Edwin Buckhalter (Chair)
Edwin Buckhalter is the son of a London bookseller, growing up in the book trade, and founding Severn House Publishers in 1974. Having sold the company in 2017 and ostensibly retired, he still reads widely and avidly, especially his first love of crime fiction, whilst devoting much time as a Trustee of an orchestra and not enough time to watching cricket.

Teddy Hayes
Teddy moved to London in 1996 from Ohio, and started writing a detective series of novels and producing his own plays as well as feature films. He started publishing his novels about a black CIA- hitman turned private detective in Harlem called Devil Barnett. The first novel, Blood Red Blues was published in 1997. In 2019 Teddy was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Equal Arts Foundation in the UK.

Sam Blake
Is an international bestseller and has been writing fiction since her husband set sail across the Atlantic for eight weeks and she had an idea for a book. Her debut Little Bones (Bonnier 2016) was a runaway bestseller, shortlisted for Irish Crime Novel of the Year. After a police procedural trilogy, she now writes bestselling psychological thrillers.

Find her on social @samblakebooks

Karen Robinson
Karen Robinson was a senior editor at The Sunday Times. She devised the paper’s  Crime Club newsletter and ran it for five years. She now reads crime fiction purely for fun.