When Mike Craven won the Theakston Old Peculier crime novel of the year award at the 2023 festival in Harrogate last week, there was one person he made sure to give special thanks – without whom, he might have found himself involved in a real-life crime as well as fictional.
That person was the author and scientist Brian Price, whom the 55-year-old, who writes as MW Craven, had employed to read his manuscript and check for scientific inaccuracies. The winning book – The Botanist – is the fifth in Craven’s Washington Poe series of police procedurals set in Cumbria, and features a poisoner who targets celebrities with cryptic poems and pressed flowers. Price had pointed out that in one of the killer’s poems Craven had included the exact recipe for ricin – a biological warfare agent that is classified as a weapon of mass destruction.
