3 Books You Should Never Take on a Plane + C.J. Merritt on Octagon (SUMMER SPECIAL)

Recorded live at Capital Crime Book Festival, Philippa talks to C.J. Merritt about his whiplash international spy thriller Octagon — but first, a public service announcement: three brilliant books you should absolutely not read on an actual flight.

3 Books You Should NOT Take on Holiday (If You're Flying)

Hostage – Clare Mackintosh

A flight attendant receives a note threatening her daughter's life mid-flight from London to Sydney. Gripping, claustrophobic, and definitely not in-flight reading.

Drowning – T.J. Newman

A plane crashes into the Pacific, trapping passengers underwater on a sinking fuselage. Written by a former flight attendant who knows exactly how to make this terrifyingly real.

Airframe – Michael Crichton

A catastrophic mid-air disaster sparks a tense investigation into what really went wrong. Brilliant, realistic, and best read firmly on the ground.

Philippa talks to C.J. Merritt about Octagon

A former MI6 officer and an ex-SAS soldier, both out in the cold, are pulled back in when a coded warning leads to a trail of danger across Europe. Described as a page-turning action thriller in the vein of I Am Pilgrim.

Chris and Philippa discuss:

• His dream holiday: New Zealand, or a few days alone on a writing retreat (a luxury when you have a small child)
• Travelling solo through Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East in his twenties — and the cardigan with zip pockets built for smuggling books through customs
• His nightmare holiday: a 25-mile jungle trek through 35°C heat in Central Africa, hired porters who got drunk on the money he paid them, and arriving to find the gorillas they'd come to see had all died of Ebola a year earlier
• Why he wanted to write a spy thriller with a huge geographic canvas after several more localised books
• Writing 500–1,000 words a day in a café, fuelled by multiple coffees, and losing track of time during action sequences
• The two-book deal already underway, plus a slower, more psychological spy thriller drawing on his past life as a psychologist
• Why the title Octagon came early and never changed

Ice cream order: Salted caramel, pistachio, and chocolate cookie dough — in a dish, with a cone on the side just in case.

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