The Usual Santas: A Collection of Soho Crime Christmas Capers Audiobook

About the Authors

Martin Limón retired from military service after twenty years in the US Army, including ten years in Korea. He is the author of the Sergeants Sueño and Bascom series, which includes Jade Lady Burning, Slicky Boys, Buddha’s Money, The Door to Bitterness, The Wandering Ghost, GI Bones, Mr. Kill, and The Joy Brigade. He lives near Seattle.

Mick Herron, British novelist and short story writer, is the author of the Slough House espionage series, four Oxford mysteries, and three standalone novels. His work has won the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel, the Steel Dagger for Best Thriller, the Theakston’s Novel of the Year Award, the Palle Rosenkrantz Prize, the Ellery Queen Readers Award, and the USC Libraries Scripter Award. His works have been nominated for the Macavity, Barry, and Shamus Awards. He was born in Newcastle and studied English at Oxford.

James R. Benn is the author of the Billy Boyle World War II mysteries. The debut, Billy Boyle, was named one of the top five mysteries of 2006 by Book Sense and was a Dilys Award nominee. Subsequent books have received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Library Journal and have been listed as the BookPage Mystery of the Month. Two have been tagged as Killer Books by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. A librarian for many years, Benn lives in Hadlyme, Connecticut, with his wife, Deborah Mandel.

Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis are the Danish duo behind the Nina Borg series. Friis is a journalist by training, while Kaaberbøl has been a professional writer since the age of fifteen, with more than two million books sold worldwide. Their first collaboration, The Boy in the Suitcase, was a New York Times and USA Today bestseller and has been translated into twenty-seven languages.

Tod Goldberg is the author of the crime-tinged novels Living Dead Girl, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Fake Liar Cheat, and the popular Burn Notice series. His essay “When They Let Them Bleed” was selected by Cheryl Strayed for inclusion in Best American Essays 2013. He is also the author of the story collections Simplify a 2006 finalist for the SCIBA Award for Fiction and winner of the Other Voices Short Story Collection Prize, and Other Resort Cities. His short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, twice receiving special mention for the Pushcart Prize as well as being named a distinguished story of the year in The Best American Mystery Stories 2009. His essays, journalism, and criticism appear regularly in many publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Las Vegas CityLife, and have been featured in E!, Salon, Jewcy, and the Wall Street Journal, among many others.

Stuart Neville is the author of Ratlines and the Belfast series—The Ghosts of Belfast, Collusion, Stolen Souls, and The Final Silence. The Ghosts of Belfast won the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Spinetingler Award for best first novel and was a finalist for the Macavity, Barry, and Anthony Awards. Stuart has taught at Trinity College in Dublin and appeared on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. He lives in Belfast.

Ed Lin is a journalist by training and the author of the Taipei Night Market series: Ghost Month, Incensed, and 99 Ways to Die; his literary debut, Waylaid; and the Robert Chow crime series set in 1970s Manhattan Chinatown. He is of Taiwanese and Chinese descent and is the first author to win three Asian American Literary Awards.

Henry Chang was born and raised in New York’s Chinatown, where he still lives. He is a graduate of Pratt Institute and the City College of New York. He is the author of Chinatown Beat and Year of the Dog, part of the Detective Jack Yu series.

Gary Corby has long been fascinated by ancient history, finding it more exciting and bizarre than any modern thriller. He’s combined the ancient world with his love of whodunits, to create an historical mystery series set in classical Greece. Corbylives in Sydney, Australia, with his wife and two daughters. He blogs at A Dead Man Fell from the Sky, on all things ancient, Athenian, and mysterious.

Helene Tursten is a Swedish author who was a nurse and a dentist before she turned to writing. She is the author of the Irene Huss series, the Embla Nystrom series; and the Elderly Lady series of connected short stories. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages and made into a television series.

Katherine Kellgren (1969–2018), narrator and actress, appeared onstage in London, New York, and Frankfurt, including in the role of Laura in a regional production of The Glass Menagerie and appearances on Comedy Central. In recognition of her mastery of audiobook narration, she received many honors, including the prestigious Audie Awards, with four for best female narrator; the Odyssey Award; Publishers Weekly Listen Up Award; dozens of AudioFile magazine Earphones Awards; an AudioFile Golden Voice Award; Booklist Voice of Choice award; and acclaim from press and listener reviews.

Colin Cotterill has won the Dilys Award and a Crime Writers of America Dagger and has been a finalist for several other awards. Born in London, he has worked as teacher in Israel, Australia, the United States, and Japan before he started training teachers in Thailand. He lives with his wife in a small fishing village on the Gulf of Siam in Southern Thailand.

