different reasons.

Love Song from Apache | Coleman Hawkins




Credit to Ian Rankin for making me aware of Hawkins. Blake finds an old CD of his in the car given to him by Special Agent Banner for the final leg of his cross-country quest. It's a brilliantly atmospheric instrumental jazz piece, from the 1954 Burt Lancaster western.

Mark Billingham talks about how much he loves the moments in Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch books where there's a lull in the action and it's just Harry, on his balcony listening to jazz while looking out at the city. This scene was a nod to that. A quiet interlude before all hell breaks loose in a snowy corner of upstate New York...

Next time: Eagles, Skynyrd and Swift in Don't Look For Me

Soundtracks blogs:



  • The Killing Season
  • The Samaritan
  • Winterlong / The Time to Kill
  • Sunday, 5 March 2017

    New York




    I've always loved New York. Even before I visited for the first time a few years ago, I loved the idea of it.

    Before I made the trip in person, I got to know the city through countless movies and books, and in particular from the wonderfully geographically-specific parts of town where Spider-Man or the X-Men would battle their enemies. I saw the city through many eyes before my own, from Holden Caulfield to Nick Carraway to Jerry the mouse. I love big cities in general, but NYC in particular.

    So it was particularly enjoyable to make my first trip to the Big Apple as an author, even for a few short days. Even better - we were able to secure babysitting, so my wife Laura was able to tag along, which was great as we don't get to spend much time together, just the two of us.

    Things started out well with a fairly smooth flight (I'm not the world's biggest fan of air travel), with a stopover at Reykjavik. I got some writing done and finally got to see Mad Max: Fury Road, which I enjoyed, although not quite as much as The Road Warrior.

    Somewhere cold
    Arriving at JFK, we took the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station, getting into the city around 7pm local, which was midnight by my body clock. As it was a brief visit, I did what I always do, which is stay on GMT - why not take advantage of the fact you’re in a place that bills itself as the city that never sleeps? In truth, I’m not a morning person anyway, so a five hour time difference puts me in the sweet spot. We decided to walk the twenty-four blocks north to the hotel, soaking up the sights and the sounds.

    Always a nice welcoming view

    After breakfast the next morning, we visited the Barnes & Noble on 5th Avenue and I got to see one of my books in an American bookstore for the first time. Winterlong was really well displayed as a new release, too.





    After that, I visited the nearby New York Public Library and wrote some of the new book in the beautiful Rose Main Reading Room. I make a point of writing in interesting places whenever I can. I wrote part of a short story in the British Library last year, so it was nice to continue the tradition. 


    We headed east to drop in on Grand Central Station, which plays an important part in Winterlong, and admired the Chrysler and MetLife buildings on the way in. I really like distinctiveness of the former Pan Am building, even though it isn't held in the same regard as some of the more classically beautiful towers like its neighbour. 



    After getting dinner in a fantastic steak place, Laura opted to stay in the hotel with a book, and I took a walk up to Central Park and the Upper East Side, then headed all the way out to the East River and saw the Queensboro bridge in the fog. I love walking in cities, particularly big ones like NYC or London or Paris. It's absolutely the best way to absorb their unique characters: pounding the sidewalks and looking down the dark alleys, passing the doormen of upscale apartment buildings as they stand to attention beneath heated canopies.



    Day two started out with a trip to the Top of the Rock. I had ticked off the Empire State Building on my first trip to the city, but this lived up to the hype of being a better view, since it actually includes the Empire State Building. From seventy floor up, I was struck again by what an incredible city this is; the towers stretching out to the tip of the island, now and forever a work in progress.




    After a stroll in Central Park, I took the subway down to Chambers Street in time for my appointment at the world-famous Mysterious Bookshop, where I signed a stack of copies of Winterlong, which was a dream come true. The shop would have been worth the trip without that: it's a crime fiction fan's dream. I picked up some books, including a vintage short story collection by John D MacDonald - one of my big influences.


