When Inspiration Strikes by Jenna Satterthwaite.

There’s a reason we have the phrase “inspiration strikes.” It really does feel like lightning–something unexpected and powerful–and in the case of my debut novel, Made for You, that’s exactly how the original idea came about.

I was taking a walk during my work break, along the Chicago river, in March 2022. I’d been watching the new season of Love is Blind on Netflix and I’d just finished reading The Ones We’re Meant to Find by Joan He (highly recommend) which had put Bots that are indistinguishable from humans on my mind. As I walked, ideas collided, and I thought “oooh, what if a robot that looked exactly like a human competed on a reality TV show?” It was a no brainer to add murder.

I took my first notes that very night, without knowing who the victim would be, and who the killer–but the idea felt so compelling to me that I was determined to figure it out.

I wrote the book in a kind of fever, and the first draft was complete in 7 weeks. Though it started as ‘just’ a fun idea, writing it quickly became an incredibly cathartic experience. My youngest sister was dying of cancer as I wrote it (she died right as the book was going out on submission to editors, summer 2022), and this book became a place for me to process my grief, my questions about purpose and pain and the isolation that intense suffering brings. During the cancer years leading up to writing Made for You, I was deconstructing a lot of the assumptions I’d made about life/existence/God from the Christian point of view, and that definitely came out as I explored the main character Julia’s relationship to Andy, her creator.

This started as a fun book—and I think it IS a fun book still—but it’s also my grief book and does go to some dark places. But in a light way! Kind of. I keep describing it as “suspense candy,” and I think that in spite of the heavy themes, it’s still mostly a frothy, light, murdery page-turner.

Of course, other questions snuck their way in that were less personal and more heady–like, what makes identity? Is it a core essence that’s inalterable, or is it our choices that shape us and define us? Social issues I care deeply about also started weaving their way in–the way our culture objectifies women, the toxic dynamics of the patriarchy, and the dark side of the narrative often woven around romance that we are ‘made for each other.’ Add to that an examination of social media, our obsession with image, the pressure of ‘relatability,’ and the ethics of Artificial Intelligence as it starts to encroach on ‘human’ jobs. In short, that original lightning strike sparked in many, many directions, and I had an incredible time 

Will you find answers about any of the above issues in this novel? (*laughs to self*) No. We fiction writers are lucky because, unlike our non fiction counterparts, we don’t have to actually answer the questions we pose. Our job is to just turn the prism on the issues we’re highlighting and show as many facets of a question as we can—which, for me, is the fun part.

The answers are up to you.

Made for You by Jenna Satterthwaite (Verve Books) Out now.

Hi. My name is Julia. I'm a Synth. And I'm here to find love... Julia Walden - a Synth - was designed for one reason: to compete on The Proposal and claim the heart of bachelor Josh LaSala. Her casting is controversial, but Julia seems to get her fairy-tale ending when Josh gets down on one knee. Fast-forward fifteen months, and Julia and Josh are married and raising their baby in small-town Indiana. But with haters around every corner, Julia's life is a far cry from the domestic bliss she imagined. Then her splintering world shatters: Josh goes missing, and she becomes the prime suspect in his murder. With no one left she can trust, Julia takes the investigation into her own hands. But the explosive truths she uncovers will drive her to her breaking point - and isn't that where a person's true nature is revealed? That is... if Julia truly is a person.

Jenna Satterthwaite's debut novel MADE FOR YOU (published by VERVE Books) is a page-turning, twisty debut that skilfully merges artificial intelligence, psychological thriller and reality TV.

More information about the author can be found on her website. You can also find her on X @jennaSchmenna and on Facebook.

Incorporating research into writing – or how I learned not to get bogged down in toilets.

