Welcome to The Left Room
Welcome to The Left Room, the website of UK crime writer Steve Mosby. I’m the author of five books: Still Bleeding (2009); Cry for Help (2008); The 50/50 Killer (2007); The Cutting Crew (2005); and The Third Person (2003). Read more information about these novels via the links to the right, along with reviews, and various interviews and other pieces I’ve contributed along the way.
There will - shortly - be a randomly-updated blog here. Alternatively, you can keep track of me in the usual places, listed at the top. Still a few bits and pieces to add in and sort out. But in the meantime, thanks for stopping by.
new and upcoming
I recorded an audio interview with Sarah Walters, for the Yorkshire Post’s OutLoud series. You can listen to it here. And while you’re there, you might want to check out some of the other interviews that are available on the site, as it’s a really good selection. Big thanks to Sarah for taking the time to talk to me, and for making it all so easy.
The blog’s open.
In a genuine ‘pinch yourself’ moment, I’m a featured author in the Case Notes section of Black Static 11, including a lengthy review of Still Bleeding by the great Pete Tennant, an interview, sidebar facts, and a competition to win a copy of the book. There’ll also be some web exclusive stuff appearing on the site there in a bit. More information, along with how to order, is available here.
I’ll be appearing at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Festival in Harrogate (23-26 July 2009). I’m doing the dinner event on the Saturday night, but I’ll be hanging about all weekend. Hope to see you there.
novels
Alex Connor is running away from death. After his wife’s suicide, he wanted nothing except oblivion. Only his friend Sarah kept him going. Now, she’s been murdered, and though the police have the killer, they don’t have her body. The gruesome search to find her will drag Alex back into the land of the living - and the dead. Paul Kearney is a policeman. It’s his job to look death in the eye - however sinister a form it takes. But what happens when you look too closely? As he tracks a killer who’s taking women and slowly draining them of blood, Kearney gets drawn into a world of dark desires that people will go to great lengths to hide. Wound together by their search, if they’re to save themselves and the people they love, Alex and Kearney will need to go to a place where normal rules don’t apply. A place where people trade murder memorabilia, and where your life is only the first thing you lose… [more]
Dave Lewis is a man with a history. Haunted by his brother’s murder when they were children, and scarred by his parents’ grief, he’s built a bitter life denying everything they ever stood for. He spends his time working as a magician, running a cynical magazine that derides his parents. New Age beliefs, and drowning his sorrows over his lost love, Tori. He’s trying to convince himself the past is the past. A promise he made to Tori has got him into trouble before, and Dave’s determined to move on and not let that happen again. Detective Sam Currie is a man with a past. His failure to prevent his son’s death has ended his marriage and cast a shadow over his life and career. He’s directed his hatred towards the one man he sees as responsible, but he has other priorities right now. A killer is stalking the city, abducting girls and sending texts and emails to their families before he kills them. When Dave Lewis appears to connect both investigations, it’s an opportunity Currie can’t resist… [more]
Mark Nelson is a young police officer, newly assigned to the team of John Mercer - a highly-decorated and successful detective, and author of a bestselling true crime book based on his years of experience catching killers. Mercer is a legend in the force and it’s a huge opportunity for Mark, who has dedicated his life to his job ever since the death of his girlfriend years before. When a man is found burned to death in his own home, Mercer’s team is thrown into an investigation that grows darker and more complex at every turn. The evidence points to a man known as the Fifty-Fifty Killer. His targets are young couples, who he stalks and subjects to a single night of torture and manipulation, testing and destroying the love between them. Only one of them ever survives until dawn. And his victims include a former member of Mercer’s team. Soon afterwards, a young man walks into a police station badly tortured and with his memory in tatters. He knows only that his girlfriend is still being held captive in the woods he’s escaped from. But the team know that by fleeing, the man has sealed his girlfriend’s fate. If they can’t piece together his experience by daybreak then she will die in his place. [more]
The small team of policemen never even identified the dead girl and, for the officers involved, her murder came to symbolise everything that was wrong with the city: a haphazard sprawl of commerce and indifference. Four months on, that group is in disarray. Sean has disappeared into the city’s black heart and not returned, and Martin is separated from his job, his wife and his friends. But then a simple note from his ex-partner forces him to re-enter an investigation he’d rather forget. ‘I found her’, it says. The search leads him from one side of the city to the other, in a downward spiral of violence and pain, and drags him into the orbit of the things that are really wrong with the city: the eight brothers rumoured by legend to have control over everything. [more]
‘This isn’t some kind of ‘dear John’ letter. I’m coming back again’. But Amy Sinclair didn’t come back. That note on the kitchen table was the last that her boyfriend, Jason, heard of her. At first, he had let her have her space but as the weeks turned to months the worries had set in… and eventually he went after her. What he found appalled him. It seems that Amy had had a secret life on the internet and had met some people she shouldn’t have. And one of them took her. Now Jason sits at home and cruises the same horrific websites that she once walked through to find her kidnapper. But when he lays a trap for a monster he meets in a chat-room he gets more than he bargained for. He finds that nothing in this story is as it seems, and that the clues lie in the mistakes of his own past… [more]