Watch the book

Watch The Book is a blog that features book trailers. They've very kindly posted my trailer for A Vengeful Longing. Go see!

A week away....

... from the publication of the US Penguin paperback of A Vengeful Longing.

If you're interested, there's a Reading Group guide here on the Penguin website.

View from Here interview part two

I think it must be the longest, most in-depth interview I have ever done! Part Two is here.

Part one, if you want to read that first, is here.

Jen Persson of View from Here also reviewed A Vengeful Longing here.

I feel like I am rather hogging the view over there.

But if that's not enough for you, Alex at Faber spotted another review in Eurocrime.

American paperback trailer

Ahead of the publication of the American paperback of A Vengeful Longing, which comes out in May, here is a slightly edited version of the trailer to include the name of my American publisher, Penguin.

Crime Squad's top ten books for 2008

I'm in it, just - at number 10!

Here's the full list:

1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson
Quercus £7.99

2. Child 44 - Tom Rob Smith
Pocket Books £7.99

3. Blood From Stone - Frances Fyfield
Sphere £12.99

4. A Simple Act of Violence - R.J.Ellory
Orion £9.99

5. Swan Peak - James Lee Burke
Orion £14.99

6. Therapy - Sebastian Fitzek
Pan Macmillan £6.99

7. Revelation - C.J.Sansom
Macmillan £12.99

8. The Perk - Mark Gimenez
Sphere £6.99

9. Echoes from the Dead - Johan Theorin
Doubleday £10.99

10. A Vengeful Longing - R.N.Morris
Faber and Faber £12.99


And here's what they said about mine:

"Our review said; "A Vengeful Longing is in essence a novel about power, suffering, bitterness and the lengths that people will go for revenge. There is a darkness about A Vengeful Longing that leaves the reader repulsed yet fascinated." Strong and stirring."

I'm thrilled to be included in their list.

Bookgasm reviews A Vengeful Longing

My google blog alert showed up a new review of A Vengeful Longing on the Bookgasm website.

I'm extremely pleased with it, especially this bit:

This is period fiction of the best kind: accurate in its details; staying within its appropriate time; even managing to teach us a bit about the society’s norms. And on top of that, you get a rousing good mystery that keeps you thinking until the end. More, please, from Mr. Morris. —Mark Rose

Okay, Mark, I'm working on it! On which note, back to the edit.

Audio book news

I was asked by facebook friend and audiobook reviewer Sharon Harriott whether there is an audiobook of A Vengeful Longing. The answer is yes!

I have to confess that I'm not a fan of audiobooks myself. Reading has always been a silent occupation for me, and I find the reader's voice too intrusive. This is especially so when I'm listening to audiobooks of my own work - which, frankly, is something I just can't do. However, I do know there are people who love them, and indeed some who rely on them. (Audiobooks in general, I mean - not my audiobooks!) So for those of you who are interested, the audiobook of A Vengeful Longing is available through audible, as an mp3 download. I think that means you can put it on your ipod, if that's the kind of thing you're into. It's read by John Curless, who may or may not be this guy:



I'm sure he does a great job, though I can't bring myself to listen to the clip on the audible page. Perhaps you will be able to and report back in the comments what it sounds like.

FREE books!!!!!! Paperback giveaway madness!!!!!!!

Hey, do I know how to write a headline! You can't argue with FREE, can you? And for those of you who like reading, 'books' is a pretty good pull too! In fact, what could be better? It's such a good offer I'm now wondering if I really needed all those exclamation marks, or 'screamers' as they're known. And maybe 'giveaway madness' doesn't quite hit the right tone. Ah well, too late now.

Here's the deal, to celebrate the official publication day of the UK paperback of A Vengeful Longing (shortlisted for the 2008 CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger, longlisted for the 2008 CWA Ellis Peters Award for historical crime fiction, runner up for New York Magazine's best thriller of the year) I have three signed copies to give away as prizes in my FREE TO ENTER competition (never hurts to slip in an extra 'FREE' now and then). All you have to do is email me at rogernmorris at blueyonder dot co dot uk with the name of the investigating magistrate from Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment who is the protagonist of my books A Gentle Axe and A Vengeful Longing.

Also, you'd better tell me where you'd like the book sent.

It's as easy as that!

Happy New Year... let's hope so.

Jeepers, how the New Year creeps up on you. All of a sudden we're in 2009. A new year means a new edition of A Vengeful Longing, the mass market UK paperback, which comes out a week today on the 8th of Jan. Here's what it looks like:



It should start appearing in the shops around now, but it's already available for pre-order here.

Of course, the downside of having another book out is that it gives me something else to obsessively google and rank-check. Anyone know a good hypnotherapist?

New York Magazine Best Thriller 2008

... was won by Child 44 by Rob Tom Smith.

Runners up: A Vengeful Longing by RN Morris and The Likeness by Tana French.

Full story here

Here's what they said about AVL:

Morris resurrects one of literature’s all-time greatest characters: Porfiry Petrovich, the detective from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The result reads like an episode of Columbo, but with feverish Russian psychology and the filthy overflowing canals of 1868 St. Petersburg.

Paperback writer

Just a quickie to preview the cover of the paperback edition of A Vengeful Longing.

It's not officially published until January 8, 2009, though I've been told that Faber will be releasing some stock early to catch the Christmas shoppers. So feel free to mention it in your letter to Santa.

My first podcast!

To hear an extract of the interview I did with Muthamma on Phoenix fm, press the green arrow on the virtual player below.

A special big thank you to my writewords buddy, Shellgrip, aka Jon Gritton, who supplied all the technical advice and assistance - even tidying up the file and converting it to the right format. Suffice it to say, that without Jon's help I wouldn't have had a clue how to do this!

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Review radars, human and otherwise.

