The Idea Behind An Ordinary House by Rae Starling

In August 2006 – almost 20 years ago to the day that I’m writing this article – I was living in Germany and driving to collect my young children from a play party. The news came on the car radio with a lead headline about a girl who had suddenly appeared on a street in neighbouring Austria after being missing for eight years. The story sounded fantastical. Thinking my German must have let me down, I quickly tuned to an English-language radio station. What I thought I’d heard was confirmed. Natascha Kampusch hadn’t been seen since she vanished on her way to school at the age of ten. Now, as a resilient eighteen-year-old, she finally escaped from her captor.

World media went mad. Her first TV interview for ORF, the Austrian national broadcaster, aired in full in ten countries, and excerpts were shown in another one hundred and twenty.

Inspired by the case, I thought about writing a thriller that would explore the aftermath of a kidnap victim’s escape and the challenges facing them as they adjust to life outside. It felt like a sensitive issue that would need respectful handling and thorough research, so I enrolled on a PhD at the University of Birmingham.

My thesis title was: Hijacking Survivor Narratives: A Creative and Critical Study of Trauma Appropriation in Fiction. I examined topics in several disciplines, including trauma writing and post-traumatic stress disorder. However, within a month of starting my research, I read one academic article and two personal memoirs that made me rethink my approach.

(i)The article, by Fairleigh Gilmour, examined the media coverage of the ‘Kampusch’ case. Gilmour discovered that initially sympathetic reporting soon turned against the teenager. In Gilmour’s view, Natascha Kampusch received negative press because she did not present as the typical stereotype of a victim. Instead, she claimed her independence and seemed to hold a complex and contradictory attitude towards her abductor.

 Gilmour analysed 355 newspaper articles in English language newspapers from 2006 to 2010 and noted the occurrence of four story ‘angles’ to refer to Natascha Kampusch: the ‘mad’ woman (28% of coverage referred to Natascha Kampusch in this way); the ‘bad’ woman (15%); the ‘sex slave’ (19%); and the ‘virgin bride’ (16%).

The two memoirs that made me review my plans were written by Natascha Kampusch herself. (ii) In her first book, 3096 Days, she powerfully contests each of these stereotypes and (iii) in her second book, 10 Years of Freedom, published some eleven years after she escaped, she is still citing incidents of ongoing media intrusion and unwelcome attention from the public.

Sadly, since hearing what I thought was an unbelievable news story about Natascha Kampusch’s captivity and escape, I have heard of other women and girls – including Elizabeth Smart, Sarah Smith, Jaycee Dugard, Amanda Berry, Gina De Jesus, Michelle Knight, and Katy Morgan-Davies – who all suffered long-term abuse and captivity. I read memoirs by these survivors as well as the two by Natascha Kampusch. One point that several mentioned was the difficulty of readjusting afterwards under a media spotlight.

These memoirs, together with the Gilmour article, inspired me to write about how an individual's experience of crime might be rewritten by the media and social media. When we soak up true-crime headlines, we can sometimes forget about the effects of media sensationalism on the victims.

A recent example concerns the media coverage of the search for a missing Lancashire woman in January 2023.  (I won’t name her as she never had the opportunity for a right of reply to the coverage.) Social media platforms were rife with speculation and keyboard warriors flocked to the River Wyre, where she was last seen, to make videos and play at amateur sleuthing.

With their working hypothesis being undermined by the media and social media, the police divulged private details about the woman’s health, and some TV news channels invaded her family’s privacy. Although there was no survivor in this case – she had sadly drowned – the potentially traumatising effect of media intrusion on her family cannot be overlooked. 

In my thriller, An Ordinary House, a traumatised teenager finds his story sensationalised after rescue from years locked in a suburban house. As well as navigating lurid headlines and false allegations, he must suppress nightmarish memories of his ordeal to stop himself spiralling out of control. We see him face scrutiny not only from the media but also from detectives, lawyers, psychologists and social media keyboard warriors.

