Kate Riordan and Sam Steele (aka Sarah Steele) are two of Stroud’s most popular and successful novelists. Their latest books feature more than one body, and a crime that urgently demands to be solved.

Set in the Stroud valleys, Kate’s The Last Time I Saw Her Alive is a slow-burning, suspenseful time-shift novel in which the bodies of two dead young women are discovered in the same location, decades apart. One young woman – Rain – makes it her mission to solve the mystery, but to do so she must face her own past.

Sam’s Five Silver Spoons – her crime debut – is a taut revenge story, in which a killer targets five privileged Cambridge students who buried him alive twenty years before. The first in a new series, it introduces the characters of DI Hope Fenton and her forensic scientist ex-husband Adam Fenton, who are both still mourning their missing, presumed dead, son.

Join us for a fascinating discussion about why two writers turned to crime, and how they crafted these two marvellously compelling novels.

Chaired by Emma Flint

Venue: Lansdown Hall

Tickets: £14, on sale from 11 September from the Sub Rooms box office