Along with a bunch of other names I will be at the Mysterious Bookshop, New York, on Friday July 10 around 5.30, signing and talking. A bunch of authors are in town for Thrillerfest so we’re taking time out to head off over to Tribeca. The current list looks like this… Kathryn Fox, Glenn Cooper, Hallie Ephron, Lisa Black, Jamie Freveletti, Timothy Hallinan, Jonathan Hayes, Matt Hilton, Steve Martini, James Rollins, Andrew Gross, William Dietrich, Alafair Burke, Peter de Jonge, Sean Chercover, Stanley Trollip (aka Michael Stanley) and Jennifer MacMahon.

Back briefly from Rome after an eventful trip for the new Nic Costa in Italian, here’s a quick look at something that gets mangled and misrepresented all around the world: Roman food. For some reason people always want to take me to ‘Italian’ restaurants wherever I am in the world. Some are good. Some not so. Few are remotely authentic.

Why? Simple. Real Roman food isn’t the fancy stuff that’s sold as such elsewhere. The core of traditional Roman food is simplicity – very good ingredients, served with a minimum of fuss and extras. Here is a very good example: the classic lamb dish abbacchio scottadito accompanied by a very common contorno, stir fried chicory.

Scottadito literally means ‘burns your fingers’. The idea is that the meat is so good you’ll want to eat it with your fingers before it cools down. Usually you do too. All you have here is excellent Roman lamb cutlet seasoned and griller. Chicory, cicoria, is a common green vegetable stir fried with oil and seasonings – usually a little peperoncino pepper. The two make a fantastic combination and couldn’t be less complicated. I’ve never seen them done properly outside Rome.

Here are the two together.

This was lunch yesterday as I killed time waiting for the plane. I was in one of my favourite restaurants, Al Pompiere in the ghetto. The food is reliable, if unspectacular, and the ambience quiet and unhurried — a lovely dining room. A touch overpriced these days which may explain the empty tables at lunchtime, but a very pleasant break from the hurly burly of Rome nevertheless.

I’ll be in Rome next week for the launch of Il Rituale Sacro (The Sacred Cut), the third Nic Costa book in Italian from my Roman publisher, Fanucci. There’ll be one public event — a signing in Piazza del Popolo at 7pm on Thursday July 2 as part of the book fair Roma si libra.

Bouchercon is one of those events that puzzles normal people. Four days of intensive and often exhausting panels, signings and general mischief, in a different city in America every year. This year it’s in Indianapolis, a place I’ve never visited, though since I’ve just finished Lee Child’s excellent One Shot I think I have a feel for the industrial atmosphere to expect.

It’s not practical to tell you what Bouchercon is about or like really. You just have to go and look at the web site and decide for yourself. Unmissable, if you have the opportunity. I’ll be there this year, en route to Vancouver, of which more later.

Harrogate has become Europe’s top crime festival in its brief existence, a fantastic get together that attracts a wide range of authors from all over the world. This year’s no exception. You can check out the line-up here. I’ll be there on Thursday night and Friday, appearing for one thing only, the revelation of the winner of the coveted Theakstons prize.

It’s an honour to be on the shortlist alongside such luminaries. Don’t forget, you’re all entitled to vote too, wherever you happen to be in the world. Just cast your vote online here.

A declaration of interest: for the last four years I’ve had the honour of being a board member of International Thrillerwriters, watching this amazing organisation grow from a handful of diehard authors into one of the most dynamic writers’ groups in the world. So you’d expect me to say the annual convention in New York is great, wouldn’t you?

Well, it is. Just look at the line-up here. Is there another writing festival in the world that can match it for such a wide range of authors, from household names to thriving newcomers? Thrillerfest is a chance for readers to meet more of their favourite writers under the same roof than they’ll encounter anywhere else on the planet. And for authors and would-be writers it’s a chance to chat, mingle and learn from one another. All in the heart of the great, bustling city of New York. Love it…

I’ll be talking on organising research and a writing project as part of the busy CraftFest day on the Wednesday. And you’ll find me on panels with some of my favourite writers too, among them Deon Meyer, Eric von Lustbader, MJ Rose, Joseph Finder, Brad Meltzer and David Liss. It’s a hell of a lineup. Hope to see you there.

