66 books like The One You Really Want

I’m a feel-good romance author from Scotland, published with the HarperCollins imprint One More Chapter. I trained as a journalist and studied Communication and Media, but I always wanted to write romance novels. When I’m not doing that, I write verses and captions for greeting card companies. I’m also a huge music fan, which gave me the idea for my first published novel with One More Chapter, A Secret Scottish Escape.

I’m a feel-good romance author from Scotland, published with the HarperCollins imprint One More Chapter. I trained as a journalist and studied Communication and Media, but I always wanted to write romance novels. When I’m not doing that, I write verses and captions for greeting card companies. I’m also a huge music fan, which gave me the idea for my first published novel with One More Chapter, A Secret Scottish Escape.

I’m a feel-good romance author from Scotland, published with the HarperCollins imprint One More Chapter. I trained as a journalist and studied Communication and Media, but I always wanted to write romance novels. When I’m not doing that, I write verses and captions for greeting card companies. I’m also a huge music fan, which gave me the idea for my first published novel with One More Chapter, A Secret Scottish Escape.

I’m a feel-good romance author from Scotland, published with the HarperCollins imprint One More Chapter. I trained as a journalist and studied Communication and Media, but I always wanted to write romance novels. When I’m not doing that, I write verses and captions for greeting card companies. I’m also a huge music fan, which gave me the idea for my first published novel with One More Chapter, A Secret Scottish Escape.

I’ve always been interested in the dark side of the human psyche and how people choose or are driven to do the awful things that some of them do. Equally, I enjoy reading and writing stories that feature strong women, who may be scared and vulnerable at times, but who are brave, intelligent, and determined to see justice done. I began writing The Kate Redman Mysteries because I wanted to write about a detective who, despite an appalling upbringing and without much care and support, really believes in her career and in protecting the underdog. In the interests of equality, I like to include quite a few female villains too. 😉

I’ve been fascinated by crime ever since I was a junior reporter working on a daily newspaper and covered a huge number of court cases. I’ve written all my working life and turned to crime writing after reaching the final of a UK TV channel’s Search for a New Crime Writer competition. I’ve built up contacts within the police force during my career which has enabled me to write Storm Deaths, the first in a series of police procedural crime novels. I’ve seen so many films and TV shows that don’t follow the proper procedure, so I ensure that all my writing is as authentic as possible. 

In 2021 I retired as Schwarz-Taylor Professor of German at Oxford. For many years I had been interested not only in German literature but in European literature and culture more broadly, particularly in the eighteenth century. Oxford is a centre of Enlightenment research, being the site of the Voltaire Foundation, where a team of scholars has just finished editing the complete works of Voltaire. When in 2013 I was asked to write a book on the Enlightenment, I realized that I had ideal resources to hand – though I also benefited from a year’s leave spent at Göttingen, the best place in Germany to study the eighteenth century. 

While one-off stories are fantastic, I love that children's series lets readers return to trusted characters. Series allow children to see a wider arc of character development and decision-making—often imperfect and in transition—when they are trying to figure out how to identify and connect with the world themselves. That shared experience over time is why I only write series myself—to let kids evolve alongside their favorite characters.

I dropped out of law school to pursue a PhD in music at the University of Glasgow and to write the history of the flute in Scotland. Essentially, I wanted to know that if Scotland was a leader in Enlightenment thought, and if there were hundreds of publications with flute on the title page, and since the flute was the most popular amateur instrument in the eighteenth century, why was nothing written about the flute. I obsessively read Scottish mythology as a child, and was always drawn to the stereotypical wild misty landscapes of Scotland without knowing much about it. 

My fascination with crime fiction has come from reading about it. I have no idea how many novels I have read focused on baddies and the catching of them, but it’s numbering now in the many hundreds. I think the fact that a crime novel can incorporate elements of all other genres – horror, history, romance, the supernatural, etc. are what make them so appealing and add to the joy of writing them. Untangling the threads that make up a crime novel is very satisfying. Maybe in another reality, I would be a detective – I love that idea, but for now, in this bit of the multiverse, I’ll just carry on making them up.