Jake Arnott is an award-winning novelist and dramatist whose bestselling debut The Long Firm was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was adapted as a BAFTA award-winning BBC TV drama series starring Mark Strong and Sir Derek Jacobi. His second novel, He Kills Coppers was made into a critically acclaimed ITV1 series, starring Rafe Spall and Kelly Reilly. Along with his third book, truecrime, this trilogy was awarded the Crime Writers Association Dagger in the Library. His subsequent novels include Johnny Come Home, The Devil’s Paintbrush, The House of Rumour and The Fatal Tree.
His new novel, Blood Rival, is published 16 October 2025 by Datura Books. To pre-order go to:
Datura Blood Rival landing-page
For an exclusive extract on the Literary Hub website CrimeReads go to:
BLOOD RIVAL
‘It happened at a place where three roads meet. Junction 1A of the M25, heading east towards Gravesend. There’s a killer on the road.’
A shocking act of road rage sparks off a brutal gang war, drawing two lovers into a fatal dance of forbidden desire in a deadly struggle for power and loot. Blood Rival is a fast-paced psychological thriller, a reworking of an ancient story with a dark secret at its heart that could destroy its protagonists. Greek tragedy meets neo-noir in a compulsive tale of ambition, betrayal and doomed love.
What they are saying about Blood Rival.
‘Familiarity with the myth in no way vitiates the impending sense of doom or pre-empts the events foreseen… the greatest riddle of all is the mystery of our self. What Don Winslow does for Homer’s Iliad in his Danny Ryan trilogy Arnott does for Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex — and the result is just as viscerally entertaining.’
The Times Book of the Month October 2025
