JULY 20 2023
"Wow. Such a great book. I could not put it down"
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THE CONSPIRATORS: NEW IN 2023
G.W. Shaw
Jacob Meaney makes so little money as a translator that his girlfriend has given up on him. Then Eloise, an Australian digital marketer, appears out of the blue, offering him unheard of sums for a couple of weeks' work.
A private plane and helicopter take him to a showcase villa in Carinthia and all the luxury he could ever want. Here he meets the owner of the house Bondarenko. Unwillingly Jacob has become part of an organised crime conspiracy, held captive there by armed guards.
His task is to interpret between Hindi, Russian and English during Zoom calls with Nazim, an Indian criminal whose gang have taken over the manufacture and distribution network of the wonder fertility drug that Bondarenko has been selling on the internet. It becomes clear to Jacob that his employer is in far deeper and more dangerously than he realises. The gang's plan is to take over the entire operation by any means.
The villa has become a lethal gilded prison to Jacob and Vlada, the maid who's a trafficked worker. When Nazim finally strikes which side will Jacob take to survive?
Fast-moving, tense, glamorous and witty The Conspirators is G. W. Shaw's follow-up to Dead Rich ('A great book by a fabulous writer' Steve Cavanagh) and shows that he's a master of the gripping international thriller genre.
News
I would be delighted if you could join me, to launch the new DS Alex Cupidi novel The Wild Swimmers at The Mermaid Inn, Rye, Mermaid St, Rye TN31 7EY. To RSVP, […]
Not too shabby. The end of the rainbow is in Dingle Bay which I can also see a slice of from my desk.
In one week’s time we leave for Ireland, knowing how lucky I am to be able to slip from one country to another. My father was born in Belfast. I […]
G. W Shaw
My first name is George, but nobody has ever called me it. I was always called William, for some reason. But I decided to use G. W. Shaw as a pen name when I wrote the thriller Dead Rich – because that book was a bit different from the police novels I’d been writing.
G. W. Shaw are adventure thrillers, a genre I read a lot as a teenager – hopefully with a contemporary twist.
One of Britain’s greatest crime writers
The Sun
Best Crime of 2013
Breen & Tozer 1, The Evening Standard
A terrifically atmospheric thriller
The Trawlerman, The Mail on Sunday
A modern crime master
The Sun
William Shaw makes his sentences sing
New York Daily News
Cathal Breen is altogether the most welcome crime solver in British fiction
Toronto Star
A contender for thriller of the year
The Birdwatcher, The Sun
Excellent
Salt Lane, Wall Street Journal
Insightful . . . An elegy for an entire alienated generation
New York Times
The question of why a killer kills is always central. William Shaw delivers a perfect motive in the third of his excellent Breen and Tozer mysteries…
The Spectator
Crime Book of the Year
BREEN & TOZER 3, SUNDAY TIMES
What a pleasure it is when one discovers a writer who combines ironclad storytelling techniques with the linguistic finesse of more literary novelists
Barry Forshaw, Independent
William Shaw writes the DS Alexandra Cupidi books, set in Dungeness. The Trawlerman is the fourth in the series. The next, The Wild Swimmers, will be published in 2024.
Writing as G. W. Shaw, he also writes gripping adventure thrillers. His latest, The Conspirators, will be published by riverrun in July 2023.
William Shaw has been longlisted three times for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger, the Barry Award, The CWA Golden Dagger and the Golden Bullet.
The Sun calls him ‘a modern crime master’. Peter May has praised him as ‘a superb storyteller’, and Peter James has hailed him as ‘one of the great rising talents of UK crime fiction.’ The Times critic Marcel Berlins said: ‘William Shaw is a superb, flowing writer, both of police procedure and personal relations, and perhaps England’s most adept at using dialogue to propel his always intelligent stories.’
Before becoming a crime writer, William Shaw was an award-winning music journalist and the author of several non-fiction books including Westsiders: Stories of the Boys in the Hood, about a year spent with the young men of South Central Los Angeles, Spying In Guru Land, about time spent investigating religious cults, and A Superhero For Hire, a compilation of columns written for the Observer Magazine.
Starting out as assistant editor of the post-punk magazine ZigZag, he has been a journalist for The Observer, The New York Times, Wired, Arena and The Face and was Amazon UK Music Journalist of the Year in 2003.
In 2021 he initiated the community bookshop The Book Makers, working with the charity Creative Future and Brighton and Hove City Council. His narrative artwork 41 Places featured on BBC’s Front Row as one of the highlights of the 2007 Brighton Festival.