Nicki Thornton’s debut novel for adults, the Little Bookshop of Murders, was inspired by nearly twenty years working with bookshops.

Nicki ran her own bookshop for more than ten years and then moved into mentoring other booksellers. She discovered bookshops are naturally places where gossip is shared and you learn a lot about everyone locally! So having been a lifelong fan of crime fiction, she decided it would be the perfect place to set a murder mystery series.

Nicki’s debut middle-grade fantasy crime fiction thriller, the bestselling The Last Chance Hotel, won the Times Children’s Fiction Prize and was nominated for awards including the Carnegie Medal, the CrimeFest Best Crime Novel for Children and Specsavers National Book Award, and for the Prix Elbakin.Net for fantasy writing in France. She has been described by Waterstones as ‘one of the most original children’s writers around’. 

Nicki remains a huge supporter of anything that promotes reading for pleasure. She also reads way too much and you can find out what she’s reading in her newsletter as well as following the progress of the next books in the series.

Fun Facts!

• Although somehow cats always seem to feature in Nicki’s books, she refuses to have one of her own as she is a wildlife gardener. She loves to encourage everything from butterflies to frogs into her garden and cats might disagree with the reason for this.
• As well as creating her own a garden for wildlife she is a bio-diversity volunteer in Oxford getting involved in assessing habitats for everything from badgers to bats
• She finds walking or running and just being outdoors is generally great for coming up with plot ideas.
• She adores the sea, but lives in Oxfordshire, just about as far from the sea as it is possible to be in the UK. She has an ambition to live by the sea one day.
• Her birthday is November 5 – a night which is celebrated in the UK with fireworks (but not just for her).
• If she could do any magic she would choose to be able to do good luck and bad luck charms.
• She has a YouTube channel where she used to share writing tips, but does less of this since starting a newsletter.

Cover Design by Holly Astle

Holly is an illustrator based in Falmouth, Cornwall. She is greatly influenced by her local surroundings of the coast and her deep love of the natural world. Protecting this comes at the forefront of everything she does, from drawings to educate and enhance appreciation of nature, to campaign work.

Find her amazing work at hollyastle.co.uk