The sixteenth annual Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference will take place at the famed Book Passage store in Corte Madera, just outside San Francisco, from July 16 to July 19 this year. This four-day get-together has become something of a tradition in the US and has proved a breeding ground for a number of would-be authors who’ve gone on to be published successfully around the world.

You’ll find a few of them there this year, writers like Sheldon Siegel, Cara Black, Tony Broadbent and Tim Maleeny, along with their fellow authors, among them Katherine Neville, Martin Cruz Smith and James Rollins, and publishing professionals. If you’re serious about getting published it’s hard to find a better place to learn the ropes.

I’m happy to be there too, on my ‘way back’ from Thrillerfest. I’ll be doing a pre-conference class about the practicalities of organising the research, structure and writing of a book, and talking about craft too. You can find the schedule here and details of my pre-conference talk here.

I should also say that Book Passage is enormous fun too. Four creative, thought-filled days you won’t find anywhere else.

I’m flattered to tell you that the sixth Nic Costa novel, The Garden of Evil, has been shortlisted for the UK’s most prestigious crime award, the Theakston prize for crime novel of the year. It’s in classy company too as you can see from the announcement page here.

The Theakston is pretty much unique as far as I know in that it is awarded on the basis of online votes by the public. So if you’d like to cast a vote for the author of your choice just do so on the page. Of course I’d love it if that was for me, but with such a great selection of writers to choose from I fully understand if you want to pick someone else.

The winner will be announced at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival on Thursday July 23 – and I will be there for the event.

Unavailable in the United Kingdom for several years, David Hewson’s highly-praised first Italian novel will soon be back in print in a  revised edition, with a new title, The Cemetery of Secrets.

First published in 2000 as Lucifer’s Shadow, the book tells the twin related stories of two sets of young people, in contemporary Venice and the same city in the early eighteenth century. With real historical figures such as Vivaldi and Canaletto flitting through the book is a twisting tale of music, passion and murder.

The book gained the ‘highest possible recommendation’ from Bookreporter.com and was hailed as ‘one of the best of 2004? by Deadly Pleasures. The Sunday Times described it as ‘richly enjoyable, sophisticated and beguiling entertainment’ while The Times declared, ‘Venice is painted beautifully, both then and now, and this would be a splendid book to read after you have taken the evening air in the Piazza San Marco, or when gliding down the Grand Canal.’

The book will be available in the UK on October 3 and serves as a companion piece to the fourth Nic Costa novel, The Lizard’s Bite, which features some of the same Venetian characters.

ITW’s Thriller 2 anthology is set for release in the UK on September 10, in one of those big C format paperbacks priced at £10.99. There’ll be a mass market paperback next summer. The cover has been specially designed for the UK market as you can see here. I’m in there with a story set in London called The Circle. My fellow co-conspirators include Jeffery Deaver, Ridley Pearson, Javier Sierra and Sean Chercover among others, under the overall editorship of Clive Cussler who introduces each story.

The first Thriller anthology sold an astonishing 400,000 copies, 60,000 of them in the UK. Hope we can match that – the money all goes to keeping the excellent International Thrillerwriters organisation afloat. Simon Wood and I are the only Brits in this anthology. So a question to my fellow thriller writers elsewhere in the world. When are we all going to band together to do our own thriller anthology under the ITW banner instead of leaving it to those lovely chaps and chapesses across the pond?

It’s free for authors to join ITW now, it’s a great cause to support, and these things are enormous fun and good for business too.

Any takers?

You’ll be able to get more info on the book from the publishers, Mira UK, and buy it online there, as well as in all the usual retail outlets too.