If you like dark thrillers, I hope you’ll give this one a go. 

Sources

(i)             Fairleigh Gilmour, ‘The Girl in the Cellar: Media Representations of Natascha Kampusch’, Current Issues in Criminal Justice, 25. 2 (2013), 645-666.

(ii)           Natascha Kampusch and Heike Gronemeier, 10 Years of Freedom (Berlin: Ullstein Buchverlage, 2017).

(iii)         Natascha Kampusch and Heike Gronemeier, 3096 Days (London: Penguin, 2010)

An Ordinary House by Rae Starling (Hera Books) Out 3^rd September 2026

We lived in a house on Beech Avenue. Outside-People say we're safe now. But one of us wants to go back. Back to that house and the darkness it held. Police raid an ordinary house in a quiet suburban street and find a traumatised teenager held captive with his family. They call him a survivor, but he doesn't know what to believe. His memories don't match what his siblings and the press tell him about his home. As he struggles to make sense of his new world, he must find and face the truth. With one of his siblings set on revenge, should he forget his family, or turn from victim to killer?

You can find more information about Rae Starling and her work on her website.

 Rae Starling can also be found on X @RachelSargeant3 on Instagram @raesargeant3 and on Facebook.

Joanna Dodd on The Long Shadows cast by Old Sins

Long before I started writing my debut psychological thriller The Summer Dare, I was fascinated by the tricks memory can play on us and by what goes through the heads of people who commit a crime a long time ago and think, for decades sometimes, that they’ve got away with it. What story do they tell other people about what happened? Even more interestingly, what story do they tell themselves and, over time, do they actually start to believe that story? 

For me, these questions become even more acute when the person who’s done something wrong is a child at the time. When I was at school, I used to have a recurring nightmare where I’d wake up convinced I’d caused someone’s death. For a few fuzzy-headed moments it seemed like nothing would ever be the same again, and then reality would take over and I’d realise that what I had in fact done was tape over my dad’s recording of the rugby before he’d had a chance to watch it. Such a relief! 

But supposing you were a child and you woke up with that feeling and it was true. Maybe you didn’t mean to do whatever it was, but you can’t be sure that people will believe that, so you make up a story about what happened, and you tell it to other people, and you try to tell it to yourself too. And gradually over the years, the lines between what actually happened and what you tell yourself happened become blurred. 

After all, memory is notoriously unreliable. Many works of fiction explore this concept brilliantly. One of my favourites is Iain Pears’s incomparable An Instance of the Fingerpost, which tells the same story of a murder in 17th century Oxford from four different points of view—all of them unreliable narrators. 

In real life, we’ve all been in a situation where friends or family tell a version of the past that doesn’t accord with our own. We’re all our own unreliable narrators. I’ve definitely been mid-argument with my brother, and longed to be able to rewind and play a perfectly accurate version of whatever we’re bickering about. But the point is I can’t; no one ever can. Mostly the differences in our memories are trivial, and you could argue that when the stakes are high, because some kind of terrible incident has occurred, people might hold onto a more accurate version of events. But I think the opposite could sometimes be true: when the stakes are high, everyone has an interest in creating their own version of the past and they might not even know they’ve done it. There’s a reason why so many of the great works of fiction exploring the unreliability of memory centre around crime.

And if you were a child who did a terrible thing, when justice finally caught up with you, could you conceivably argue that you were a different person now—an adult? Are you always culpable for the sins of your younger self, or does it depend what, and how serious, those sins are? If we’re talking about criminal acts, the legal position is clear. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the age of criminal responsibility is 10, and in Scotland it’s 12. As a society, we recognise that children are less morally culpable than adults, and a different sentencing regime applies, but it’s not uncommon for people to be sentenced when they are adults for crimes they committed as children, and the courts have grappled with how best to handle these cases. And behaviour doesn’t have to be criminal to have life-altering implications. 