    Serious author face


    After the Mysterious Bookshop, we met up for dinner with Iris and Jessica of Pegasus Books, my US publisher and we had a great evening at an Italian restaurant in Tribeca talking about books and big cities and life in general. It was a pleasant night for a walk from the subway station to the hotel, but the news was saying a change in the weather was on its way.

    Winterlong climaxes with a blizzard hitting New York, so appropriately, my last day in town did too.

    6th Avenue Freeze Out

    This was a big one; big enough for them to take the drastic step of closing the schools. Watching the news, it was comforting to see that Americans freak out about the weather just as much as Brits do. I started to get a little worried about delays, but by the evening things had calmed down.

    By the time we made it back to the UK, Winterlong was published all over again, this time in paperback under its British title of The Time to Kill, and I signed some copies in Waterstones. It's always good to come back home, but I'm already looking forward to the next time I'm in New York.









    Saturday, 11 February 2017

    A tale of two titles

    As I may have mentioned before, the third Carter Blake book was published this week in two territories under two separate titles:

    Winterlong (Pegasus, US)
    The Time to Kill (Orion, UK)




















    Why the change?

    I wrote the book as Winterlong. It's the codename of the secret covert ops initiative Carter Blake used to belong to (although appropriately, it has gone by many names). It works for a book set in the depths of winter. It's also one of my favourite Neil Young songs, and I love the Pixies cover too. But the most important thing was, I liked it as a title.

    My UK publisher Orion liked it too, and it was Winterlong throughout the editorial process, right up until the first proofs were produced.



    But then they decided to rework the cover. Feedback from sales said that Winterlong wasn't quite thrillery-sounding enough. My editor asked me what I thought about The Time to Kill as an alternative title. I was honest and said I didn't mind it, though I preferred Winterlong. But I was in agreement with taking advice from sales. Call me a mercenary, but as long as it's the same book, I'd rather sell twice as much with someone else's title.

    So the book got a new title and a new cover (which I love, both on the new blue paperback and with the original pink font).



    Meanwhile, my US publisher Pegasus had acquired the book under the original title, and they thought Winterlong would work better for their market. They also had some concern that it could be confused with John Grisham's A Time to Kill. Again, sound reasoning, happy to go with it.

    I got my author copies of both version last week, and I love them both. It feels kind of like I have two books out, and I only had to write one.




    The experience got me thinking about why titles change. Some light Googling revealed that it happens a lot.

    Would Baa Baa Black Sheep have sold as many copies as Gone With the Wind? Would Trimalchio in West Egg and First Impressions really have done the job as well as The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice?

    I asked some of my crime writer friends, and found it difficult to find one who hadn't had a book with multiple identities. With thanks to the below authors for their comments, you can read about what some of the best thrillers of recent years were almost called below:

    ***

    CL Taylor - My UK title was The Accident, my US title was Before I Wake which I thought was clever because a) the main character's daughter is in a coma and b) the main character is sleep walking through life/in denial and what happens 'awakens' her to the danger she's in. 

    Tammy Cohen - The original UK title for The Broken was The Fallout, but that changed at the last minute when we realised there was another book coming out the same month called Fallout. But the US publishers much preferred the original title so it came out in the US as The Fallout. I didn't mind at first as I preferred the original title anyway, but actually it wasn't great for me because all the publicity and reviews etc for The Broken don't appear if someone in the US Googles the book. So it's like starting completely from scratch. Plus inevitably there are people who buy the book twice thinking it's a new title and are mighty pissed off!

    Brian McGilloway - The Nameless Dead was called Isle of Bones originally. Hurt was called Family Life and in the US ended up as Someone You Know. My name for Preserve the Dead was Sticks and Stones. In the US it ended up as The Forgotten Ones. In every instance I preferred the working titles...

    Katerina Diamond - The Teacher was originally called Unkindness - I do love my original name but I also love The Teacher and I fully understand why they chose a punchier name for it. As a result I have never bothered to name any of my other ones. It's a title and it's all about selling at the end of the day - that's the part I know nothing about

    Lucy Dawson - My first four all had title changes at Little Brown's request. You Sent Me A Letter and Everything You Told Me were mine and the next one is Come Back, which is mine too. I honestly can't even remember what my original titles for the first four were. 

