Next month sees Book 2008 here in Dublin, a festival running from the 5th to the 7th of September. I will include the link and you can peruse at your leisure the terrific line up of writers who will be appearing-including Martin Amis, John Banville, John Connolly, Rebecca Miller, Declan Hughes and many many others.

As part of this festival there will also be a crime writing series, where many ...

Hi all,

here’s the cover for Undertow, the new book that will be out in the early Autumn. Click to enlarge the image.

[photopress:undertowcoverbig.jpg,thumb,pp_image]

Good evening. It’s Tuesday the 13th of May, 13, a suspicious number for some but a golly an auspicious one for me it seems. I ought to update this blog more often but I doubt you’d really want to hear my day to day routine. It would be very repetitive and go something like, ‘got up, sleepy, had toast, fed dog, ignored cats, sat at computer, read emails, yawned, watched birds, yawned some more, considered work, patted dog, had more ...

While sitting here at my desk earlier, chewing the end of a biro to ribbons and pondering the imponderable, namely how in the name of shark jumping I was going to get John out of the scrape I’d just written him into, my telephone rang.
Wearily, blearily, non too cheerily I got up and went to throttle the offending racket.
But gadzooks! Stall the ball! Hold yer horses. For it was news, good news, the sort of news Tuesdays never ...

This is the draft cover for the Dutch edition of Missing Presumed Dead. It’s simply entitled ‘Missing’ and it looks fantastic.

I am making up part of a panel on Fionn Davenport’s show Culture Shock tonight, on Newstalk 106. http://newstalk.ie/newstalk/programmes/20/culture-shock.html
The topic is Mind of a murderer and it should be an interesting discussion.
Why murder? What might drive a person to such a vicious and brutal act? Do we understand it? Would there be any circumstances in which we could see ourselves performing it? Are we as a society saturated by murder? Does it have the capacity to shock ...

I have just completed my first Dublin City Marathon and oh my god do I ache like a barely breathing corpse. However-despite the pain- I have never felt more alive than I do at this moment. It didn’t occur to me that I could do it, after all it was only eight months ago when I was waffling about it first. However I have done it and despite my poor legs I feel terrific. You see readers, anything is possible, ...

Hello there readers, and good news on this sunny Friday morning. I’ve just received word that Missing Presumed Dead is to be published in the The Netherlands by the publishing house Verbum. This is my first foray into a foreign market and I’m so excited about it I could do a small jig here-but I won’t because that would look daft. I haven’t seen the new books yet, but how odd to think of my writing in Dutch. As soon ...

OF THE hellishly high numbers of children who are abducted globally every year, few ever return home. One does in Hunt’s novel. The action opens in an austere 1980s Ireland. Katie Jones is snatched while she plays on a south Co Wicklow beach. Fast forward to 2006: a woman taxis into a quiet Dublin estate, knocks on a door and blows the brains away of the man who opens it. Is she the same Katie Jones? Opening steps of an ...

CHILLING TALES FROM BRITTAS TO BANGKOK

By MYLES MCWEENEY
Saturday June 16 2007

MISSING PRESUMED DEAD

by Arlene Hunt

Hodder Headline Ireland.

Summer 1980. Charlotte, her husband Tommy and their two children, Sam and his little sister Katie aged two, are enjoying the beach at Brittas Bay when Katie inexplicably goes missing.

She vanishes, her body never found. 26 years later a young woman arrives on a Dublin doorstep wielding a gun. She shoots the man who opens the door, then turns the gun on herself. ...