Ben McPherson’s debut novel was the highly acclaimed
A Line of Blood. He is a television producer and director, as well as a
writer, and for more than ten years worked for the BBC, among other outlets.
[
The Page 69 Test: A Line of Blood.]
McPherson's new novel,
Love and Other Lies, is partly based on terrorist Anders Breivik’s slaughter of 77 people at a Norwegian summer camp in 2011.
At
Publishers Weekly the author tagged
ten thrillers based on real-life events, including:
The Long Drop by Denise Mina
Sixty years after Peter Manuel’s death, people in Scotland still shudder at his name. Mina takes an event known to have happened
—Manuel’s 11-hour drinking session with William Watt, the man whose wife, sister-in-law, and daughter he had bestially killed—and intercuts that night with Manuel’s trial for their murder the following year. For both men the stakes are high. The police suspect Watt of murdering his own family; Watt believes Manuel to be the killer. This is true crime reimagined as fiction and marketed as a novel. It’s a superb trawl through the razor gangs and illegal bars of the 1950s Glasgow underworld—horrifying, but at times very funny. Traces of that world are still there, as anyone who grew up in Scotland will tell you.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
writer, and for more than ten years worked for the BBC, among other outlets.
Posts
