Credit: Rosalind Hobley
WILL DEAN
Agent: Kate Burke
Assistant: Sian Ellis-Martin
Biography: Will Dean grew up in the East Midlands, living in nine different villages before the age of eighteen. After studying law at the LSE, and working many varied jobs in London, he settled in rural Sweden with his wife. He built a wooden house in a boggy forest clearing and it's from this base that he compulsively reads and writes.
DARK PINES, the first in the Tuva Moodyson series, was published to huge critical acclaim in 2018, was shortlisted for Not the Booker prize, selected for Zoe Ball’s TV Book Club and named as a Daily Telegraph Book of the Year. RED SNOW and BLACK RIVER were both longlisted for Crime Novel of the Year at the Theakston Old Peculier Awards in 2020 and 2021 respectively, and RED SNOW was also shortlisted for the Independent Voice Award at the Capital Crime Amazon Readers Awards 2020.
Will’s first standalone novel, THE LAST THING TO BURN, was a word-of-mouth sensation reviewed positively by readers and media alike. It was shortlisted for Thriller Book of the Year at the Fingerprint Awards 2022, Crime Novel of the Year at the Theakston Old Peculier Awards 2022 and the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award 2022, and was longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award 2022.
ADRIFT will be published in paperback in February 2026 by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK and Emily Bestler Books in the US.
Praise for Will Dean
'Readers will be saying 'just one more page' all the way from the gripping beginning to the heart-stopping end’— C.L. Taylor
'MISERY meets ROOM... a triumph' — Marian Keyes
'A complex plot, suffused with the nightmarish quality of Twin Peaks, and a tough-minded, resourceful protagonist add up to a stand-out read.' — The Guardian
‘Dean masterfully ramps up the tension and claustrophobia throughout the story’s sinister series of events before delivering an unexpected and satisfying finale. Tuva is a wonderful creation and Dean’s series is not to be missed.’ — Daily Express
Visit Will’s website
Follow Will on Twitter
Visit Will’s YouTube channel
ADRIFT
Thriller, Hodder, 400 pages, February 2026
Peggy Jenkins and her teenage son, Samson, live on a remote stretch of canal in the Midlands. She is a writer and he is a schoolboy. Together, they battle against the hardness and manipulation of the man they live with. To the outside world he is a husband and father. To them, he is a captor.
Their lives are tightly controlled; if any perceived threat appears, their mooring is moved further down the canal, further away from civilisation. Until the day when the power suddenly shifts, and nothing can be the same again.
ONE AT A TIME
Thriller, Hodder, June 2024, 320 pages
On a boat heading out into the North Sea, Ellen Brooke steels herself to spend almost a month locked inside a hyperbaric chamber with five other divers. They are all being paid handsomely for this work - to be lowered each day inside a diving bell to the sea bed, taking it in turns to dive down and repair oil pipes that lie in the dark waters. It is a close knit team and it has to be: any error or loss of trust could be catastrophic.
All is going to plan until one of the divers is found unresponsive in his bunk. He hadn't left the chamber. It will take four more days of decompression, locked away together, before the hatch can be opened. Four more days of bare steel, intrusive thoughts, and the constant struggle not to give way to panic. Mind games, exhaustion, suspicion, and, most of all, pressure. And if someone does unlock the door, everyone dies...
AND THEN THERE WERE NONE meets THE LAST BREATH in this tense and suspenseful locked-room thriller.
ICE TOWN
Crime, 400 pages, Hodder, November 2024
'Deaf teenager goes missing in Esseberg. Mountain rescue are launching a search party but conditions hinder their efforts. The tunnel is being kept open all night as an exception.'
When journalist Tuva Moodyson reads this news alert she knows she must join the search. If this teenager is found, she will be able to communicate with him in a way no one else can.
Esseberg lies on the other side of a mountain tunnel: there is only one way in and one way out. When the tunnel closes at night, the residents are left to fend for themselves. And as more people go missing, it becomes clear that there is a killer among them ...
THE LAST PASSENGER
Thriller, Hodder, 496 pages, May 2023
When Cas steps onboard the exclusive cruise liner RMS Atlantica, sailing from Southampton to New York, it’s the start of a holiday of a lifetime with her new love, Pete. On their first night they explore the ship, eat, dance, make friends, but, when Cas wakes the next morning, Pete isn’t in their cabin. She can’t find him on the balcony or in their bathroom so she walks out into the corridor. All the cabin doors are open. And she soon realises that the ship is completely empty. No passengers or crew. The Atlantica is steaming into the mid-Atlantic and Cas is the only person on board. But that’s just the start of her problems…