Capital Crime Full Lineup Revealed

The wait is over! The full Capital Crime 2025 programme has landed, and it’s our biggest, boldest lineup yet.

Join us in London on 12th-13th June for an unforgettable festival packed with thrilling conversations, exclusive events, and the chance to meet your literary heroes.

Expect bestselling authors, award-winning storytellers, and crime fiction’s biggest names, including:

Michael Connelly, Steph McGovern, Jeremy Vine, Vaseem Khan, Linwood Barclay, Karin Slaughter, Richard Armitage, Ruth Ware, Lisa Jewell, Clare Mackintosh, Andrew Child and many many more.

Plus, we’ve just announced the Fingerprint Awards shortlists - will your favourite take the prize?

Whether you’re a fan of psychological thrillers, gripping spy fiction, or classic crime stories, there’s something for everyone. 

Weekend & day tickets are selling fast - secure yours now to avoid disappointment.

With an electrifying mix of bestselling authors, expert panels, and thrilling discussions, this year’s festival is set to be truly unforgettable.

Here’s just a taste of what’s in store over two packed days:

FRIDAY:

Thrillers That Go Bump in the Night with Linwood Barclay and Andrew Child & Nadine Matheson

Criminal Minds Throughout History with Conn Iggulden, Kate Williams & Hallie Rubenhold

Espionage for the Modern Reader: Ava Glass, Charles Cumming and Nick Harkaway & Vaseem Khan

The One You Least Suspect: Dilemmas and Decisions with David Goodman, S. M. Govett and Remi Kone & Brian McGilloway

Deception in Crime Fiction - Mark Edwards, Nicci French, Erin Kelly & Claire McGowan 

Found in Translation: Jón Atli Jónasson, Lex Noteboom, Johana Gustawsson, Thomas Enger & Quentin Bates

Terror on and off the page: social injustices in horror and high concept thrillers:  Chris Carter, Erin E. Adams, Jessie Elland & Andrea Carter

Masters of Mystery: a panel of crime writing experts: Dr Duncan Harding (forensic psychologist), Graham Bartlett (police) and Nicola Williams (practising Judge)  in conversation with criminal defence lawyer Ruth Mancini 

Crime to cool you down this summer: Will Dean, Heidi Amsinck, R. O. Thorp & Ed James

SATURDAY: 

Crime Writing Masters discussing craft and creativity: Michael Connelly in conversation with M. W. Craven 

The Appeal of Unlikeable Characters with Richard Armitage, Lisa Jewell and Steph McGovern & Jon Coates

25 Years in the Making: Mark Billingham and Karin Slaughter in conversation with Louise Minchin

Exploring the Human Mind One Thriller at a Time: with Dorothy Koomson, Ruth Ware & Anna Sharpe

From Page to Screen: Bringing crime thrillers to life: with Jane Casey, Michael Connelly andRagnar Jonasson, interviewed by Lisa Howells

Agatha Christie for the ‘Knives Out’ Generation: Kelly Mullen, Ram Murali, Jeremy Vine & Rob Rinder

Silver Anniversary Stories: celebrate 25 books with Adele Parks in conversation with David Headley

Not-so Domestic Bliss: toxic families and friendships with Andrea Mara, Asia Mackay, Claire Douglas, Caz Frear & Heidi Perks 

‘C’ is for creating communities in Crime Fiction: Suk Pannu, Rev Richard Coles, Blake Mara & Tim Sullivan

Making your mark: the different routes to telling your thriller: Barnaby Martin, Jo Callaghan and Dominic Nolan & C. B. Everett

And so much more! With over 30 incredible events, the Fingerprint Awards, surprises throughout the weekend, and the chance to meet your favourite authors, this is one festival you don’t want to miss.

The full schedule can be found here and tickets can be found here.

Capital Crime Individual tickets on sale

INDIVIDUAL EVENT TICKETS ARE NOW AVAILABLE
& WE'RE DELIGHTED TO WELCOME SHARI LAPENA, CLARE MACKINSTOCH, BEN AARONOVITCH & PETER JAMES TO OUR LINEUP!

There's only one place to be from 31st August - 2nd September 2023 and that's the Leonardo Royal St Paul's Hotel, where we will be celebrating the best genre in town.

We believe that every reader and crime fiction fan should be able to celebrate and enjoy a weekend's worth of entertaining and engaging conversations from some of the world's finest creative minds! With only four weeks to go until we're opening our doors, we're swinging them wide open with our individual event tickets that will suit every budget.