Stephanie Barron is a graduate of Princeton and Stanford, where she studied history. A former intelligence analyst for the CIA, Stephanie—who also writes under the name Francine Mathews—drew on her experience in the field of espionage for such novels as The Alibi Club, which Publishers Weekly named as one of the fifteen best novels of 2006, and for her critically acclaimed Jane Austen Mystery series, in which the intrepid and witty author of Pride and Prejudice details her secret detective career in Regency England. Barron lives and works in Denver.

Peter Lovesey, the author of more than thirty highly praised mystery novels, has won the British Crime Writers’ Association Silver and Gold Dagger awards as well as the Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement and the Strand Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. In the United States, he has received Edgar and Dilys nominations, an Anthony Award and a Macavity Award, and the Ellery Queen Readers Award, among others. In 2018, he was named a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master.

Timothy Hallinan is the Edgar and Macavity Award–nominated author of over a dozen widely praised books, including the Poke Rafferty Bangkok thrillers and the Junior Bender series. In 2010 he conceived and edited an e-book of original short stories by twenty mystery writers, Shaken: Stories for Japan, with 100 percent of the proceeds going to Japanese disaster relief.

Cara Black is the author of the popular Aimée Leduc mystery series. She is a San Francisco Library Laureate and a member of the Paris Sociéte Historique in the Marais. Her book Murder in the Sentier was nominated for an Anthony Award for Best Novel, and Murder in the Latin Quarter was a finalist for the Best Novel Award from the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association.

Scott Brick, an acclaimed voice artist, screenwriter, and actor, has performed on film, television, and radio. He attended UCLA and spent ten years in a traveling Shakespeare company. Passionate about the spoken word, he has narrated a wide variety of audiobooks. winning won more than fifty AudioFile Earphones Awards and several of the prestigious Audie Awards. He was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine and the Voice of Choice for 2016 by Booklist magazine.

About the Narrators

Elizabeth Sastre has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Bed Rest by Sarah Bilston, Brick Lane by Monica Ali, and The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde, which was an AudioFile Best Audiobook of the Year in 2004.

Carine Montbertrand is an award-winning narrator of dozens of audiobooks. When she first started working in the 1990s, she sounded younger than her years and specialized in children’s and young adult titles. Since then she has expanded to fiction for adults and has recorded everything from murder mysteries to fantasy and inspirational titles. She is adept with dialects and accents, voicing characters from countries around the world. She also specializes in English language titles with a French flavor, as she is half French. With her audiobooks, she has the opportunity to tell wonderful stories while finding voices for men, women, children, and sometimes ghosts and extraterrestrials.

Jonathan Yen is a commercial voice-over artist and Earphones Award–winning audiobook narrator. He was inspired by the Golden Age of Radio, and while the gold was gone by the time he got there, he has carried that inspiration through to commercial work, voice acting, and stage productions. From vintage Howard Fast science fiction to naturalist Paul Rosolie’s true adventures in the Amazon, he loves to tell a good story.

John Keating is an actor, voice talent, and AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator. His numerous acting credits include Roundabout Theatre’s production of Juno and the Paycock and La Mama ETC’s production of Cat and the Moon, as well as various parts with the Irish Repertory Theater and the Irish Arts Center. He can also be seen in the HBO miniseries John Adams, starring Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney.

Barbara Caruso, winner of numerous Earphones Awards for narration, is an accomplished actress. A graduate of London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, she was a featured player in the Royal Shakespeare Company. She has played starring roles on Broadway and in theaters across the country. She won the Alexander Scourby Reader of the Year Award for her performances of young adult fiction and has more than one hundred audiobook narrations to her credit.

Ali Ahn is a film, television, and voice actor. Her acting credits include appearances on Law & Order, Ugly Betty, White Collar, and Zero Hour. She has also narrated numerous audio books, such as Honolulu by Alan Brennert, This Lullaby by Sarah Dessen, Persian Pickle Club by Sandra Dallas, and Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart.

Brian Hutchison is an Earphones Award–winning audiobook narrator and a professional theater actor who has appeared in numerous Broadway, off Broadway, and regional plays.

Luis Moreno, a voice actor, has narrated several audiobooks throughout his career.

Tavia Gilbert is an acclaimed narrator of more than four hundred full-cast and multivoice audiobooks for virtually every publisher in the industry. Named the 2018 Voice of Choice by Booklist magazine, she is also winner of the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. She has earned numerous Earphones Awards, a Voice Arts Award, and a Listen-Up Award. Audible.com has named her a Genre-Defining Narrator: Master of Memoir. In addition to voice acting, she is an accomplished producer, singer, and theater actor. She is also a producer, singer, photographer, and a writer, as well as the cofounder of a feminist publishing company, Animal Mineral.