    Sinead Crowley - Book 1 started life as Can Anybody Out There Help Me? but they thought it was too long and we batted every terrible internet related pun back and forth till they accepted Can Anybody Help Me? Book 2 was Are you Watching Me' And book 3 was originally Don't You Remember Me? to fit that theme but no one liked it, and I came up with One Bad Turn which we all love.

    Michael J MaloneTaste for Malice was originally called, Sins of the Father - a check on Amazon quickly found how overused that was.

    June Taylor - My soon-to-be out there psychological thriller Losing Juliet was submitted to HarperCollins Killer Reads as Two Summers. But as it was to be a winter launch they deemed it unsuitable. Also said it wasn't thrillery enough, and preferred a woman's name in the title. I liked the original one, but a couple of months ago I saw a YA novel released called Two Summers, so maybe the change of title was a good thing.

    James Oswald - I wanted to call book six Suffer the Children, but Penguin wouldn't let me. Apparently any suggestion in the title that children might come to harm kills sales. I completely failed to come up with anything else, and it was my editor who suggested The Damage Done. Italian titles for my first two are The Name of Evil and The Book of Evil. I'm betting book three will be The Rope of Evil.

    Marnie Riches - The Girl Who Wouldn't Die was originally Blown Away, it ties in with a leitmotif running through the book and some apparent suicide bombing. The Girl Who Broke the Rules was meant to be called Empty Vessel, again, because it tied in with the story, which is about trafficked people whose organs have been harvested. Born Bad, coming out next year, was meant to be called Killing a King

    Fergus McNeill - Eye Contact and Broken Fall were my titles, and everyone seemed happy with them. Knife Edge was a brilliant suggestion by my editor (someone actually gets stabbed, right on the edge of a cliff) so thank goodness she dissuaded me from the working title of You're Scaring Me.

    Cass Green - The Woman Next Door was Hidden In Ordinary Days until my agent just grimaced and went, "Hmm.. no." !

    Clare Mackintosh - I Let You Go was Written in the Sand when I first started it; when it was less thriller, more romantic suspense. It lost the title early on and was nameless, then my editor suggested I Let You Go, which it was perfect. It's been interesting seeing the titles of the various translations. In Chinese it's The Runaway , in German it's My Soul So Cold, in Dutch Mea Culpa, and in Italian - with no prior knowledge of the working title - it's Written in the Sand.

    Jenny Blackhurst - How I Lost You was originally Cradle and All but apparently some dude published by Headline already had that. Before I Let You In was Before You Let Me In when I pitched it.

    Helen Cadbury - Bones in the Nest was my agent's far better idea. I wanted to call it Bird Bones.

    Neil White - The working name for my second novel was The Painter Man (based upon David Mandell - Google him). An excerpt appeared at the end of the first book with that title. It was changed to Lost Souls just before it came out. I get more emails asking why they can't find The Painter Man than anything else. It's a pain in the arse. I prefer The Painter Man.

    Tom Wood - My first book was titled The Killer and was published as such in the US, then retitled as The Hunter in the UK ('Women won't buy a book called The Killer,' my UK editor told me). My second book was called The Contract, but the same editor changed it to The Enemy. He wanted my third book to be called The Game, so I just let him. I stopped trying to think of titles after that. My fourth book was published as Better Off Dead in the UK and No Tomorrow in the states because my UK publisher wanted a crimey title and in the US they wanted more thriller. Oh and that same editor wanted my last name changed to Wood from Hinshelwood, which my US publisher liked and so followed suit... after I was already published as Hinshelwood, so The Killer is by Tom Wood in pb and Tom Hinshelwood in hb. This is the short version.

    ***

    After reading all of that, I think I got off lightly with only one title change.

    My next one is currently titled Don't Look For Me, but by the time it comes out in April, who knows?








    Tuesday, 7 February 2017

    Winterlong - American publication day

    Delighted to say that the third Carter Blake book, Winterlong, is published in hardcover in the USA today.


