Cara Hunter and Victoria Selman chaired Triona Adams

Sunday Times bestselling authors Victoria Selman and Cara Hunter explore our apparently unquenchable thirst for true crime and ask why the genre is often stranger than fiction.

Why are we so fascinated by true crime? A recent YouGov poll found that a third of Americans consume true crime at least once a week. Why are more and more writers now using real crimes as inspiration for their novels?
Hunter is the author of a crime series featuring DI Adam Fawley and his Oxford-based police team. No Way Out was selected by the Sunday Times as one of the 100 best crime novels since 1945. Hunter’s novels have sold over a million copies worldwide. Her recent first standalone, Murder in the Family, was a Sunday Times bestseller and TikTok sensation.

Selman is author of five critically acclaimed thrillers including her latest novel All The Little Liars, described by Ian Rankin as “Heathers meets Charles Manson in a tale of good girls gone bad”. Selman has been nominated for both the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award and the Fingerprint Thriller of the Year Award and shortlisted for two Crime Writers’ Association daggers.

Discussions are chaired by the director of the festival’s crime programme Triona Adams.

Part of the festival’s crime fiction programme.