Me And My Big Mouth, the blog of Scott Pack, June 2007

The Good Thief's Guide To Amsterdam by Chris Ewan is the latest winner of Long Barn Books' First Novel Award. Every year Susan Hill invites unpublished novelists to submit their work from which a shortlist is selected. The eventual winner is published by Long Barn in hardback and is also guaranteed a book deal with Simon & Schuster in paperback - quite a prize. I am one of the judges for the award and the standard of the final shortlist last year was extremely strong, any one of the books would look perfectly at home on the bestseller lists.

The inaugural winner was The Extra Large Medium by Helen Slavin which arrives in paperback later this year. A cross between Sixth Sense, Coronation Street, Lovely Bones and Most Haunted, it is a witty tale of ghosts and housework. You can still pick up the Long Barn Books edition which looks set to become a collector's item if the mass market paperback takes off.

The Good Thief's Guide To Amsterdam is an intelligent crime novel with a fantastic premise - the hero is a crime writer who moonlights as a burglar. He gets embroiled in a plot to steal three plaster of Paris monkeys (see no evil etc.) which quickly goes wrong while at the same time attempting to resolve key plot points in his next novel (just how can he get the briefcase with the severed hand into the locked room?). It is a clever approach and adds a more literary dimension to what is already a cracking plot. I suspect that crime fans will love it and many readers of more general fiction will fall for its charms.

It's a Crime! (or a mystery...), May 2007

The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam is intriguing and fun. It's a début not to be missed and the beauty of it is that it's the start of a series. More Charlie to come; more intriguing stories and more locations. Wonderful!

You can read the full review here