Get ready to mingle with crime fictions biggest stars and latest chart toppers as we're honoured to welcome Richard Osman, Lisa Jewell, Joanne Harris, Kate Atkinson, "Happy Valley" creator Sally Wainwright, Dorothy Koomson, Chris Carter, Peter James, Ben Aaronovitch Liz Nugent, Imran Mahmood, Will Dean, Nicola Williams, Richard Armitage, Yomi Adegoke, Mark Billingham, M W Craven, Steve Cavanagh, Adele Parks and many more of your favourite authors to Capital Crime this year! 

For our full line-up and schedule head to our website!

Tickets can be brought here.

THE FINGERPRINT AWARD NOMINEES ARE...

 

Since our schedule announcement last week our festival tickets have been selling like hot cakes (or whatever the crime equivalent is)!

To keep the crime-celebration going we've announced our nominees for the 2023 Fingerprint Awards!

The Fingerprint Awards are the awards where you, the crime and thriller fan, get to choose the winner. Every year we will be featuring the best in the genre, as selected by our Advisory Board, from the year before but it's up to YOU to decide who wins in each category.​

Voting is free and open to all! 

Vote here

The winners will be revealed at our festival on Thursday 31st August live at Capital Crime 2023 and via our social channels.

To toast your winners in person book your ticket to Capital Crime 2023!

Book Your Tickets Here

ABOUT CAPITAL CRIME

There's only one place to be from 31st August - 2nd September 2023 and that's the Leonardo Royal St Paul's Hotel, where we will be celebrating the best genre in town.

Get ready to mingle with crime fictions biggest stars and latest chart toppers as we're honoured to welcome Richard Osman, Lisa Jewell, Joanne Harris, Kate Atkinson, "Happy Valley" creator Sally Wainwright, Dorothy Koomson, Chris Carter, Peter James, Liz Nugent, Imran Mahmood, Will Dean, Nicola Williams, Richard Armitage, Yomi Adegoke, Mark Billingham, M W Craven, Steve Cavanagh, Adele Parks and many more of your favourite authors to Capital Crime this year! 

For our full line-up and schedule head to our website

Tickets can be purchased via our website, along with full details about accommodation, discounted tickets (Frontline Workers/Librarian/Students/Local Residents) but if you have any further questions please do not hesitate to get in touch with the team at info@capitalcrime.org and they'll be happy to help.

Capital Crime Announces Exciting New Central London Venue, After Sell Out Festival in 2022

 

Capital Crime 2023 to be held at the Leonardo Royal Hotel in shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral from 31st August - 2nd September 2023 

Dorothy Koomson & Kate Mosse (Capital Crime Festival 2022

Led by Goldsboro Books’ co-founder and managing director, David Headley, celebrated crime and thriller festival, Capital Crime, has announced it will take place this autumn at the Leonardo Royal Hotel in St Paul’s, providing a fitting backdrop for this year’s stellar line-up. 

Authors confirmed so far include Kate Atkinson, Happy Valley creator Sally Wainwright, Richard Osman, Dorothy Koomson, Chris Carter, Peter James, Liz Nugent, Imran Mahmood, Kat Diamond, Joanne Harris, Nicola Williams, Richard Armitage, Yomi Adegoke, Adele Parks and Lisa Jewell, with the full line-up of over 140 authors and field specialists to be announced later in the year. Standard Weekend and Day Tickets for Capital Crime 2023 are on sale now at www.capitalcrime.org. 

Richard Osman Capital Crime Festival 2022

Headley and his team at Goldsboro Books have helped launch the careers of so many authors since it opened almost 25 years ago, by uniting incredible writing with their loyal, ever-growing community of passionate readers. Committed to connecting readers to the books they’ll love, the capital’s first crime writing festival is a brilliant extension of this vision with an outstanding programme of over 40 entertaining, accessible events that explore all corners of the genre, and the opportunity to meet your literary heroes. The previous festivals have seen a wide range of authors, from household names to exciting debuts paired with actors, broadcasters and experts across the field. The 2022 line-up included Rev. Richard Coles, Kate Mosse, Robert Harris, S.A. Cosby, Bella Mackie, Abir Mukherjee and Paula Hawkins. 

Alongside the festival, Capital Crime will continue to create a year-round home for crime and thriller readers and authors with their book club and awards, and nurture under-represented authors with their social outreach initiative which was established in 2019. In June 2023, the festival will take its first trip out of the city with “Capital Crime goes on Holiday”, which will bring together crime-writing legends including Peter James, Dorothy Koomson, and John Sutherland for a very special series of events at Brighton Friends Meeting House, with book signings run by Goldsboro’s recently opened, Brighton store. 