It began as a simple problem. I needed a character to meet his untimely end while relieving himself at the back of an eighteenth-century London tavern. But how, I wondered, did people go to the loo in those days? Would there have been a latrine or even an outhouse? I had no idea. My research took me down several internet rabbit holes, where I learned a lot about the development of sewerage, the disparity between facilities for the rich and the poor, and the reason why women with long skirts and petticoats didn’t wear underwear. It was fascinating, but, in the end, a week of research ended up as half a paragraph of text. 

This is the joy and the frustration of researching for historical fiction. Those of us who write it often say that it is the research that draws us. It can certainly bear fruit for the plots. In my second Lizzie Hardwicke novel, The Corpse Played Dead, much of the action takes place at Drury Lane Theatre. I read a number of books about eighteenth-century staging, which helped me come up with the method of the murder. Reading about gambling houses and the outrageous wagers that took place in them gave me a crucial plot point for the latest novel, Viper in the Nest. 

But however fascinating the research is – and believe me, the history of toilets is utterly enthralling – the novel reader is reading fiction and wants to press on with the story. As a reader, I can always spot when a writer has become over-excited about their research because they feel the need to offer several paragraphs of information – sometimes delivered from the mouth of a character who would surely not need to explain because they inhabit that period. 

It's not easy to get it right. Too little information about something specific to your chosen era and you risk the reader missing something crucial to the plot. Too much, and they may be wearied by the history lesson. 

My own preference is to allow my protagonist to describe what she sees, and to make her own observations on the situation. I’m lucky that Lizzie Hardwicke has a conversational tone of voice – she’s more likely to make a wry aside than to lecture. I also tend to trust the reader. People who enjoy historical fiction already have a historical imagination. My readers may have read Georgette Heyer, Antonia Hodgson, Laura Shepherd-Robinson, or Winston Graham – or, indeed, watched Poldark or Harlots. They are familiar enough with the landscape of the eighteenth century and all I need to do is nudge them now and again with a small detail or comment. 

At the end of each of my novels, I add a short historical note. Mostly, I want the reader to know that I’ve done my research and, if I’ve made a few tweaks to historical facts, I prefer to confess my anachronisms openly rather than have someone point them out. I also add a short list of some of the books I’ve found helpful so that, should any reader wish to engage further with the history of theatre, or gambling, or even toilets, then they may do so at their leisure – perhaps even when alone in the smallest room. 

Viper in the Nest by Georgina Clarke (Verve Books) Out Now

London, June 1759. When a charmless civil servant takes his own life, few are interested in his death. But Lizzie Hardwicke, who plies her trade in the brothels of London whilst also working as an undercover sleuth for the magistrate, can see no reason why a man who had everything to look forward to would wish to end his life. Lizzie's search for answers takes her from the smoke-filled rooms of fashionable gambling houses, where politicians mix ambition with pleasure, to the violent streets of Soho, ready to erupt with riots in the sultry summer heat. All the while, she is navigating her complicated feelings for the magistrate's trusted assistant, Will Davenport, and a disturbing situation at home. Then a gambling house owner is brutally murdered, and Lizzie finds herself tangled in a chaos that she cannot control. The darkest of secrets threatens to turn Davenport against her forever; its exposure will send her to the gallows. London, June 1759. When a charmless civil servant takes his own life, few are interested in his death. But Lizzie Hardwicke, who plies her trade in the brothels of London whilst also working as an undercover sleuth for the magistrate, can see no reason why a man who had everything to look forward to would wish to end his life. Lizzie's search for answers takes her from the smoke-filled rooms of fashionable gambling houses, where politicians mix ambition with pleasure, to the violent streets of Soho, ready to erupt with riots in the sultry summer heat. All the while, she is navigating her complicated feelings for the magistrate's trusted assistant, Will Davenport, and a disturbing situation at home. Then a gambling house owner is brutally murdered, and Lizzie finds herself tangled in a chaos that she cannot control. The darkest of secrets threatens to turn Davenport against her forever; its exposure will send her to the gallows.

