Clio Gray Writer of Guardians of the Key and The Roaring of the Labyrinth

Clio has won many prizes for her short stories, most notably the Scotsman/Orange 2006 Award, and the Harry Bowling Prize in 2004. The latter led directly to the publication of her series of historical crime novels, following the investigations of Missing-Persons Finder and obsessive list-maker, Whilbert Stroop.

Guardians of the Key is the first of the series, published by Headline (hardback Aug.2006, paperback editions Dec.2006 & Aug.2007) Guardians moves between the medieval town of Lucca in Tuscany, and 1805 London, and includes a spectacular suicide, several gruesome murders, a nasty bout of arson, and the chase to find the missing, but politically expedient, relics of Lucca as Napoleon hammers on the city’s ancient walls.

The Roaring of the Labyrinth (Headline : hardback Aug.2007, paperback 2008) features a fiendish plot winding from the shores of the Black Sea and the founding of the City of Odessa, to the Valley of Eden in the Pennine Hills. Stroop and his adopted family are engaged to find missing bell-founder Uwe Dvoshka. They arrive at Astonishment Hall with its eclectic collections of exotica and weird invention, and trail the missing man through a series of grisly murders and a cold landscape of moors and mists.

The Envoy of the Black Pine (Headline; to be published in 2008) finds Stroop and co on the trail of an entire missing library, taking them from the flooded valleys of Upper and Little Slaughter, to the Printworks of Painswick, and the sea-bound shores of Saareema, a strange group of islands off the Estonian coast. Inevitably murder occurs, plus a little piracy and animal mutilation, and that’s all in the first 50 pages…

For a quicker read, try her collection of short stories, Types of Everlasting Rest, which is published by Two Ravens Press, July 2007