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Winning Stories 2009

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Clio Gray - Founder

Clio Gray : Founder of HISSAC

Born in Yorkshire and brought up in Devon, Clio Gray has been living in the Highlands of Scotland for the past fifteen years, where she works in her local library of Tain and spends the rest of her time writing books.

Clio has won many prizes for her short stories, most notably the Scotsman/Orange 2006 Award, and the Harry Bowling Prize in 2004. The latter led directly to the publication of her series of historical crime novels, following the investigations of Missing-Persons Finder and obsessive list-maker, Whilbert Stroop.
Guardians of the Key is the first of the series, published by Headline (hardback Aug.2006, paperback editions Dec.2006 & Aug.2007) Guardians moves between the medieval town of Lucca in Tuscany, and 1805 London, and includes a spectacular suicide, several gruesome murders, a nasty bout of arson, and the chase to find the missing, but politically expedient, relics of Lucca as Napoleon hammers on the city’s ancient walls.

The Roaring of the Labyrinth (Headline : hardback Aug.2007, paperback 2008) features a fiendish plot winding from the shores of the Black Sea and the founding of the City of Odessa, to the Valley of Eden in the Pennine Hills. Stroop and his adopted family are engaged to find missing bell-founder Uwe Dvoshka. They arrive at Astonishment Hall with its eclectic collections of exotica and weird invention, and trail the missing man through a series of grisly murders and a cold landscape of moors and mists.

The Envoy of the Black Pine (Headline; published August 2008, paperback January 2009) finds Stroop and co on the trail of an entire missing library, taking them from the flooded valleys of Upper and Little Slaughter, to the Printworks of Painswick, and the sea-bound shores of Saareema, a strange group of islands off the Estonian coast. Inevitably murder occurs, plus a little piracy and animal mutilation, and that’s all in the first 50 pages…
The Brotherhood of Five' (Headline; published August 2009, paperback March 2010) The Isle of Thanet, 1808. One man is pushed into a kiln of molten metal beneath the looming shadow of the Shot Tower, and another is dug up from the sandy bay beyond. Who they were, and why they died so strangely, is no ordinary mystery, even for Missing Persons Finder Whilbert Stroop. On arrival in this marshy corner of Kent, on the very edge of England, Stroop tries to piece together the puzzle of these deaths, and the significance of the objects each man died trying to protect. It is a conspiracy that began ten years before on the battlefields of Europe, and one that will claim more lives before it is done.

For a quicker read, try her collection of gruesome and darkly humorous short stories, Types of Everlasting Rest, which is published by Two Ravens Press, July 2007

Clio can be contacted via this website’s e-mail address : info@hissac.co.uk