Capital Crime co-founder and Goldsboro Books managing director David Headley said: 

“I’m incredibly proud of everything we are achieving at Capital Crime, we’re unlike any other festival. We’re a year round home for crime and thriller readers and fans. Alongside our weekend festival we run our Fingerprint Awards, where winners are voted for by readers, our Social Outreach initiative, which encourages literacy and aims to demystify the publishing industry, and we’ll also be running an exciting satellite event in Brighton with Goldsboro Books. We were so honoured to be joined by so many wonderful authors at last year’s festival and I can’t wait to reveal everything we have in store for this year!” 

Capital Crime Festival Director, Lizzie Curle, said: 

“I am absolutely delighted that we’ll be welcoming authors and field specialists from across the globe to the UK’s capital city once again this year. Our new indoor venue in the shadow of St Paul’s cathedral, complete with rooftop bar and club, will be the perfect place to celebrate the best genre in the world with the authors, readers and fans who make Capital Crime possible.” 

Standard Weekend and Day Tickets for Capital Crime 2023 are on sale now at www.capitalcrime.org 

Bella Mackie, Ragnar Jonasson & Amanda Redman at Fingerprint Awards, Leonardo Hotel

Nicola Williams on The Road to "Until Proven Innocent"

This sounds like the start of an old Bob Hope / Bing Crosby film, but it's much more contemporary than that.

It's wonderful to bring back Lee Mitchell for a crime and legal thriller reading audience, because there isn't another character like her. A Black woman barrister who grew up working class, she has succeeded against all the odds in a profession which, even in 2023, can still be as unwelcoming in some quarters for someone with those three ‘ trikes' –race, gender and class – against her as it was in 1997 when ‘Without Prejudice' was first published.

Until Proven Innocent represents a number of things to me. 

It represents 23 years of thinking, dreaming, losing and then regaining hope, and then 12 to 18 months of writing. 

It represents / it was that dream deferred that lay dormant for a long time and it was brought to life by three things: first, meeting my agent Jonathan Ruppin; then the first Lockdown when writing a book seemed to be the only sane response in an unrecognisable world turned both inside out and upside down, with fear and death everywhere.

And then there was Bernardine.

I actually met Bernardine Evaristo just before the March 2020 Lockdown in a real-life 'sliding doors' moment: being invited to an event that I really didn't want to go to, unaware that she would be there. Amazingly, she remembered my first book and simply said, “You should have written more: I thought it was really good." Then after she won the Booker Prize, she championed my first book Without Prejudice and five other novels she felt should have received more attention when they were first published. As a result of that Penguin expressed interest in what I was then working on – and Until Proven Innocent was born.

Now the creative taps have been reopened I intend to write a lot more. Legal thrillers, yes: Lee Mitchell is here to stay as a unique voice in crime fiction. But other projects too. I'm fascinated by ethical questions – Without Prejudice was based on a question every criminal barrister, including myself, has been asked at least once: “How can you represent someone you know is guilty?” Until Proven Innocent considers the opposite: how do you represent a truly repellent individual who has been accused of an horrific offence that has received national attention when everyone, including their colleagues, thinks they have done it, but there is a tiny possibility they are innocent? Especially when the accused is a corrupt, bigoted, racist police Sargeant and the victim is the 15-year-old Black teenager, the son of a well known community leader, who is also the pastor of the church Verna Mitchell, Lee's mother, attends? This is Lee’s dilemma.

When I was writing this book I had no idea that the Baroness Casey Review into the standards and behaviour of the internal culture of the Metropolitan Police would also be published in the same month as my book. It is sadly timely, and shows the issues I have written about (and that I had personal experience of when I was a Commissioner at the then IPCC – now IOPC – from 2004-8) are still worryingly present today in real life.

But to end on a positive and optimistic note, I hope the return of Lee Mitchell will shown to any writer who has lost heart, who feels their chance to be published has gone forever, that it truly is never too late. And here's to not having to wait as long as 25 years!

Until Proven Innocent by Nicola Williams (Penguin Random House) Out Now

The gripping new courtroom thriller following barrister Lee Mitchell in her most controversial case yet. Lee Mitchell is a young barrister from a working-class Caribbean background: in the cut-throat environment of the courtroom, everything is stacked against her. On her doorstep in South London the 15-year-old son of the pastor at the local Black church is shot, and the local community is shattered. All evidence is pointing to infamously corrupt, racist police officer Sergeant Jack Lambert as the irredeemable suspect. His own boss - rebel-turned-copper Danny Wallace - is certain he is guilty. Against her will, Lee is strong-armed into defending him. With cries of 'Black Lives Matter!' echoing in the streets, Lee is at the centre of the turmoil as lies, anger, and mistrust spiral out of control. With the line between her personal and professional life becoming increasingly blurred, Lee keeps asking herself the same question: How can she defend the indefensible?