Reading: Michael Connelly, Dani Couture, William Deverell, Denise Mina

Michael Connelly is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the series featuring Detective Hieronymous Bosch. He has won numerous crime fiction prizes for his novels. In Connelly’s newest novel, Nine Dragons, Harry Bosch is off the chain in the fastest, fiercest, and highest-stakes case of his life. Fortune Liquors is a small shop in a tough South L.A. neighbourhood, a store Bosch has known for years. The murder of John Li, the store’s owner, hits Bosch hard, and he promises Li’s family that he’ll find the killer.

Dani Couture is a poet and fiction writer, whose work has been published in a number of anthologies, journals, magazines and newspapers across Canada, including THIS Magazine, the Globe and Mail, and Fiddlehead. She is currently at work on a novel and has a forthcoming collection of poetry, Sweet, which will be published in 2010. Couture presents her first book of poetry, Good Meat, a collection of mostly observational poems that revolve around food, or, more specifically, the varied and complex relationships we have with the things we eat.

William Deverell’s acclaimed first novel, Needles, which drew on the author’s experiences as a lawyer, won the $50,000 Seal Award. Since then he has published one work of non-fiction, A Life on Trial, and 12 further novels, including April Fool, which won the 2006 Arthur Ellis Award for best crime novel. In Deverell’s latest hilarious mystery, Snow Job, wily old lawyer Arthur Beauchamp moves to Ottawa, and all hell breaks loose. Wildly imaginative, utterly Canadian, irresistibly funny.

Denise Mina (Scotland/UK) was born in Glasgow in 1966. She studied law at Glasgow University and later went on to research a Ph.D thesis at Strathclyde University. Mina is the author of seven previous novels, including the John Creasy Dagger award-winning Garnethill, and numerous other short stories, plays and comics. Ian Rankin has named her as “one of the most exciting writers to have emerged in Britain for years.” Still Midnight, Mina’s latest thriller, begins with a brutal and mysterious kidnapping of an innocent old man.

Denise Mina appears at IFOA as part of Writing Scotland.

Ian Rankin (Scotland/UK) is the internationally bestselling crime author of the Inspector Rebus Series, from which books have been translated into more than 20 languages. He has received multiple accolades including four Dagger Awards, the Chandler-Fulbright Award, the Edgar Award, multiple honorary degrees and the Order of the British Empire for services to literature. Rankin presents his major post-Rebus novel, The Complaints, an inquiry into personal morality, private vice, friendship, and the state of a nation – “A stroke of genius,” says the Globe and Mail.

Ian Rankin appears at IFOA as part of Writing Scotland.