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You are here: Home / Archives for murder

Last One To Die by Cynthia Murphy

January 6, 2021 By achuka Leave a Comment

ACHUKA Book of the Day 6 Jan 2021

Waterstones
Amazon
Bookshop

Are you a teen who thrills to be terrified? This book is for you.
Promoted as “Point Horror for the social media generation” [The book is published by Scholastic]
We love the striking jacket design.

Young, brunette women are being attacked in London. 16-year-old, Irish-born Niamh has just arrived for a summer of freedom, and quickly discovers that the girls being attacked look frighteningly similar to her. Niamh is determined not to let her fear destroy her summer. But can her new friends be trusted? Will she be able to stay ahead of the attacker? Or will she be next? Packed with voice-driven whodunit storytelling, and a retro slasher-movie feel reminiscent of cult classics, this dark, pacy, and irresistibly-creepy debut really has something for everybody!

Last One to Die is a YA horror novel and you’ve mentioned that Point Horror has been a big influence for you. Can you tell us a bit more about your debut, and the inspiration behind it?

Last One to Die came about after a huge writing slump. I was actually trying to write something else when I started listening to a podcast called Lore and an episode about a creepy Victorian villain, Spring Heeled Jack. I had never heard of him, but it planted a little seed which I kept coming back to. I shelved what I was writing and started to brainstorm a teen horror. I have always been a huge fan of anything remotely scary so went and re-watched all of the classics from my teens – Scream, Final Destination, The Craft – and I knew that I wanted to write something scary but also fun. I wanted to recapture that feeling I had as a teen where I was thrilled to be terrified!

from Curtis Brown’s website

 

Filed Under: Blog, BookOfTheDay, Books, YA Tagged With: crime, horror, murder, thriller

A Spoonful Of Murder by Robin Stevens

February 26, 2018 By achuka Leave a Comment

The latest in the bestselling series starring 1930s schoolgirl detectives Hazel Wong and Daisy Wells. This instalment, set in Hong Kong, features ultra-English Daisy feeling “foreign” for the first time, an unexpected development in the Wong family – and a murder close to home for Hazel. Stevens’s combination of meticulous research, character development and a knotty plot is guaranteed to please.
IMOGEN RUSSELL WILLIAMS Guardian Review

Waterstones

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: murder, mystery

Murdered teacher: ‘Mrs Maguire, the teacher I loved’

April 30, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

YA Author Anthony McGowan remembers his form teacher, Mrs Maguire… a moving piece…

Miss Connors was our form teacher. She must have been 23 or 24. Not long out of teacher training college. Neat and very pretty. Yet she had authority, even then. She controlled that class with a combination of humour, kindness and decency, but also an intense fierceness, when required, matching their ferocity with her own. And, in truth, it was required quite often.
There was a pervasive feeling of violence at that time in the school. Breaktime scraps were common and bullying was endemic. The hard kids preyed on the weak, the quiet, the studious. I escaped only because I was tall for my age and good at sport.
At the time I hated the bullies, the meatheads. They ruined school for many, made it a place of horror and fear. Now I can see how this all flowed from that environment, that background, the desperate poverty of Halton Moor.
Many teachers responded to the violence with brutality of their own. Corporal punishment was a daily ritual, administered with a sort of dull thoughtlessness, or sadistic relish, depending on the tastes of the teacher. Even a good kid like me could be slapped across the face for talking, thwacked on the knuckles with an iron-rimmed technical drawing ruler for forgetting his homework.
The teachers who rose above this remain heroes to me. And it’s clear Mrs Maguire became one of them – loved, respected, dedicated. But when I knew her, she was still young, so young it seems to me now. Hardly more than a girl, trying to control a class full of kids for whom the kindest word you could use would be unacademic.
And what I remember most about her was her determination to get the best from us, to put into our heads what we needed to get through, to get by. That caring, that intensity, could at times spill over into fierceness, goaded by some jackass, or when she came across bullying or unkindess in others.
But it isn’t the fierceness that I remember when I think of her. I think of her face, always on the verge of a smile. Her consideration. The way she listened when you spoke to her, and tried to answer, rather than fob you off. I remember her kindness and consideration for me. I could easily have had a terrible time in 1J. I was an outsider. I was different. My parents were lower-middle-class. I didn’t have the hard Leeds accent, so like a hammer hitting rock. And I was brainy. My hand was always up in class. But she looked after me, and I got through. Others she helped more, those who had greater problems to overcome. For 40 years she did this, week in, week out. And she had earned the right to spend another 30 years thinking about the good that she had done, the lives transformed.

via Murdered teacher: ‘Mrs Maguire, the teacher I loved’ – Telegraph.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: death, knife, memory, murder, school, teacher

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