BAD TURN: Charlie Fox is on the loose in Europe by Zoë Sharp

One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about writing the Charlie Fox books is that they are not tied to one location. A part of me can see the attraction of a familiar locale and I know it might be a good idea to do this. After all, tours of Rebus’s Edinburgh, Morse’s Oxford, or Aimée Leduc’s Paris are undoubtedly popular.

But every time I sit down to write the next instalment in this series, deciding where she’s going to be heading off to is one of the things that keeps me hooked. The very nature of Charlie’s job in close protection means she has to be minutely aware of her surroundings. I take it as a challenge to try to weave in as much of the ever-changing dynamic between Charlie and her environment as I can into the fabric of the story.

For BAD TURN, number 13 in the series, I wanted a real European setting. I took Charlie to a bodyguard training school in Germany for one of the early books, HARD KNOCKS, and on a bikers’ fast trip around Ireland in ROAD KILL, but this time out I decided it was high time she made a return to mainland Europe.

I’d driven down to the southern area of France just before starting BAD TURN, and the scarcity of both people and other vehicles once we got away from the cities really set my imagination going. Tailing someone without other traffic to use as cover, for example, would present its own difficulties for Charlie.

The open agricultural land around the Midi-Pyrénées, with its open fields of sunflowers and occasional stunning pieces of modern architecture like the Millau Bridge, took my breath away.

There seemed to be a lot of half-derelict farmhouses that made my DIY fingers twitch to get stuck into them but provided ideal places of cover and concealment, as did the swathes of woodland.

But when I visited several of the magnificent local chateaux, including castles that had been in the same family line for a thousand years, I knew I’d found one of my main locations for the book. I borrowed aspects of a couple of them and created the Chateau de Bourdillon, complete with French aristocrat in residence. The fact he happened to have a somewhat unusual occupation was beside the point…

And then, of course, there was Italy. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Tuscany and Umbria and couldn’t resist BAD TURN visiting some areas that were very familiar to me, as well as others where I had to wing it a little more.

I borrowed the small island of Isole Minore on Lake Trasimeno, for example. In reality, the island is state owned and uninhabited but when you create your own version of the world, you are allowed to bend the rules. I made it the home of a wealthy Italian with a particular wish for privacy. I placed on the island a combination of abandoned monasteries and palaces for him to be restoring. Of course, there would be more reconstruction work to be done after Charlie left than there was when she arrived…

With her love of big motorcycles, Charlie’s no stranger to high-speed chases but I thought I’d take a different tack this time. It didn’t mean I couldn’t have some fun—as well as adding tension—by putting her in a small and somewhat underpowered vehicle like a Fiat Cinquecento. (And if you’re a fan of Fiat 500s, you’d better read that bit with your eyes closed. Let’s just say it doesn’t end well for that poor little car.)

Reintroducing Charlie to a European setting for BAD TURN was quite a ride and I’m already planning book #14. Where will she be next time around? Well, having spent a number of books working overseas, I think she might be ready to return home to the UK. The only question is, will the UK be ready for Charlie Fox?

Bad Turn by Zoë Sharp

Charlie has quit her job in close protection, been turned out of her apartment, and is apparently out of luck.  House-sitting in rural New Jersey has to be the pits—TV and TV dinners. A far cry from Iraq... Bulgaria... Afghanistan. Unlucky or not, she happens to be around at the right time to foil a violent kidnap attempt on Helena, wife of billionaire arms dealer, Eric Kincaid.  Kincaid offers her a job looking after Helena. The rumours about Kincaid’s business empire say he’s gone over to the dark side, but Charlie is in no position to be fussy. And protecting people against those who want to do them harm is what she’s good at. But when the threats against the Kincaids escalate, and then follow the couple over to Europe, Charlie’s really going to have to up her game. It’s time to take the fight to the enemy.  Charlie’s at her best putting an end to trouble. Now she must learn to strike first. And hope that the Kincaids don’t discover the secret she’s been keeping from them, right from the start.