    They taught him to kill. Now they want him dead.

    It’s been five years since Carter Blake parted ways with top-secret government operation Winterlong. They brokered a deal at the time: he’d keep quiet about what they were doing, and in return he’d be left alone. But news that one of Blake’s old allies, a man who agreed the same deal, is dead means only one thing – something has changed and Winterlong is coming for him.


    You can get Winterlong at all good bookshops and in your format of choice:


    Hardcover

    ebook


    Audiobook

    British readers can also buy the same book under a different title - The Time to Kill is published in an excellent new paperback edition in the UK in just two days time.

    Lastly, I'm in New York City for launch day, and am hoping to sign some stock in the Mysterious Bookshop - if you're in the area you can pick up a signed copy.



    Saturday, 28 January 2017

    Events coming up

    A few dates for the next couple of months. It's likely I'll be adding some more in the lead-up to the publication of Don't Look For Me, but in the meantime here's where I'll be (click on the dates for more detail):

    • Thursday 2 March - World Book Day talk at the Dick Institute, Kilmarnock
    • Sunday 12 March - I'm delighted to be in conversation with Ian Rankin about 30 Years of Rebus at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
    • Wednesday 12 April - I'm reading and giving a talk at East Kilbride Central Library
    Keep an eye on my events page for more soon.



    Excitingly, I'm also going to be in New York City in a week or so for the American release of Winterlong.  I'll be doing an informal signing or two, so will let you know where you can get signed copies if you're in the market.

    Aside from that, I'm just looking forward to a trip to my favourite city in the world, and meeting my American publishers Pegasus for the first time. Last time I visited, I wasn't a published author yet, so I can't wait to see Winterlong in a real NYC bookstore.

    Finally, there's still (just) time to win one of 10 paperback copies of The Time to Kill if you're in the UK - enter the Goodreads giveaway by midnight on Monday for a chance to win a copy pre-publication. Look - the lovely Laura from Orion has taken a nice photo of one in the wild:



    Thursday, 12 January 2017

    Writing a series - top tips

    I've been pretty busy lately, but the good news is that means there are more books in the pipeline. The paperback of The Time to Kill comes out in the UK on February 9, which happens to be the same week that it's published in hardcover under its American title Winterlong.

    It snowed today, so here's an appropriately wintry picture of the new edition:



    Book 4: Don't Look For Me is out in the UK in April, and you can preorder it now. I'm currently writing the fifth book, which seems incredible since it doesn't seem all that long since I started writing Killing Season.

    It makes me glad I put some thought into the series before I wrote the first book. With that in mind, here's a piece I wrote for the Scottish Book Trust website last year: my top 5 tips on writing a series of novels:


    Writing a continuing series has a lot to recommend it. You don’t need to start everything from scratch with each new book, and you have the opportunity to develop your characters and themes across multiple novels. On the other hand, you don’t have the standalone author’s luxury of an entirely blank slate at the beginning of every new project.

    Here are my tips for writing series fiction. Bear in mind these are from the point of view of a crime writer, but they’re adaptable to working on any kind of ongoing series.

    Build your protagonist to last before you write the first book, rather than trying to turn a standalone character into a series lead

    Ideally he or she will be intriguing and compelling (though not necessarily likeable), and will have room to grow as a character over the course of the series. That means you don’t necessarily want to give them too detailed a backstory. If you leave your protagonist’s history reasonably vague, there’s more to discover about them in future books. Just as importantly, you have less continuity to keep track of. 

    Don't make your central character too old


    Ian Rankin recently spoke about this problem, as Rebus hit retirement age a long time before his author. Even Jack Reacher is now pushing sixty as he hitchhikes toward his twenty-first adventure. If you want your character to age naturally but have a long fictional life, it’s best not to start out with an octogenarian detective. Alternatively, you can just make them immune from ageing. Like Batman, for instance, who started his caped crusading in 1939 but shows no signs of slowing down.

    Naming convention - yay or nay?

