From the Booking Desk:
It’s a long-standing tradition to have Catriona McPherson guest post on BOLO Books with the release of each new novel. She is her with us today to celebrate the launch of The Dead Room, a suspense novel that pays homage to Agatha Christie’s Sleeping Murder. Read on to find out more about the special residence that forms the major setting for this excellent novel. (And then follow the post about this blog on Catriona’s Facebook profile for a chance to win an awesome prize pack.)
A House to Die For
by Catriona McPherson
I would probably spend quite a lot of time looking at property listings even if I didn’t write domestic suspense. RightMove.UK is my daily treat. (The houses all have floorplans and some of them have Matterport tours. (If you like looking at properties and you’ve never encountered Matterport before . . . you’re welcome.))
But when I’m looking for a setting for a new book I can while away hours on RightMove and – this is the point – call it working. (I love my job.) As you can imagine, I get to know the house I pick pretty well by the time I’ve written the story set there. The setting for The Dead Room was no exception.
So it was uncanny when, watching Escape to the Country on BritBox one Sunday night, I recognised the mystery house: the plasterwork thistles picked out in botanically-accurate colours around the drawing-room ceiling; the glass-fronted china cupboards built into the butler’s pantry; the kitchen that needed “a bit of work”, including a sink; and of course the dead room itself, up the wee stairs near the back door.
“That’s my house!” I said to Neil. “Well, Lindsay’s house.”
“Who’s Lindsay?” said Neil, because I am a furtive weirdo about works in progress and he knew nothing.
It was the best kind of Escape episode, that one with Lindsay’s house. The couple, Stewart and Cris, didn’t say the mystery house was a bit outside their search area (it was), or that it was too much of a project (see above; sink), or that it was too big for two people (Lindsay didn’t think it was too big for one person, to be fair). No, they loved it and they bought it.
Now comes the slight cyber-stalking. I knew from the show that Stewart had been a stage manager in the West End for decades, in charge of Phantom of the Opera for a record-breaking number of performances, and I knew Cris was moving back home to Scotland to start working at the Edinburgh Festival. To cut the chase, I found out their full names. And I already knew where the house was from locating it on a map on RightMove.
So, when I had the ARCs, I sent one along with a very diffident letter, telling them I’d set a thriller in their lovely house, but assuring them that I had put it in a completely different bit of Scotland and if they were creeped out I wouldn’t breathe a word and they could chuck the ARC in the wheeliebin.
They were not creeped out! They were tickled. They’ve now got a copy of the finished book – if it was me, I’d put it by overnight guests’ bedsides – and I’ve got an invitation to tea when I’m in Scotland this summer.
That’s not all I’ve got, either. By complete coincidence, Stewart happened to be writing his first book, Beginners to the Stage, Please as I was finishing my . . . not first. Actually, my thirty-ninth. Which sounds like bragging, but guess which one of us got a helicopter to land onstage during Miss Saigon every night. Correct.
Beginners… is a memoir of Stewart’s working life in the West End and it is brilliant – technical, gossipy, illuminating, gossipy . . . I’m not a devotee of musicals, particularly, and I’m not at all part of the world of professional theatre but I was gripped from start to finish. Not since I read Simon Wood’s motor-racing mysteries have I been so engrossed in such an alien world and loved it so completely.
That’s why I’m not just giving away a copy of The Dead Room to anyone who comments on the Facebook post about this blog, but a copy of Beginners… too.
Catriona McPherson’s The Dead Room officially releases on May 1, 2026
Catriona McPherson (she/her) was born in Scotland and immigrated to the US in 2010. A former linguistics professor, she is now a full-time fiction writer and has published: preposterous 1930s private-detective stories; realistic 1940s amateur-sleuth stories (The Edinburgh Murders is latest); and contemporary psychothriller standalones (The Dead Room is the brand-new one). These are all set in Scotland with a lot of Scottish weather. She also writes modern comic crime capers about a Scot-out-of-water in a “fictional” college town in Northern California sneezedavissneeze. Scot’s Eggs, No. 8 just won for best humorous novel at Left Coast Crime in San Francisco. Her other novels have won Agathas, Anthonys, Leftys and Macavitys and been finalists for an Edgar, a CWA Dagger and three Mary Higgins Clark awards.
Catriona is a proud lifetime member and former national president of Sisters in Crime. www.catrionamcpherson.com
