Michael D Smith

Wattys 2020 winner (The Painted Altar, literary fiction)

(Please note I don't do read-for-reads, vote-for-votes or follow-for-follows. Only follow me if you genuinely like my work and wish to be updated on future projects.)

Hi, I'm a 50-year-old English teacher originally from England, but now settled in Italy. Creative writing's been my passion since I was old enough to hold a pen straight.

I'm a mystery/thriller writer who deals in twisty, suspenseful plots and psychological depth. My target readership is principally adult, and my literary ambitions lie in traditional publishing.

I have five novels on the site. The most recent, entitled The Trail Killer, revolves around the wrongful arrest of an Indian immigrant for the murders of two young women on a hiking trail. Explored themes include racial prejudice and gender inequality.

 The Scent of Death is meanwhile about a cadaver dog handler. After uncovering the remains of a missing child, and unconvinced by the direction of official police investigations, she resolves to unravel the mystery herself.

My Wattys award-winning novel, The Painted Altar, mixes the historical element of the Second World War, and revolves around two interconnected murders, 64 years apart. 

My Wattpad debut is an edgy thriller entitled Kill Who You Want, in which a small town is terrorised by a series of darkly menacing letters.

The final of my novels, The Third Shadow, is about a British detective who retires to southern Italy and becomes involved with carabinieri investigations into a case of two missing tourists. 

Though the mechanisms of Wattpad may be at the disadvantage of adult/semi-literary writers like myself, I am nonetheless immensely grateful to the site for two reasons:
1) The week-to-week motivation it gives me to keep churning out those chapters and thus build up a body of work.
2) The possibilty to interact with a (relatively) small but (I hope) appreciative readership whose feedback will help me hone my craft.