For The Summer Dare I had the idea of a group of old school friends, who are now adults and are bound together by something that happened to them 25 years ago that they can no longer even talk about. At the time, they tell the grown-ups around them a version of what happened and their decision to withhold the truth has awful consequences. But as adults themselves, they all have slightly different memories of the long-ago summer night that changed all their lives for ever, and somewhere between the gaps in these multiple versions is the truth.

The Summer Dare involves three different timelines: the present, when my characters’ lives are starting to unravel in frightening ways; 1999, when they were school friends and took part in a dare that changed all their lives for ever; and the 1920s, when a legendary star of the silent screen is accused of murder after a glitzy showbiz party. All three strands explore the tricks memory plays and the difficulty of definitively establishing what happened many years earlier. 

The Summer Dare by Joanna Dodd (Hera Books) Out now

Six weeks of friendship. A lifetime paying for it. They were the cool girls. Two years older, oozing glamour. She could prove herself worthy of their friendship. She could do the dare. Twenty-five years later, Lucy has a perfect life. She is still friends with the cool girls. All except one. Maddie. The one they never saw again after the dare. They don't talk about her. They don’t think about her. It is as though she never existed until… Lucy gets a text from an unknown number. Why didn't you tell them where I was? The past hurtles into the present and secrets push their way to the surface. Who is the message from? Is Maddie back? Or is someone else set on exposing the truth and seeking revenge?

Find out more about Joanna on her website You can also find her on X @jkdwriter

Online armchair investigators – friends or foe? by N V Peacock

When I research my thrillers, I’m often propelled head first down rabbit holes, and there was never one so long, winding and dark as that of online armchair investigators, sometimes known as citizen sleuths.  Let’s begin by defining what, and who, these people are. First, they are not necessarily from police backgrounds, but are mostly everyday people who take it upon themselves to investigate a crime from afar. They will have rarely attended crime scenes and will have limited access to police reports. As a whole, they work as part of a team and become a collective who utilise their time and internet skills, which means their evidence and resources are wider - sometimes even than the police.

Since the inception of the internet, online collective intelligence has been used on websites and social media to dig out the truth of people and situations. On the face, it can feel like a dedicated community of do-gooders, however more often than not, crowds of people will swing on the lowest common denominator, thus those with dark intentions can influence others into a mob mentality; making even the most noble of people descend into a spiral of gossip and hate that ultimately goes against their true natures.

Being part of important investigations can offer a false sense of grandeur along with an almost addictive form of validation akin to seeing likes gather on social media posts – this then fuels a behaviour that might have otherwise dissipated.  Pitchforks and torches in hand, righteous folks storm forward on a mission, without paying heed to where they tread and on who they tread upon. To a degree, this can be observed in The Stanford Prison Experiment that was conducted by Philip Zimbardo in 1971. Normal young men were recruited to re-create a prison environment and were randomly selected as either prisoner or guard. The whole thing was called off after just six days as the guards were suddenly employing cruel and out of character behaviour towards the prisoners – give someone a bit of power, and a group to remain faceless and in, and darkness can seep through even the most gentle of souls. 

The most recent example I can give of online armchair detectives is the Netflix documentary Don’t F*ck with Cats. An online group from the USA banded together on social media to identify a sick man who posted disturbing videos of animal abuse on YouTube before graduating to killing his first human victim.  Although not stopping said killer start his spree, they were, in my opinion, instrumental in saving further lives. They were tireless in their efforts and a prime example of those hard-working people who use all the tools at their disposal and leave no digital rock unturned to solve the puzzle of the killer’s identity. Ironically, if the evidence in the documentary is to be believed, the online armchair investigators didn’t actually identify the killer, but simply lured him into the spotlight, and so although not technically unmasking him, gave him the perfect ego-tripping opportunity to unmask himself. But; well, there’s always a but isn’t there, on their journey for justice, they also pointed a finger at the wrong man. This man had mental health issues and tragically committed suicide.

