Crime Writer

By Dime Sheppard

Dime Sheppard delivers a smart and witty romance about a crime novelist who recruits her main characters to investigate her maybe-unfaithful fianc?.

Evie Howland has problems.

Guns. Bombs. Murderers.

And that's just on the page...

In real life she's meant to be planning a wedding to adorable billionaire Daniel Bradley, but Evie is seriously snarled in the sixteenth book of her successful crime series. In fact, her protagonists are becoming almost impossible to wrangle: NYPD detective Carolyn Harding is volatile after a messy divorce, and Detective Jay Ryan has that heated look in his blue eyes again. They're both sick of being written. And frankly they're getting a little...physical. Evie is beginning to wonder if she's ever going to finish Book Sixteen and get them back into fiction where they belong.

When it looks like Daniel might be having an affair and Evie makes the mistake of inviting the police detectives to investigate, a sticky unravelling of reality and Evie's safety-first existence begins. And when a disturbingly familiar homicide surfaces in the city papers, it seems as if other, darker characters might have crossed the fiction-frontier too. In which case, Evie is in a lot of real-life trouble.

If she's going to survive it, Evie must face her own worst fears, and learn that real love can be the best way of writing her own story.

But can she change the ending?

Full of high-octane adventure and dry humour, this novel is perfect for fans of Janet Evanovich's action-packed Stephanie Plum novels, or Mary Stewart's stylish romantic suspense.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0648877000
• ISBN13: 9780648877004
• Release Date: October 2021
• Publisher: Ruby Books
• Length: 440 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

This book was an absolute trip from beginning to end!

Crime Writer has been on my Kindle shelf for about a month maybe a little longer. The longer it sat there the more I second-guessed requesting it. The premise became sillier in my mind and I was really afraid of the execution. Yesterday at around 4:30pm I decided that I would at least give it a shot, I finished it at 2am this morning. Did I only get four hours of sleep because of this? Do I regret it? Not in the least. I was hooked from almost the very first sentence! Evie Howland is living almost a fairy tale life; she is currently engaged to be married to billionaire playboy Daniel Bradley, she's living in her modest "dream home" in NYC, and all of this is thanks to her best selling crime novel series featuring Detectives Carolyn Harding and Jay Ryan. Well, it would be a fairy tale life except for the first time in ten years Evie has writer's block. And what's worse her characters are not letting her forget that she has writer's block. Not only are they interrupting her at the most inconvenient times to remind her that they have been on the same stakeout for weeks they are now injecting themselves into her everyday life! What? Your characters don't talk to you? I assure you this is very normal. Well, it is until it's not. Because it's not just Evie that can see Carolyn and Jay any longer. Everyone can. And as Evie must face the fact that not only are her characters alive and are currently wearing her clothes and borrowing her shower but that all of her characters are alive, not just the two who are her closest and dearest friends, but their arch-nemesis The Blade as well. Evie, Carolyn, and Jay must somehow stop a deranged, brilliant serial killer who up until forty-eight hours ago was only real in Evie's head. And to do it Evie may have to do the one thing she is most afraid of; end the stories of the two people she loves most in the world. I do not believe I have ever read anything that has broken the fourth wall so completely, so expertly in my life. I'm sure there are other books out there where the author's characters come to life, Evie even mentions that there are in this book, however, I have so many questions about what the hell happened specifically here. Sheppard wraps you up so completely in Evie's world and in turn this kind of weird other dimension where fictional characters are maybe living a completely separate and *real* life that finishing this is like coming out of an oddly specific dream. It was absolutely brilliant! The entire story is told from Evie's point of view and right from the beginning you get the feeling there is something more to the story than just some cheesy gimmicky story about characters becoming real. Evie alludes to something going very wrong in her life within the first few chapters, something's happened and she's essentially cut the world off, she is not really living. She's just going through the motions of life. Billionaire wants to marry her and offers her everything her heart desires, maybe there's something a bit off about it, but Evie ignores that and just goes with it. You have this feeling pretty much the entire book that Evie is not happy. And then there is this scene; Evie has been kidnapped, she has this feeling that she can write things into existence and so she tries it a few ways and those don't work but she has a flash of insight and writes I AM. Two little words, three short letters that are deceptively simple. Because in the book and in real life they are the beginning of magic. They can be used to harm, they can be used to uplift but they are the beginning of writing yourself into your own story. And that's it, the moment when this went from a really good book to an exceptional book because all of it becomes so relatable at that point, Evie up until this point had written herself out of her own story. And this is something that many of us do for a multitude of reasons; Evie's was a traumatic event but people do this every single solitary day for reasons ranging f

A Fantastic Read! Both Fun and Thrilling!

I had heard so many great things about this book both from friends, as well as from critic reviews that kept popping up on social media, that I was almost nervous to read it in fear it would disappoint the high expectations I had. But it certainly did not! Dime's writing managed to grip me in a way that I hadn't experienced in a long time, and she has managed to create characters so endearing that you find yourself invested in them. Crime Writer will have you both laughing out with the author's dry sense of humor, and on the edge of your seat, dying to know what's going to happen next. I absolutely loved it and can't wait to read the next one!