More information about the author and her books can be found on her website. She can also be found on X @clarkegeorgina1

Georgina Clarke’s latest novel Viper in the Nest is a gripping and vividly imagined historical mystery set in 18th century London, featuring brothel worker and sometime sleuth Lizzie Hardwicke and follows on from the first two in the series (Death and the Harlot and The Corpse Played Dead). Clarke is also the author of the acclaimed novel The Dazzle of the Light which is based on the Forty Elephants - a gang of notorious female thieves in 1920s East London. All of Clarke's novels are published by VERVE Books.

Women and the Art of Intrigue by Tania Malik

Before Julia Child was the cooking icon who brought an appreciation for French cuisine to American shores, she was entrenched in the world of espionage. She began her career as a copywriter at a furniture store and, wanting to help with the war effort, found her way into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). She went from a research assistant to having top security clearance as Chief of the OSS Registry.

Regular citizens drawn into counterintelligence and other cloak-and-dagger activities can be the stuff of reality (think Mata Hari) and also make for thrilling novels with life-and-death consequences and characters who are often flawed, are morally ambiguous, and are dealing with demons that comprise their already complicated lives. While most stories focus on men, a growing genre puts the female protagonist front and center of the intrigue.

In The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott, two secretaries from the CIA’s typing pool become instrumental in smuggling copies of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago back into Russia during the Cold War. As it happened, Doctor Zhivago was banned in Russia for its unflattering portrayal of life in the Soviet Union. Set in more recent times and dealing with online privacy concerns, in Kathy Wang’s Imposter Syndrome, a lowly tech worker at a Facebook-like company discovers untoward activity on the company’s servers that trace back to the CEO, who may be an enemy sleeper agent. And then there is Who is Vera Kelly? by Rosalie Knecht. A witty and astute young woman working nights at a radio station finds herself infiltrating a group of revolutionaries in Argentina and must use every skill to come out alive when caught in the middle of a coup.

War can complicate the best of espionage plans or help them come to fruition. In my novel, Hope You Are Satisfied, a twenty-five-year-old guest worker is employed by a local tour operator in 1990s Dubai, UAE. When Iraq invaded Kuwait and coalition forces began amassing in the region, Dubai became a major base of operations, and the world prepared for what may be the next world war. Unlike Dubai today, the city then was a small trading port and was a popular destination for tourists from the UK and Western Europe. As the threat of chemical and biological attacks throws her future into question, she becomes the lynchpin to the plans of an international arms dealer. Caught between her bosses and the intelligence agencies operating in the growing theater of war, her daring undertaking will impact her future and affect the direction of the impending Gulf War, thus having consequences for the world at large. Like the furtive figures who fight in the shadows for their beliefs and lives, no one will ever know what she risked and how wrong it could have gone.  

Women, it turns out, are uniquely suited to the covert operations that require intelligence, quick thinking, dexterity, and courage. They make friends easily and are good listeners. Strong analytical abilities and an intuitiveness about people are assets. A lifetime of navigating a world where they could be attacked in their homes, at work, or going for a jog teaches them to be hypervigilant. They know where the exits are, have a Plan B for most situations, and are practiced at making quick getaways. It is almost second nature at this point. They can fade into the background and are adept at hiding different facets of themselves.

My protagonist in Hope You Are Satisfied is forced to confront the absurdities and challenges that come from the world teetering on the cusp of a new global conflict while doing her day job. Like her, the women in these espionage narratives must make choices because of geo-political events and the manipulations of sometimes unknown, albeit powerful, decision-makers. Their stories, relating to being a woman in a particular kind of world, often contemplate ramifications of power, privilege, and gender, all while wrestling with complex moral calculations, family relationships, and unwanted emotions.

Julia Child had the right idea. After a period of vital, dangerous service for self and country, the simple pleasures of a glass of fine wine and a hearty boeuf bourguignon are well deserved.

Hope you are Satisfied by Tania Malik (Published by Verve Books) Out Now

Hope You Are Satisfied welcomes you to Dubai as you've never seen it before...