Another famous case is the 2013 USA Boston Bombing. When news hit that a bomb had been detonated at the Boston Marathon, people were shocked and justifiably outraged. With so many photos being taken on the day of runners and crowds, it didn’t take long for potential online investigators to start crowdsourcing photos to try to spot the man carrying the suspicious bag. And spot them they did. They even identified them. Then they doxxed them online, exposing names and addresses of innocent people to justice-hungry crowds, ruining lives and creating situations just as dangerous as the bomb itself.  The authorities eventually caught the bombers. They were not anyone named online.

In my newest thriller, The 13th Girl, a band of online armchair detectives come together to identify a serial killer calling himself the Righteous Wraith. Naming themselves Wraith Finders, they set about pointing the finger at suspect Andy, who they are certain is the killer. They’ve crowd sourced evidence, they have created believable timelines and, after all, he is a little creepy. But the police are not interested in their ‘evidence’ so they being to turn up at his work and home. Losing his job and wife, and with the wraith still dropping bodies, Andy seeks the professional advice of a psychologist. This is where he meets our loveable oddball protagonist Dee, who has her own tragic back story of mental health issues. Knowing what it’s like to be accused of something she didn’t do, Dee sets about filming a true crime documentary to prove Andy’s innocence – but there’s no smoke without fire, and the deeper down that rabbit hole she gets, the more alone she feels. After all, if she finds out who the wraith is, who would believe her?

Even after writing the book, I still haven’t decided on whether online armchair investigators are friend or foe. They can do good, but can also cause trouble. Mob mentality can taint efforts. However, if we were to all stop caring what is happening in the world, and getting involved, where would that leave us?

The 13th Girl by N V Peacock (Hera Books) Out Now

12 girls gone. Can she save The 13th Girl? After decades in a mental health hospital, Dee knows that people find her creepy – because they tell her so. Once the reluctant star of an infamous documentary, she is trying to blend back into the outside world. But when a string of local girls disappear, only to be found dead days later, she becomes fixated on the case and decides to film her own True Crime documentary There is a serial killer on the loose - The Righteous Wraith. Girls are being found one by one, their bodies gruesomely staged in the most innocent public spaces. With the killer taunting the police and public fear mounting, the armchair detectives begin pointing fingers at one suspect. But for Dee, something isn’t adding up. She knows what it’s like to be accused of something that you didn’t do. She resolves to prove his innocence, unmask the real killer, and save The 13th Girl. But who will believe her?

N V Peacock can be found on FaceBook and she can also be found on X @NickyP_author.

A.A. Chaudhuri on the Fascination of Secrets and Lies between Friends and Family

As a psychological thriller writer, I love delving into the mindsets and motivations of my characters - what makes them tick and do the things they do - while setting this against everyday set-ups we can all relate to, as readers. Whether that be the workplace, on holiday, a marriage, or indeed in the context of a family or friendship scenario. It’s this close to the bone feeling that makes the genre so compelling for me, because we can all picture ourselves in a given situation, while the darker traits of human nature psychological thrillers tend to explore are all ones that we have the potential to fall foul of, as fallible human beings. Secrets and lies are a good example of this. At some point in our lives, all of us will have held a secret or told a lie, however big or small. It’s human nature. Secrets and lies permeate every level of society and in thrillers they tend to relate to something bad or unsavoury because of course this is what thriller fiction is about. It would be very bland and dull otherwise! Readers want to be intrigued, to feel on edge, to feel the tension, conflict and sense of dread and unease between characters as they turn the pages, so what better than a juicy secret to achieve this and keep them gripped? And when such secrets and lies exist between family and friends it can ramp up that intrigue and suspense we want from our thrillers that much more because we, as readers, know the ultimate reveal and impact is going to be huge and potentially very destructive. 

In my latest psychological thriller, The Final Party, three couples gather in a luxury villa high in the hills above the glamorous town of Sorrento for the seemingly perfect fortieth birthday celebration. But their idyllic week in paradise rapidly descends into the holiday from hell when one of the group starts receiving anonymous text messages threatening to expose a dark secret from their university days, and before long one of them is dead. 

