Mark Lawson
The Guardian journalist and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Front Row programme, Mark Lawson, has a new novel just out, his first for eight years. The Deaths is a state-of-the-nation novel positioning the ‘new aristocracy’ of bankers, professionals and business tycoons in the ‘old aristocracy’ setting of listed houses in the English countryside. This idyll is threatened by the economic downturn, then turned upside down by an act of violence.

Paula Hawkins
Paula Hawkins’ debut novel, The Girl on The Train, is described as an edge-of-the-seat thriller in the tradition of Before I Go to Sleep. The book will be published by Doubleday in spring 2015.

Hawkins said: “Like most Londoners, I’ve spent more hours than I’d like to think about shuttling backwards and forwards on trains to various jobs in various parts of the city, and many of those hours have been spent gazing out of windows at the same streets and the same houses, every now and again catching a glimpse into the lives of others. I find that there’s something so intriguing about those snatched glances into strangers’ lives, partly because they’re so frustratingly fleeting, so you only ever see a tiny sliver of a story.”

Lucy Foley
The Book of Lost and Found is the debut novel by Lucy Foley. The novel is described as “lyrical, compulsive and haunting”, “the heartbreaking tale of loves lost and decades of regret, a story of life broken by wars, and how the dark secrets in your past can resonate through your future”, as a young woman who has been adopted goes on a quest to discover the truth of her parentage.

Tanya Byrne
Heart-Shaped Bruise by Tanya Byrne was shortlisted for the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger award at the Crime Writers Association awards.

Byrne was also shortlisted for New Writer of the Year award at the National Book Awards. Now Byrne has signed a two-book deal, the first to be published in December next year. No titles as yet.

Maggie Stiefvater
A companion book to Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver trilogy will feature Shiver character Cole St Clair. Sinner will be published in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada on July 1, 2014.

There are more than 1.8m copies of the Shiver trilogy in print, with rights licensed to 36 foreign editions, according to Scholastic. The first of the three, Shiver, was published in the UK in 2009, followed by Linger in 2010 and Forever in 2011.

Mark Edwards
Mark Edwards’s self-published Kindle hit The Magpies has been signed-up by Amazon publishing imprint Thomas & Mercer. Edwards, who has sold 170,000 copies of The Magpies through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform, has sold two psychological thrillers to T&M.

The Magpies will be published this winter in the UK and the US, followed by Because She Loves Me next summer. The titles will be published in print and audio as well as digital.