1990. Twenty-five-year-old Riya works for Discover Arabia, a tour guide company in the far-flung outpost of Dubai. In the months leading up to the first Gulf War, the city's iconic skyline and global reputation are just a gleam in developers' eyes. For Riya, it's a desert purgatory that spreads out between her family back home in India and her unknown future. As political tensions run high, international arms dealers, American soldiers, CIA consultants, corrupt bosses and wayward vacationers all compete for Discover Arabia's attention. Meanwhile, Riya and her colleagues begin to plan their exit strategies. Will a favour from Dubai's most notorious fixer offer Riya the chance to fulfil her financial obligations and escape to the United States?

More information about the author can be found on her website. You can also find her on Instagram and ‘X’ @taniamalik and on Facebook.

Photograph© Paul Stonehouse

Jane Jesmond on what she likes best about writing.

What bits do I love writing most? It's a question that crops up from time to time and it's pretty tricky to answer because I love everything about writing crime fiction: plotting the twists and turns; inventing perilous situations for my characters to escape from; exploring interesting places for settings. Or at least I love it when the words are flowing!

But if you put a gun to my head and told me I had to choose, I would say that it's writing the characters and their relationships with each other that I get the most pleasure from. There's nothing to beat that moment when I suddenly feel I know a character better than my friends and family. When I know what they'll say or do or react without having to think too much about it. 

I've always thought that moment arrives because I put a lot of background work into developing characters - coming up with life histories, asking them questions and searching for pictures that convey some aspect of them - all to ensure that their actions and reactions are true to themselves or making sure there's a consistency running through them.

So I was a bit disconcerted when an interviewer asked me the following about Phiney, the often-grumpy nurse whose grandad dies in mysterious circumstances at the start of my latest book A Quiet Contagion. 

Tell me about Phiney, the interviewer said, she's a bundle of contradictions isn't she? And she went on to list all the inconsistencies in Phiney's character. 

After I'd spent the obligatory 10 minutes panicking that I'd got it all wrong, I made myself think a bit more calmly. It is true Phiney is contradictory and conflicted. She obsesses about living a chemical-free life while administering toxic drugs as an oncology nurse. She is judgmental (internally anyway) about other people while giving in to her own worst failings. But aren't we all contradictory? Isn't that what makes Phiney so human? So relatable? 

There's often a conflict between what we'd like to do and what we actually do. We behave differently according to the situation we find ourselves in. I have 100 times more patience in a professional situation than I do with my family. And while we're thinking about family, how many parents have been pleasantly surprised when an acquaintance has described their sulky, stroppy teenager as charming or considerate?

Maybe I had got it right after all! The development work, the histories, the interviews and pictures were part of the process leading up to the point where I'd immersed myself in Phiney's character enough for instinct to take over. Because so much of writing is instinctive - or at least it is for me. I do the background work. I plan. I produce spread sheets and use post it notes. I write brain maps. But, in the end, it comes down to the words that come out of my head and appear on the page as I'm writing and I often don't quite know where they come from. 

The Quiet Contagion by Jane Jesmond. (Verve Books) Out Now

Six decades. Seven people. One unspeakable secret. 1957. A catastrophe occurs at the pharmaceutical lab in Coventry where sixteen-year-old Wilf is working for the summer. A catastrophe that needs to be covered up at all costs. 2017. Phiney is shocked by the death of her grandfather, Wilf, who has jumped from a railway bridge at a Coventry station. Journalist Mat Torrington is the only witness. Left with a swarm of unanswered questions, Phiney, Mat and Wilf's wife, Dora, begin their own enquiries into Wilf's death. It is soon clear that these two events, sixty years apart, are connected - and that Wilf is not the only casualty. But what is the link? And can they find out before any more lives are lost?