But it is not just the fear of one secret from nearly two decades ago being exposed that is haunting my characters. Each of them is plagued by their own individual secrets which is driving a wedge between them, leading to the mind games and sense of mutual mistrust and unease which typifies the psychological thriller genre. As the plot unfolds the reader is gradually let into such secrets while the characters continue to keep them from each other. The continuing suspense for the reader lies in wondering when such secrets will be found out and what the fall-out will be when that happens. 

But what makes secrets and lies between friends and family so compelling for readers? For me, the answer to that questions lies in the fact that families and friends are our support systems, the people who we trust completely, and who we rely on to be honest with us and have our backs. That being said, when they lie to us and keep potentially harmful secrets from us, it’s a bitter pill to swallow, while the guilt and shame of the person at fault can take its toll and lead to the gradual erosion of such relationships along with escalating feelings of suspicion between them. There is a famous William Blake saying which I feel encapsulates this perfectly: ‘It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.’ What he of course meant by this is that we all expect our enemies to lie to us, but it’s the last thing we expect from our nearest and dearest, and so the potential for us to react in a rash or explosive way is that much greater. 

Guilt and fear are feelings that tend to feature heavily in psychological thrillers, and often stem from a character holding a dark secret they are at pains to keep buried because they fear the consequences of it being exposed, and yet at the same time the guilt and shame they feel for deceiving their loved ones almost destroys them. I think most people can empathise with this. It’s very rare for a person not to feel conflicting emotions of fear and guilt, unless they are a sociopath of course! Again, this is what makes the psychological thriller so relatable and therefore compelling.

Of course, just because a given character has a secret they are tormented by this doesn’t necessarily make them the ultimate culprit in the overall story, but what it does do is give them more complexity and depth as a human being, which I think readers appreciate because we all have light and shade to us, and it’s important to show a character’s redeeming side. It also serves as an effective red herring, particularly in multiple person narratives where the reader is privy to various characters’ secrets and lies, all of them with the potential to be the ultimate culprit in the overall story, and so keeps them guessing until the hopefully explosive denouement. 

It's human nature to be intrigued by secrets and lies when they aren’t your own, especially when they exist between friends and family because the potential outcome is that much more destructive. It’s a theme I’m sure will continue to hold infinite appeal for psychological thriller lovers far and wide until the end of time.

The Final Party by AA Chaudhuri. (Hera Books) Out Now

Six friends. In a luxury villa set high in the hills above the glamorous town of Sorrento, southern Italy, three couples gather for the perfect 40th birthday celebration. One body. Before the week is out, one of them is dead. Countless lies. Their perfect reunion quickly becomes the holiday from hell when one of the group starts receiving anonymous messages, threatening to expose a dark secret from their university days.  As old friendships are tested to the limit, it's clear that what happens in the dark past won't stay buried...

More information about A A Chaudhuri and her books can be ffound on her website. She can also be found on Twitter @AAChudhuri, Facebook. Instagram @a.a.chaudhuri

Why I chose to write my debut psychological thriller SHE’S MINE in the first person. By A.A. Chaudhuri

She’s Mine, my debut psychological thriller with Hera Books, is my first foray into writing in the first person, having used the third person narrative for my Kramer & Carver legal thriller series. 

I always enjoy exploring the mindsets of my characters – who and what is motivating them to behave in the way they do. Even with The Scribe and The Abduction, I made a conscious effort to do this, i.e., not just take my readers on a straightforward mission to unearth and track down the culprits alongside my lead protagonists, but also allow them to see things through the culprits’ eyes, just because I feel this adds substance to the story, enabling readers to connect with and relate to all of the characters on a deeper level; even induce them to feel some level of sympathy for the wrongdoers, having been offered an insight into their inner turmoil and often painful backstories. 

