Books like Terra Nova — picked by fans

I've been teaching and writing in the field of the history of technology for over six decades, and it's not too much to say that the field and my professional career grew up together. The Society for the History of Technology began in 1958, and its journal, Technology and Culture, first appeared the following year. I've watched, and helped encourage, a broadening of the subject from a rather internal concentration on machines and engineering to a widening interest in technology as a social activity with cultural and political, as well as economic, outcomes. In my classes I always assigned not only original documents and scholarly monographs but also memoirs, literature, and films.

At an early age, I became a fan of tightly plotted mysteries that play fair with the reader. This led to my career in mystery games and videos and a dozen books of short mysteries. It also led to my TV career.  When the creator of Monk realized he needed some twisty plots, he visited a bookstore, found my books, and tracked me down. Since then, I’ve been plying my trade on the small screen as well, working with some very talented people, like Steve Martin, who needed a mystery guy to come in and add some structure to their ideas.   

There was a time when women had to use pseudonyms or otherwise pretend to be men to get published. These days, especially in the urban fantasy genre, it seems like there are more female authors and female main characters than male ones! I love dynamic main characters, male or female, and every one of these books has stellar characters with a great story. I wanted to mention so many other authors, but I have narrowed it down to these five. I hope you enjoy my list.

Much of the Britain that's exported to the world is fed by the monochromatic myth of nobility and royalty, but the heart of Britain is multifaceted and multicultural. I didn’t grow up in London, but grew up visiting family here and ‘The Big Smoke’ had an allure for me. The people were all different colours and ethnicities and it truly felt like the most exciting place in the world. I moved here the week I turned 18, and I haven’t left. It's a harsh, expensive city, and it's much too busy to provide anyone with any lasting sanity, but here I found a version of Black Britain that I was missing in my hometown.

Social history has always been my passion: unless you know how people thought, felt and lived, even down to how they dressed and ate, it is often impossible to understand why they acted as they did. And no period is as fascinating to me as the inter-war years; after WW1, the greatest conflict the world had ever seen, the upcoming generations determined to break barriers, discard the last vestiges of what they saw as hidebound custom, to invent new, freer ways of writing, painting, dancing - and to have fun. And for most of this post-war generation, there was nowhere like Paris.

There are so many billionaire romances out there based in America, but as a Brit, there’s nothing quite like reading a contemporary romance based in London. The capital city of Great Britain, there are a great number of reasons why books here are simply to die for. The history, the culture, the mixture of communities, and the potential for passion – in my opinion, there’s no better place to escape to in a book. Even better if there are delicious characters to lose yourself with…

What is it about women in their forties, fifties and beyond? What’s that you say? They feel invisible? A bit boring? Something about menopause? No, actually, I was going to say they’re absolutely bloody brilliant. That’s why (especially after entering my own fifth decade) I wondered where all the kickass midlife women were on TV and in literature. One editor admitted to me once that it was ‘safer’ to write about younger women, that people weren’t so drawn to the midlife heroine. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised how many great stories just weren’t being told.

Aged eighteen and living in London, my mother fell in love with an older man and was soon pregnant. Fearful of repercussions, she kept the pregnancy secret from her Catholic parents and continued to keep this secret for many years. This was something I’d always known, but it was only recently that I decided to investigate what happened to so many girls who went to the wrong people for help. What I found was devastating, and it gave me a greater understanding of the choices my mother made. I'm a writer who often draws on autobiographic material for my novels, plays, and stories. I like to feel a subject is truly mine.

Before I started to focus on writing, I was a performer: an actor, a magician, and an escapologist. I’ve learnt a great deal about how to construct a story for an audience. I’m excited by the layers of a good narrative—by what makes it work. In my own life I’m always looking for the details: reflections in a puddle, the interactions of strangers, lost items left behind. My book is all about stopping in the middle of this overwhelming world to notice the everyday moments and to celebrate them. I often find that there is magic there, hidden in plain sight.

I’m the author of 24 twisty psychological thrillers, many of which are Amazon bestsellers. Most of them are set in southern England where I live. My life was tipped upside down in 2015 when I was diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma, a rare bone cancer. Although I have a masters in writing and was traditionally published for non-fiction, I hadn’t been brave enough to put my fiction out in the world. Cancer changed that. I’m now a full-time author, writing about scary things that happen to ordinary people. I’m also an avid reader of thrillers and enjoy nothing more than reading a book with an ending that makes me gasp!