Jane Jesmond writes crime, thriller and mystery fiction. Her debut novel, On The Edge – the first in a series featuring dynamic, daredevil protagonist Jen Shaw – was a Sunday Times Best Crime Fiction of the Month pick. The sequel, Cut Adrift, was selected as a Times Thriller of the Month and a Sunday Times Book of the Year upon its publication. Jesmond also recently published Her, a speculative standalone novel, with Storm Publishers. A Quiet Contagion is a brand-new standalone and her third book with VERVE Books. 

Wish You Were Here: A Journey from Expensive Holiday Resorts to the English Seaside

My novel Wish You Were Here borrows its title from an 80s holiday programme. This featured middle-class presenters who travelled to exotic destinations and reported back to the cold, wet UK. For most people I knew, this was aspirational telly, none of us having anywhere near the money to travel to these places. This didn’t stop us from watching and fantasising. Wishing we were there. They travelled to Praia de la Luz or, as the presenter called it ‘Luge’. I remember the strangeness of the town’s name on her tongue and her incredible tan and how hot and ridiculously foreign the beach looked. It looked like paradise. 

The next time I saw the resort, though, it was not paradise but the scene of a worst nightmare; the disappearance of a young child. The resort felt vaguely familiar as I watched but I didn’t make the connection right away. That came, years later, when I watched a documentary about Madeleine McCann as part of the research for my novel about a missing girl and it included a clip. My memories of watching it at the time came flooding back and from that moment onwards, I knew the title of my book. There’s an 80’s TV connection in the storyline, too, so it made perfect sense. 

The longer I lived with the title, the more it meant. My fictional child was a working-class girl from a single parent family and disappears from the English seaside, a deliberate contrast. So, my title references those English seaside postcards, too. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to write about a missing child from this kind of background. As a writer, you’re encouraged to show rather than tell and I wanted people to feel this experience, to feel the injustice that I felt about the way society, the media and, these days, people on social media treat and judge people differently based on a number of prejudices. I’d read Chavs by Owen Jones years before and was struck by the stark contrast he highlights between the way Madeleine’s disappearance was covered compared to that of Shannon Matthews. He even puts a number on the concern shown for the two girls, pointing out that the rewards offered for information leading to their return valued Madeleine’s life fifty times higher than Shannon’s. 

Madeleine had been missing nine months when Shannon disappeared and yet still dominated the front pages, with Shannon featured in minor columns of the same newspapers. The shameless and not entirely unconscious class bias of opinion columns at the time is chilling to read back on. The general take on Madeleine’s case appeared to be ‘this shouldn’t happen to families like us’ and there was even a revealing comment about the resort itself not being a place you would expect to meet ‘the kind of people who wallop their weeping kids in Sainsbury’s’. Apparently, not. Just the kind of people who leave their kids home alone while they go out drinking with their mates, then. 

Inequalities in our society play out in a heartbreaking way via the efforts we make to find our missing children. This was shown starkly in one of the documentaries I watched, a stream of photos of local children who’d gone missing in Portugal around the same time as Madeleine, whose names and photos I had never seen before. Recent research found that missing persons cases in the UK where the victim was Black or Asian were significantly less likely to be solved, the victims less likely to be flagged as at risk or vulnerable even when they clearly were. Such things fall sadly for me under the heading ‘shocking but not surprising’. Systemic racism has been an issue in the UK police force for years, and it’s something I explore in my books via Sian’s partner Kris, a serving Black police officer. 

Of course, what happened next in the Shannon Matthews case neatly fitted the media’s narrative of a ‘shameless’ underclass. But that doesn’t change the stark contrast in the way the girl’s disappearance was covered by the media before any of this was known. An even starker contrast is seen when you look at the lack of column inches given to the disappearance of five-year-old Elizabeth Ogungbayibi, who disappeared the year before the two white girls. I’m sure we care about all the missing children but it’s also a fact that we continue to demonstrate that we care about some of them more. 

