ITW’s Audio Anthology Shape-Shifts into a Narrative Crime Story
Using a Literary Device as a Weapon to Commit a Crime
The International Thriller Writers has been putting out crime fiction anthologies for most of its twenty years of existence and in that time shifted from print to audio. It now has four audio anthologies, but the latest is different. Not only is it an anthology of fourteen bestselling crime fiction short stories, it’s also a narrative of a crime––or crimes.
Each author was told to write a short story that included a crime and the head of the book club, Dr. Margaret Richter, a “psycho psychiatrist,” as bestselling author Joseph Finder describes her. She lives in a mansion on a hill in the small town of Wellfleet on Cape Cod.
Finder headed up the project and recruited all of the authors.
Each chapter of the audio book is told from a different character’s point of view as a detective works to figure out the entire narrative. This was not one of those books where a writer hands off a chapter to another to continue the same story.
No. This is different.
“None of us had any idea what the others were writing,” says Canadian bestselling author Linwood Barclay, one of the chapter authors.
Tying the chapters together was left to Kim Howe, ITW’s executive director, who wrote connecting chapters, including a beginning, middle and end, to make it all seamless.
Besides Howe and Barclay, the participating authors are Karin Slaughter, Lee Child, B.A. Paris, Caroline Kepnes, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Sarah Pekkanen, Naomi Hirahara, Robert Dugoni, Alison Gaylin, Heather Gudenkauf, Shari Lapena, Clare Mackintosh, and Stacy Willingham.
All of them, Finder says, took the time to create something special. “There isn’t a klunker in the entire book. They’re really good stories.”
In all, it took eighteen months to collect the completed manuscripts, each author working around their individual publishing deadlines and donating their time to the nonprofit association while creating an audio story anywhere from forty-minutes to an hour long.
It came together better than anyone could have imagined. The Twisted Women’s Book Club debuted on Audible April 10, 2025, the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby, and––believe it or not––sold much better than F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s novel initially did. The Twisted Women’s Book Club was number one on Audible for four weeks and stayed in the list of top ten Audible Original or exclusive title books for months after. The Great Gatsby, considered today to be the great American novel, struggled to sell its first printing of 5,000 copies.
Finder is so pleased with the success of The Twisted Women’s Book Club, he’s already planning ITW’s next audio book and how he can again shapeshift into something unique. He plans to start lining up bestselling authors in the coming months and hopes to publish a new audio book in 2027.
The question of course is will it continue to be twisted? Will it again include a book club in a strange mansion on a hill? Or instead of the all the usual weapons, will a new literary device be used in commission of a crime?
Joseph Finder’s not telling.
Find The Twisted Women’s Book Club on Audible.
I’m Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer.
Literary Agent Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management represents my work and is currently shopping my next crime novel and a non-fiction book about many of the authors who appear in Idol Talk.
Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen