IN MEMORIAM: SUSANNA YAGER:

Susanna Yager was the crime fiction critic of the Sunday Telegraph for more than a decade, and during this time I used to meet her at various publishers' lunches and launches, and it was always a pleasure. Not only was she the most enthusiastic and perceptive critic, able to condense for her audience the essence of the kind of books she liked and transform that into a signpost into the kind of books they would like, but she was also, with her background as a director of publishing houses and an early boss at Channel 4 TV, a wonderful font of gossip and insight which I found tantalizing. She died December 15th, but it took until New Year's Eve for me to find out. She had been ill for some time, though you'd never have guessed it when you saw her; I recall her at a lunch for Graham Hurley shrugging off questions about her health with casual grace. I'll miss her, and so will British crime fiction readers, and crime writers everywhere.