There is no hard and fast rule that psychological thrillers should be written in the first person, however, just because the genre is primarily focussed on the characters’ states of mind. Least of all the first-person present, which is what I chose to do with She’s Mine. So long as the novel contains key elements of the genre – the lead character perhaps having a dark secret or flaw which makes them potentially unreliable – it is of course perfectly possible to effectively portray them within a framework of disquiet and mystery, as is the typical mood of this genre, through the third person narrative.

Having said that, I chose not to do this with She’s Mine, principally because I felt the crux of my novel, which centres on a mother’s (Christine Donovan) grief for her missing child, and the ensuing dark and twisty turn of events that swiftly unravel after she receives a note revealing her daughter is not dead, along with the pervading sense of unease, mistrust and tension that exists between her and other characters, called for a more personal approach. Christine’s guilt for her neglect, but more so revolving around a secret she feels contributed to her child’s disappearance, also lies at the heart of the novel, and so I felt it imperative to see things through her unique perspective, and that of those closest to her, so as to give the reader a deeper and more profound insight into the excruciating pain and turmoil she is forced to endure day after day, as well as the first-hand effect her behaviour has had on others. I didn’t feel this could be conveyed as powerfully via the third person narrative which, by definition, is more detached and reliant on the author’s description of a character’s behaviour and speech rather than via said character’s natural stream of thought. Moreover, although readers may, understandably, blame Christine for losing her child owing to her past misdeeds, it was crucial to me that they should also feel some compassion for her, and I found the first-person narrative – hearing her voice, her suffering in their heads – to be a more effective way of achieving this. 

Obviously one can describe a character’s pain and emotions through the third person narrative, but there is always a danger of it coming across as contrived and lacking in depth and heart, the author sometimes ‘telling’ too much of the story, rather than ‘showing’ it through a character’s own distinct voice and actions which, admittedly, can be deceptive because we as readers don’t know if what he or she is saying can be trusted. But then again, isn’t that the point of the psychological thriller genre? To be unsure of what you are being told is the truth, thereby heightening the intrigue on the part of the reader and their impetus to keep turning the pages?

I think that fans of psychological thrillers rather enjoy the feeling of being deceived by the author – the sense that they’re not being given the whole story but rather a skewered version of the truth. This uncertainty is what adds to the overall experience and addictive nature of the genre, and I think this can often be better achieved by only seeing events through the eyes of a particular character at any given moment.

Writing in the first person also allowed me to connect more deeply with my characters even though I, unlike my readers, know the outcome of the story and what my characters are hiding. With She’s Mine, I became so invested in my characters, I really felt like I was living every moment with them, feeling their pain and inner turmoil, which was important given the subject matter of a lost child; something that was often hard to write about being a mother myself.

Similarly, because the events of the book move along fairly swiftly, constantly switching between different characters’ viewpoints, I chose to write in the first person ‘present tense’ with a view to ramping up the pace even further, as well as intensifying the prevailing sense of claustrophobia and uncertainty my characters operate in.

I really enjoyed my first experience of writing in the first person and feel sure it won’t be my last.

She’s Mine is published by Hera Books in e-book on 18th August and paperback on 26th August:

Her missing daughter was just the start of the nightmare. Twenty years ago, Christine Donovan took a call she should have ignored while shopping. In those few seconds while her back was turned her toddler, Heidi, was kidnapped. She’s never been seen again. Despite having two other children with husband Greg, Christine remains guilt-stricken that her neglect caused her child to be stolen, while haunted by a secret that consumes her. Just as she takes measures to finally heal, a note is posted through her door, with the words she has always longed to hear: Heidi isn’t dead. Christine might finally get the answers she craves - but what she doesn’t know is that finding her daughter will uncover dark secrets close to home. In seeking the truth, Christine might destroy everything that she loves … so how far is she willing to go to find Heidi?

AMAZON: https://amzn.to/3ua6Oxa

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Apple: https://apple.co/3yyqe2a