Mystery and Thriller Authors Editing and Proofreading Services

A reader who guesses the killer on page ninety is not disappointed. A reader who reaches the end and realises they could never have guessed is furious, and they are right to be — the contract of the genre is that the answer was available and they missed it. Getting that balance wrong in either direction is the commonest reason a competent crime novel gets a lukewarm response nobody can quite explain.

We work on what crime and thriller writers produce — full manuscripts and partials, opening chapters and submission packages, synopses that reveal the ending because agents need them to, series outlines and continuity notes across books, the clue and revelation structure of a plot, interrogation and procedural scenes, timelines and alibi structures, twists and their setup, and the material that goes out to agents and editors. Our editors work on what the reader was given and when.

Fair play is a structural property of the manuscript, and it is almost impossible to assess from inside the book because you know the answer. We work through these so every element of the solution appears before the reveal, in the text rather than in your notes, since a clue you know is on page sixty is worth checking because it is sometimes not; so each clue is placed where the reader will see it and not weigh it, which means immediately before something more interesting or in the mouth of somebody unimportant, because concealment by prominence is the technique and burying it in a dull paragraph is not the same thing; so the red herrings are honest, meaning each one is fully explained by the end and none of them required a character to behave in a way they otherwise would not; so the detective is never told something the reader is not; so the timeline is checked against itself independently, given that alibi structures fail in ways that are invisible during composition and glaring to a reader with a pencil; and so the reveal shows the reader where they already had each piece. Manuscripts checked this way earn the response every crime writer wants, which is a reader saying it was all there.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unpublished manuscripts, plot outlines and endings. We are editors rather than agents, publishers or police procedure advisers, and we offer no view on your plot or your book's prospects. What we can do is verify that the reader was given a chance.