INGRID SKYBERG FBI THRILLERS
FINAL OFFER
A dead Russian oligarch and a hacked Presidential election. The two crimes couldn’t be related, could they? Ingrid goes deep undercover to find out. The new Skyberg thriller coming soon!
EVA’S OTHER BOOKS
THE LOYAL SERVANT
When a minister is found dead at his desk, Caroline Barber is sure he didn’t commit suicide. MORE
WINNER of the Lucy Cavendish Prize for Fiction.
THE SENIOR MOMENT
British grandmother Jean Henderson witnesses a robbery in Manhattan. But when she tries to give evidence to the cops, no one wants to hear. MORE
THE DEADLY SILENCE
Casey Collins is 9 years old and she’s been missing for over 24 hours from the same council estate where two little girls disappeared 30 years ago. MORE
ALL ABOUT EVA
Eva grew up in south London. Before she started writing full time, she worked as a local government officer, singer, dotcom entrepreneur, portrait artist, project manager, graphic designer, web designer and content editor. Eva had wanted to write ever since she was a child (she won a literary competition aged 10 for a ghost story!), but didn’t get around to writing her first novel until 2005 when, inspired by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, she realised she wanted to tell real page-turning stories that would keep people up all night just to find out what happens next. Her first novel wasn’t, she freely admitted, very good and it was consigned to a very deep drawer… shortly followed by her second novel. She started her third novel, The Loyal Servant, in 2010. Set in the Department for Education where Eva had worked for eight years, it won the inaugural Lucy Cavendish fiction prize from Cambridge University and gave her the confidence that she was finally writing something people wanted to read. She published The Loyal Servant in 2011 and never looked back. READ MORE
WHO IS INGRID SKYBERG?
Meet Ingrid Skyberg, one of the toughest Special Agents ever to come out of Quantico. She’s tenacious, resourceful, virtually indestructible and just a little bit out of control. Assigned to the US embassy in London, Ingrid is on the case when an American citizen gets into trouble… or winds up dead… or is accused of a crime they didn’t commit. Whether she needs to wear combat fatigues or a cocktail dress, Ingrid Skyberg always gets the job done.
Ingrid grew up on a Minnesota farm but the course of her life was changed when, aged 14, her best friend was abducted, never to be seen again. She vowed she wouldn’t stop until Megan was found and the man who took her was brought to justice. From that point on, Ingrid’s life was devoted to joining the Federal Bureau of Investigations: she got herself fit, got her college degree, became fluent in three languages and served time in the local Sheriff’s department until she met the FBI’s joining criteria.
At first, she was a stickler, a keeper-of-the-rules. But the more cases she works, the more comfortable she is when she has to step out of line. Supremely fit and utterly determined, nothing stands between Ingrid Skyberg and the truth.
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Ingrid’s had a makeover!
I’ve been thinking about getting the Skyberg covers redesigned for a long time. It’s been so long since I published Below Zero I wanted to inject a bit of excitement back into the series, and giving Ingrid a whole new look seemed like a great way to make readers (and me) excited about Skyberg again. When the early books in the series were first published in 2014, Eva was going through treatment and although she was immensely proud of them at the time, the covers probably didn’t get the attention they deserved. Enough time has now passed since Eva died for me to look at the Skyberg series more objectively, and I decided it was time for an overhaul. But there was a problem. Whenever I looked at photos for the covers, I found the models used by all the major stock photography libraries (Getty, Adobe, Bigstockphoto etc) either had long hair or their lingerie showing! The books make it clear that Ingrid has short blonde hair and spends most of her time in biker gear. That meant I was going to have to commission the portrait photography, and here I got really, really lucky. Over breakfast, I mentioned all of this to my girlfriend she said ‘I know just the person’. So I went to meet the model who’s tall, slender, blond and – like Ingrid – Scandinavian. She also, weirdly, looks a lot like Eva, so much so that when I showed Eva’s best friend the early mock-ups she cried. Now I’ve got used to the similarities, I think it’s really cool Ingrid has ended up... read moreMartha Steinway
I got an email from a reader a couple of days ago asking who Martha Steinway was, so I thought I better explain… When Eva and I started writing the Hollywood Detective series, we knew we weren’t going to publish them under her name. The Hudson brand was too gritty and contemporary for a cozy mystery series, and although I think we probably did discuss writing them under my name, as a ghostwriter, using my real name seemed a breach of my professional anonymity. So… we needed a pen name. We knew we wanted something that sounded American, and also something that had the right vintage feel. I remember fooling around with Vanderbilt, Carnegie and Rothschild but we settled on Steinway fairly early on. Eva had used the character name Carmen Steinway in The Senior Moment, and she had this nice catchphrase – ‘As in pianos’ – whenever she introduced herself. It stuck in both our heads, it looked good written down, it was memorable-but-spellable (a crucial factor in name recognition) and we liked it. Now all we needed was a first name to go with it. The convention is that women will read books by men and women, but men prefer books written by men, so to appeal to the widest audience, we decided we’d choose a male name. Somehow – as evidenced by these early cover designs – we came up with Robert. However, shortly before publishing the first book, we had a change of heart: we’re both women, we wanted to improve female visibility in publishing and if we lost a few sales, then so be... read moreFinally…. another book!
I’m thrilled – and more than a tad relieved – to tell you that I am finally bringing out a new book! However, it’s not a new Skyberg – you’ve got a few more months to wait for that. Some of you will remember that Eva and I collaborated on a little side project, the Hollywood Detective series, and we’d published two books before she died. My priority had been to publish the Skyberg series, so the side project had to take a back seat. But now, over three years since the last book came out, Dangerous By Design is hitting the shelves. I finished the first draft in 2014, and Eva gave me her notes on it in December that year. It was hard going through the manuscript and seeing her handwriting, but much harder realising I couldn’t have a debate with her about which of us was right. But as she wasn’t around to argue, or consult, with I made the decision to accept every suggestion she made. We loved writing this series. The novels are bright, breezy and a heck of a lot of fun as our characters – a wisecracking P.I. and his whipsmart assistant – blaze their way through 1930s Hollywood, helping movie stars crack cases and solve mysteries. In the new book, our hero – the charming Spencer McCoy – is called to a break-in Hedy Lamarr’s mansion. When he discovers that the thieves have taken something far more valuable than jewels, the hunt is on to stop a deadly document falling in Hitler’s hands. If that sounds like your sort of read,... read moreCONTACT
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