Read the first three chapters of BAD TURN

https://www.zoesharp.com/books/bad-turn-opening-chapters/

BAD TURN is published in ebook, mass-market paperback, hardcover and Large Print editions on September 27 2019. For more information visit www.ZoeSharp.com

Sequelizing by Chris Pavone

If you glance quickly at any given bestseller chart, this may seem like a sure path to success: write a crime-fiction series featuring the same protagonist in one book after another, forever, then recline comfortably on your piles of money. But from inside the publishing business, it has always seemed to me that for every master like Lee Child or Janet Evanovich, there are thousands of novelists slogging out their series with flat (or worse) sales, while the novels perhaps become increasingly implausible and shoddy as the demands of the book-a-year-schedule take their toll—no time for substantive edits, no time to reconsider large choices, no time to hone themes or prose, no time for anything other than a quick pass with the broom to sweep up large pieces of obvious debris, never the thorough top-to-bottom cleaning that makes a home sparkle. I want my books to sparkle.

I’m now publishing my fourth thriller, and for each manuscript the revisions process has lasted more than a year—and that’s after the year or two I spent on first drafts. Of course there are some authors who are so adept at writing fiction that they don’t need all this revision for their books to sparkle. But how many such book-a-year prodigies truly exist? Is it a hundred people? A couple of dozen? Are you one of them?

I’m not, I know it for certain. Which is why I never wanted to be in the sequel business. So although my first novel The Expats ends with the possibility of a follow-up, I declined to write it. I didn’t want to set up my publishers’ expectations of any book-a-year plan. Nor readers’. Plus my imagination didn’t contain that next installment; I simply did not know what should happen. And I didn’t want to try to foist a second-rate follow-up onto those first-rate characters. I loved my debut novel; I didn’t want to sully it.

So my next couple of books were unrelated (mostly), and I was working on another when I found myself in Paris in the aftermath of their brutal terror attacks, reminiscent of my hometown of New York City after 9/11: a global capital besieged by terrorism, soldiers with assault weapons everywhere, everyone jumping at any loud sound, convinced that whatever was happening next was happening now. Paris in 2016 felt a lot like New York in 2001.

Out of this miasma of fear, the follow-up to The Expats presented itself to me wholesale and clearly. I put aside that other manuscript I was writing, and started afresh on a new page 1 of The Paris Diversion, and began trying to figure out how to do something I didn’t know how to do.

What did I know? That I didn’t want the new book to be a proper sequel—neither book should be a prerequisite to fully enjoying the other. I wanted this second installment to compel readers to go back to the first, not because it was necessary but because it would be fun. The same in the other direction.

How to construct this two-way street? I of course didn’t know then, and still don’t now. There might be loads of correct answers to this question; there might be none. 

But here’s what I did: I wrote my first draft, and my second, and during both I engaged separate beta readers tasked with answering only one question: does Paris provide enough recap of Expats, or too much? I eventually concluded that the new book should provide essentially no recap whatsoever; I should write this second book as if the first simply does not exist. The characters’ back stories should be just back stories—the things that readers ought to know to appreciate the contemporary action. Not because the action happened in a previous book, but because it happened in these characters’ lives.

So I deleted 90 percent of the recap I’d written; then I deleted half of what remained, down to practically nothing. I left readers asking questions, by providing some answers but withholding others.

This sequelizing was hard work; harder than I expected. I’d assumed that because I’d done so much of the world-building work for the first book, it would be easier to write the second. Not at all.

So I now have even more respect for those book-per-year authors. And even more conviction that I’m not one of them.