    Choosing titles that are immediately identifiable as part of a series can work really well. James Patterson’s early ‘nursery rhyme’ Alex Cross books and John D. MacDonald’s colour-coded Travis McGee thrillers are examples of this done right. What you don’t want to do is pick a title theme that has you scraping the bottom of the barrel by the fourth book. One Direction song titles will probably be of limited use.

    Think carefully about your hero or heroine’s job

    Is your protagonist a police officer? A private investigator? A lawyer? A random troublemaker?

    A job in law-enforcement will provide all the rationale you need to get them embroiled in murder investigation after murder investigation, but it also means more research and pressure to keep up with the intricacies of modern policing procedure.

    A lone wolf character has its own pros and cons, but the big advantage is you get to invent their rules.

    A related concern: make sure they’re not so great at their job that they get promoted out of the action. This doesn’t just apply to the police: James T. Kirk hated being an admiral.

    Easy on the formula

    Series fiction is popular for a reason: people like knowing what they’re going to get, to an extent. Meeting your readers’ expectations while at the same time surprising them can be a difficult balance.

    In an ideal world, you want to keep enough familiarity in the books to keep regular readers happy, but not so much that each book is indistinguishable from the last. Formulas are necessary and enjoyable, but each book has to stand on its own and offer something different to the reader.

    Focus on the sweet spot: you want familiarity to build content, not contempt. If the reader can recite the plot of the next book before it’s published, you need to mix things up a little.

    Friday, 16 December 2016

    American Giveaway Extravaganza

    Winterlong, the third book in the Carter Blake series (aka The Time to Kill in the UK) is being published in the USA on February 7 2017, and you can preorder it in gorgeous hardcover right now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Indiebound.

    If you can't wait that long, you can enter the Goodreads giveaway right now to win a copy. My American publisher Pegasus is celebrating the new book by giving away copies of the first two books in the series at the same time. All you have to do is register for the giveaway before January 16th.

    To enter, just click on the cover to go to the giveaway (enter individually for each book).
    This is open to readers with a US address only, but I'll be running a UK giveaway very soon, so watch this space. If you want to kept in the loop for news and competitions, remember to join the Readers Club.

    Good luck!

    https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/215116-winterlong-a-carter-blake-thriller
     
    Win an exclusive advance copy of Winterlong

    https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/215114-the-samaritan-a-novel


    https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/215112-the-killing-season-a-novel


    Monday, 7 November 2016

    Winterlong - American Giveaway





    If you're in the United States and would like to win an advance copy of Winterlong (aka The Time to Kill) my American publisher Pegasus Books is running a Goodreads giveaway to win one of three copies.


    All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning is click on this link and register for the giveaway by December 3.

    Saturday, 15 October 2016

    Public service announcement: two titles, one book

    If you've been wondering why I have two books coming out in the space of six months, the answer is I don't. Unfortunately, I'm just not that fast. The Time to Kill and Winterlong are in fact the same novel.

    While it's not the first time one of my books has different titles in different territories...


    ...it is the first time it's happened between English language editions.

    What I really want to avoid is people accidentally buying the book twice, because cover and title aside, they are exactly the same book. Of course, if you're fully aware of that, I have no objection to anyone buying these or indeed any of my books twice.





    So in the UK, the third Carter Blake novel is titled The Time to Kill. It's available right now in trade paperback and ebook, and will be published by Orion in mass market paperback on February 9 2017 - you can preorder on Amazon now with the price guarantee.

    Over in the USA, my publisher Pegasus loved the original title and have decided to stick with it, so Winterlong will be hitting the shelves on February 7 2017 - again, you can preorder the hardcover edition right now.

    The other news is I'm aiming to be in New York City for US publication day, and I'm going to try to get around some American bookstores for the first time. Stay tuned for more details...

    Sunday, 28 August 2016

    Top 10 Locations to Set an Action Thriller


     As it's summer, it's a good time to repost some articles and lists I've done elsewhere on The Internets.

