I really like the idea of collaborative writing – that is where two or more authors work together to produce a creative work. I have dabbled in collaboration with poetry, but find the idea of collaborating on long form fiction enticing. I imagine it could be very motivating and playful, as well as a challenging learning experience.

One of my favourite crime authors, Candice Fox, began collaborating with American author James Patterson in 2015 and the two have written seven novels together, all of which have been New York Times best sellers.

The Murder Inn is one of Fox and Pattersons collaborations. The Murder Inn, published in 2024, is a sequel to the 2019 collaboration, The Inn, featuring ex cop Bill Robinson. The story also reads as a stand alone. 

Ex cop Bill Robinson runs an Inn with his partner Susan (ex FBI) in Massachusetts. The Inn houses a ragtag collection of tenants. Bill is trying to help Nick, a veteran and guest at the Inn who suffers from PTSD episodes believing someone is trying to kill him.  

The Inn by the Sea was a simple construction: its weather-board exterior, recently painted sunflower-yellow, did little to shut out the freezing Gloucester winters, and its mismatched steel and wood bones rambling with poorly thought-out extensions and adjustments, creaked as the people inside it moved. But it was those people and their stories that give the house its heartbeat.

When Shauna, the widow of Bill’s former colleague (a crooked cop) is assaulted by some thugs who work for a notorious drug lord called Norman Driver who has moved into town, she fights back. The incident uncovers some of her husbands deeply buried secrets. Bill also tries to help Shauna and finds himself in the firing line as well.

Driver had spent most of his twenties feeling the cold hand of Lady Disaster on his shoulder whenever an officer stepped into a diner he was sitting in, or when a police squad car stopped beside him at a traffic light. Pushing sixty now, he simply smiled and nodded.

The personal dramas, dark secrets, betrayals, murders, and violence seeping out of The Murder Inn set a cracking pace and the multiple points of view and plot lines converge to tell a compelling story for thriller lovers.