The Paris Diversion by Chris Pavone is out now (Faber & Faber, £14.99)

Kate Moore is back in a pulse-pounding thriller which takes place over the course of one nail-biting day. Kate Moore - a mother with an interesting past - is living the quiet life in another European city, or trying to. On her way to drop her children off at school in the city centre, the cafes and streets of Paris start to come alive around her. Kate's husband Dex, meanwhile, charged with finding a particular present for their son's birthday, is struggling to focus on the job in hand as a financial matter at work seems to be playing on his mind. As worrying reports begin to circulate from key locations around the city, and the sound of wailing sirens becomes increasingly hard to ignore, could their day and, indeed, their lives be about to change forever?

Nour - a character examination

First of all, thank you for having me I’m delighted to be here!

I’d love to tell you more about one of the characters from my novel, The Dying Game.

Nour is the mother of our heroine, Anna. No longer  a dedicated member of the Party, she now spends her days in her  father’s old apartment as a dissident and outcast,  trying to make a living on the outskirts of the totalitarian world where you cannot think or speak freely without paying a price.

Nour is the kind of person that behaves as she wants to, thinks or feels for the moment, but is ever-changeable in her beliefs. When she believes in the system, that is the right thing to do, but once she stops, then THAT is the right thing to do. She always thinks she’s right, which of course can be a very frustrating trait for a child (or an adult, as Anna is now) to deal with. Anna describes Nour as ‘never been much of a mother hen. More like a mother dinosaur, the type who laid her egg and then walked away.’  Since childhood Anna has been vying  for her mother’s attention, and now as an adult, she has distanced herself from her. When  Anna  becomes a mother  herself, her own upbringing impacts how she faces motherhood, and is  incapable to care solely for her daughter and to love her unconditionally. Instead, it is Nour who  cares for Anna’s daughter, which makes Anna rely on her mother in a way she hadn’t before, but also raises conflict between them. But Nour isn’t entirely unlikeable, she does have  some redeeming qualities. For example, she’s incredibly loyal  when she needs to be and she’s able to suss  out the truth and nonsense when she sees it, regardless  it it’s the right  time or place .

I like to think of  Nour, Anna and Siri (Anna’s daughter), as the alternative  Gilmore

Girls.  Three generations of women tied to each other, but set in a totalitarian world without the cosy haven of the Stars Hollow community.  

So, if you’re up for a novel that isn’t all about the  feel- good factor , and explores what it is to be a mother, the sacrifices we make for love in all forms, as well as a study of human nature and how we react under extreme pressure,  The Dying Game might just be the book for you. Enjoy!

The Dying Game by Åsa Avdic is published by Windmill in paperback and eBook, £7.99

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1114362/the-dying-game/

The Dying Game by Asa Avdic
Do you live to play? Or play to live? The year is 2037. The Soviet Union never fell, and much of Europe has been consolidated under the totalitarian Union of Friendship. On the tiny island of Isola, seven people have been selected to compete in a forty-eight-hour test for a top-secret intelligence position. One of them is Anna Francis, a workaholic bureaucrat with a nine-year-old daughter she rarely sees and a secret that haunts her. Her assignment: to stage her own death and then to observe, from her hiding place inside the walls of the house, how the six other candidates react to the news that a murderer is among them. Who will take control? Who will crack under pressure? But then a storm rolls in, the power goes out, and the real game begins. . . .

Criminal Worlds at the British Library

It’s Friday the 13th and there are dark goings on as we lift the lid on a strange and disturbing world of crime and intrigue in Europe

Hosted by broadcaster Mark Lawson with guests including bestselling crime novelist Peter James, Finnish crime-writing sensation Kati Hiekkapelto and German writer Volker Kutscher, our panel will cast their forensic eye on the celebrated and lesser-known investigators of European fiction.

Details

Name:	Criminal Worlds
Where:	Conference Centre The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB Show map     How to get to the Library
When:	Fri 13 May 2016, 18:30 - 20:00
Price:	Full Price: £12.00 Senior 60+: £10.00 Student: £8.00 Registered Unemployed: £8.00 Under 18: £8.00 Friend of the BL: £8.00
Enquiries:	+44 (0)1937 546546 boxoffice@bl.uk