    Our first delivery of eco-conscious recycled material this year comes from Foyles, who asked me earlier this year for my top 10 locations in which to set a thriller. It was good timing as I had just finished edits on The Time to Kill, which sprawls across two different time periods, three countries and about half a dozen US states.

    Here's what I came up with:

    Thriller-writing has something in common with house-buying: location, location, location.

    Think of some of the standout scenes in classic thriller fiction and movies. The sweeping Scottish Highlands in The Thirty-Nine Steps. The murky lawless zone of the off-shore casino in Farewell, My Lovely. The mountain-top base in the Alps in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The towering glass and steel Nakatomi Plaza in Die Hard.

    A twisting plot and compelling characters are important, but an evocative location can effortlessly add drama to any scene. With that in mind, here are ten of my picks for great thriller backdrops.

    1. The wilderness (particularly when the climate is inhospitable)

      A great way to pile on some extra suspense is to place the action in a wild, isolated location that’s as much of a threat to the protagonists as the villains are. In my book, The Time to Kill (Winterlong in the US), freelance manhunter Carter Blake finds himself alone and unarmed in the middle of rural Minnesota in the middle of a blizzard. He’d be in trouble even without the men with guns and hunting dogs on his trail.
       
    2. A bustling metropolis

      New York, Paris, London and Hong Kong are some obvious examples, but there are many more to choose from. Hubs that draw all sorts of people from around the world, home to millions upon millions of people and as many unique stories. It’s not just the mass of diverse humanity; the urban playground provides multiple opportunities for thrilling setups, from super-highways to narrow backalleys; from dingy subways to open rooftops.



    3. A small town in the middle of nowhere

      The incongruity of a sleepy little town and the threat or reality of violence is a classic setup used in a lot of thrillers, and most westerns. Isolated outposts of humanity are vulnerable to external threat, or the town itself can be part of the menace. Lee Child makes use of the understated sinisterness of small, closed communities in several of the Jack Reacher books.
       
    4. An abandoned post-industrial site
      Aged, dilapidated factories always make for an atmospheric backdrop to the action. I’m a big fan of photographs taken by urban explorers in disused factories and subway stations. Something about a cavernous space built for teeming masses, and now surrendered to the ravages of nature makes the characters seem all the more isolated and vulnerable.
    5. Anywhere in Russia

      Place a thriller anywhere in Russia and it immediately benefits from the residual menace of decades of Cold War spy thrillers from Fleming to Le Carré. To Western eyes, it’s still a slightly mysterious, authoritarian society, with ample scope for spy games and government-sponsored skulduggery.
    6. A confined location

      Whether it’s a cruise ship, an underground bunker, or (as in JS Law’s excellent Tenacity) a nuclear submarine, a closed, confined location is the ideal setting for claustrophobic thrills. It’s equally good for a ‘locked room’ mystery on a slightly larger scale. If the characters are cooped up together with no way to escape, the tension will ratchet up, along with the whodunit possibilities.
    7. A war zone

      A backdrop of a vast, nation-spanning conflict can be an excellent way to throw a smaller story into relief. The threat doesn’t come from one direction, it’s all around.
    8. A large crowd

      There’s nothing like a big political rally or a stadium rock concert being threatened by an evildoer to raise the stakes. With so many faces in the crowd, the threat could come from anywhere. Even from a giant blimp, in the case of Thomas Harris’s first novel Black Sunday.
    9. A train

      This actually combines a lot of the above techniques, which is probably why trains pop up more frequently in thrillers than any other form of mass transit. A train can take you deep into the wilderness. It’s a mobile confined location between stations. The killer can hide among the crowd of passengers. It’s frequently difficult to get a phone signal or internet connection. And the ticket collectors often act like throwback Soviet secret police…
    10. A phone blackspot

      If there’s one thing that makes a modern thriller novelist’s life difficult, it’s the fact that virtually any human on the planet can immediately summon help using a handy device that fits into their pocket. Putting the lead character somewhere they can’t call 999 (or 911) is a great way to emphasise their isolation and give them (rather than the writer) an extra problem.
    So that's my personal favourite thriller settings, at the time of writing at least. What are yours?