Celebrity memoir ghostwriter and crime novelist Michael Robotham has beaten books by JK Rowling and Stephen King to win the Crime Writers’ Association’s Dagger awards.
The Australian author won the won award for his 10th novel, Life Or Death, which is published by Little, Brown.
Life Or Death is about a prisoner named Audie Palmer, who has spent ten years in a Texas prison after pleading guilty to a robbery in which four people died and seven million dollars went missing. During that time he has suffered repeated beatings, stabbings and threats by inmates and guards, all desperate to answer the same question: where's the money?
On the day before Audie is due to be released, he suddenly vanishes. Now everybody is searching for him - the police, FBI, gangsters and other powerful figures - but Audie isn't running to save his own life. Instead, he's trying to save someone else's.
The judges deemed the novel to be "a compelling and fascinating book. When you start reading Life Or Death, you’ll want to stay curled up in an armchair with one of the best thrillers you’ll read this year.”
Stephen King's Mr Mercedes was also on the shortlist and JK Rowling's The Silkworm was also in the running, written under her pen name Robert Galbraith. Rowling was the first to congratulate Rowbotham, tweeting her “massive congratulations to my Little, Brown stablemate”.
Robotham, who is from Sydney, has also ghost-written celebrity autobiographies for Geri Halliwell, Lulu and Rolf Harris. The author removed the Harris biography from his bookshelves after Harris’ conviction for sex offences. At the time he said that he felt “betrayed.”
