Welcome to New Talent November 2012, during which Crime Fiction Lover will be celebrating some of the rising stars of the genre. We’ve planned an extensive schedule of reviews, interviews and feature articles that might well have your bookshelf bulging, your Kindle smiling and your to-be-read list looking eye-wateringly good.

Some highlights to look out for include the top up-and-coming female crime authors, as well as new talent from Canada and Australia. We’ll be talking to authors who are learning the ropes of the publishing world and have released their first novels – such as the Scottish actor John Gordon Sinclair, who has turned to crime writing with Seventy Times Seven. We’ll also talk to Niall Leonard, the husband of EL James, who has written a YA crime thriller. James Oswald will be dropping in to talk about what not to do if  you’re a self-publishing author, we’ll look at some hardboiled with Jimmy the Stick and Hammett Unwritten, and we’ll even talk to a writer-artist duo who are making crime comicbooks. There’s some new historical crime fiction too, and plenty more on the way…

Who qualifies as ‘new talent’? Generally, we’ve been looking at authors with two or fewer books released by the big publishing companies. We’ve included writers who self-publish their crime novels digitally, and work from independent publishers, trying to unearth those hidden gems. There are grey areas, of course, but we’ve done our best to find new and interesting books for you. Each of our writers has contributed to the search for hot new talent.

We hope you enjoy New Talent November 2012. This is the second year we’ve run this themed month and we’ll be bringing you a little more than we did back in 2011. Let’s kick things off with Sam Hawken’s book Tequila Sunset, a gripping story of Tex-Mex borderland noir.