My automated review radar - google alerts - and my human review radar - Maggie my publicist at Penguin - have alerted me to a couple of interesting book sites, both of which seem to have featured AVL.

First there's Mostly Fiction, which actually has a double review of both A Vengeful Longing and The Gentle Axe (being an American site, they reviewed the American edition).

And then there's Book Browse, which not only features A Vengeful Longing on its home page as one of its recommended reads of the week, but pulls together a few of my best reviews so far!

Vengeful Longing in America

I've just realised I let the US publication date of A Vengeful Longing go by without remark. It was last week, the 12th. What did I do to celebrate? I went to London Zoo with my daughter's school trip. It was exhausting, but Claire said it was 'the best school trip ever', so it was worth it.

Anyhow, luckily for me, David Isaak was not so inattentive. True to his usual generous form, he was out book-spotting, despite being, as he puts it, in the middle of nowhere. More pictures, and other news of what David's been up to, on his blog.

Oh, by the way, I have no idea who those lovely people holding copies of AVL are. If they'd like to identify themselves, I'd be more than happy to send them a signed bookplate each.

Off to the British Library tonight...

... to get a plaque for being on the CWA Duncan Lawrie shortlist. The shortlist is supposed to be announced at the event, but there was an article in the Times on Saturday by Natasha Cooper reviewing the shortlisted books. So it seems the cat is out of the bag.

Ms Cooper found AVL a little "too impressed with its own cleverness", apparently. Which is weird, because the last time I talked to it, it told me that it wished I had made it even cleverer.

Booklist review...

The American Library Association's journal Booklist ran a review of A Vengeful Longing yesterday. Here's a quote:

The Gentle Axe was a solid debut, a reincarnation of Dostoevsky’s character from Crime and Punishment. But here Morris seems to have hit his stride. His characters come alive in all their destitution, pretension, madness, fractiousness, and humanity. His portrait of the city, abandoned by the well-to-do in summer, offers a rich, palpably fetid sense of place, and his depiction of nineteenth-century Russian society, festering with revolutionary notions and old grudges, is compelling.

— Thomas Gaughan, Booklist

Kirkus have spoken.

I loved this article by a Kirkus editor who was insane enough to write a novel - and then had to suffer the stress of waiting for the Kirkus review to come out.

Anyhow, in tomorrow's issue of Kirkus there will be a review of A Vengeful Longing. I was sent a preview of it, but I held off posting until the review was available online. I see now that Barnes and Noble have added it to the reviews of the American edition of AVL, so I think it's okay to post it here.

I'll confess I was very worried. But as my UK editor said, I couldn't have asked for a better appreciation of what I've been doing:

Kirkus Reviews

Morris (The Gentle Axe, 2007) again resurrects police inspector Porfiry Petrovich from Crime and Punishment for a second rousing crime mystery.

The story bursts open with a poisoned box of chocolates and the violent deaths of Raisa and Grisha Meyer, wife and son of Dr. Martin Meyer, a reclusive opium-eater. On his strained first day at the job, opinionated, idealistic Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky begins an apprenticeship under the older, wiser Porfiry Petrovich, and together they dispatch to the crime scene. The case appears to be open-and-shut, but in the following days, amidst the stifling heat and stench of drab, gray 19th-century St. Petersburg, a series of curious, seemingly unrelated murders occur. With mounting evidence tying the crimes to an insurrectionist cell plotting against the Tsar, a labyrinthine web of evidence begins to unravel. Each new lead becomes a dead-end, but the coincidences-so various, yet so exact-eventually lead the policemen toward the culprit. Richly colorful and alive, Morris's characters brim with texture, whether they are hard-nosed cops or seasoned prostitutes, cantankerous slumlords or bespectacled bureaucrats. None escape the piercing intellect of Petrovich, who opens every individual's closet of vice and hypocrisy. Forcing all to admit their deepest shames, he provides them a psychological conduit for personal revelation and redemption. Equally powerful (and parallel) to this Virgil-like probe of the human psyche are Petrovich and Virginsky's forays into the city's deepest shames: a hospital for the mentally insane and a tenement infected with cholera, where the only sounds are that of wailing for the dead. Musing on questions of love, regret, misery,injustice, disillusionment, etc., Morris seamlessly and brilliantly segues from intensely grave to laugh-out-loud funny.

Provocative, satirical insights into humanity's darker corners.

My starred review!

The Publishers Weekly review is now online. You can find it here.

A Very Good Friday.

I heard today that A Vengeful Longing has received a starred review in the US industry mag, Publishers Weekly. This is apparently felt to be a very good thing in itself, as the publication is highly influential within the book trade. I don't think I can link to the review, not yet at least, as it doesn't seem to be available online, but it is a great review. Almost overwhelmingly, unbelievably so. The reviewer uses the word "superb". I don't think I've ever had a superb before. It ends with this:

...this novel stands out from a number of fine czarist-era mysteries — by Russians and foreigners alike — like a Fabergé egg at a yard sale.

Oh, and I happened to buy a copy of The New Yorker today. Spotted the following, well placed in an article about Barak Obama's church minister:

Reviewed in The Economist.

Once again I've been reviewed alongside a fellow North London Historical Crime Writer, this time in The Economist. Frank Tallis and I were previously both reviewed by Joan Smith in the Sunday Times - though that time it was Frank's newest novel FATAL LIES that was under discussion. This time it's A DEATH IN VIENNA (as it's known in America - in this country it's VIENNA BLOOD). And not so long ago, Lee Jackson and I were both reviewed in The Telegraph.

Fortunately, the reviewer, who is not credited in the online version of the mag, seems to like both our books. Frank's is an "enthralling narrative", while A VENGEFUL LONGING gets: "Full marks to the author for bringing Petrovich back to life in this ambitious work that is a real pleasure to read."