Nicola Monaghan is the author of Wish You Were Here published by VERVE Books

DNA doesn't lie. But what if the truth is dangerous?DNA expert Dr Sian Love has settled into running her own investigative agency and living with her partner, Kris. She's also started seeing a therapist to work through her traumatic history - a big step for Sian. Then a teenage girl brings chaos to Sian's office door. She claims to be Courtney Johnson - a child who went missing from a Brighton beach over fifteen years ago - but refuses to let Sian test her DNA. Wary but intrigued, Sian reluctantly revives the undercover skills she learned during her police force days and begins investigating. But revisiting the past has consequences...

Forthcoming books from Verve Books

February 2023 

Cut A Drift is by Jane Jesmond. Risk everything, trust no one. Jen Shaw is climbing in the mountains near Alajar, Spain. And it's nothing to do with the fact that an old acquaintance suggested that she meet him there... But when things don't go as planned and her brother calls to voice concerns over the whereabouts of their mother, Morwenna, Jen finds herself travelling to a refugee camp on the south coast of Malta. Free-spirited and unpredictable as ever, Morwenna is working with a small NGO, helping her Libyan friend, Nahla, seek asylum for her family. Jen is instantly out of her depth, surrounded by stories of unimaginable suffering and increasing tensions within the camp. Within hours of Jen's arrival, Nahla is killed in suspicious circumstances, and Jen and Morwenna find themselves responsible for the safety of her daughters. But what if the safest option is to leave on a smuggler's boat?

March 2023

By Way of Sorrow is by Robyn Gigl. Erin McCabe has been referred the biggest case of her career. Four months ago, William E. Townsend Jr, son of aNew Jersey State Senator, was found fatally stabbed in a rundown motel near Atlantic City. Sharise Barnes, a nineteen year-old transgender sex worker, is in custody, and given the evidence, there seems little doubt of a guilty verdict.As a trans woman herself, Erin knows that defending Sharise will blow her own private life wide open and doubtless deepen her estrangement from her family. Yet she feels uniquely qualified to help Sharise and duty-bound to protecther from the possibility of a death sentence. Because Sharise admits she killed the senator's son - in self-defense.As Erin works with her law partner, former FBI agent Duane Swisher, to build a case, Senator Townsend begins usingthe full force of his prestige and connections to publicly discredit everyone involved in defending Sharise. And behindthe scenes, his tactics are even more dangerous. For his son had secrets that could destroy the Senator's own political aspirations – secrets worth killing for.

April 2023

Wish You Were Here is by Nicola Monaghan. DNA doesn't lie. But what if the truth is dangerous? DNA expert Dr Sian Love has settled into running her own investigative agency and living with her partner, Kris. She's also started seeing a therapist to work through her traumatic past - a big step for Sian. Her life threatens to descend into chaos again when a teenage girl shows up at her office claiming to be Courtney Johnson - a child who went missing in Nottingham over fifteen years ago - but refusing to let Sian test her DNA. Wary but intrigued, Sian reluctantly revives the undercover skills she learned during her days as a police officer and begins investigating. But revisiting the past has consequences...

November 2023

A Secret may be kept if , if all but one are dead. 1957 a catastrophe occurs at the pharmaceutical lab in Coventry where sixteen year old Wilif is working for the summer. A Secret may be kept if , if all but one are dead. A catastrophe that needs to be covered up at all costs. 2017. Phiney is schocked when her grandfather, Wilif dies after jumping from the bridge at Tile Hile Station. Journalist Mat Torrington is the only witness. Left in utter disbelief, with a swarm of unanswered questions, Phiney, Mat and Wilf's wife, Dora, begin their own enquiries into Wilf's death. It's soon clear that that these two events sixty years apart, are connected – and that Wilf is not the only casualty. But what is the link? And can they find out before their own lives are lost. A Quiet Contagion is by Jane Jesmond.

December 2023

Attorney and LGBTQ+ activist Robyn Gigl tackles the complexities of gender, power, public perception, and human trafficking with a ripped-from-the-headlines plot in her second legal thriller featuring Erin McCabe, a protagonist who, like the author, is a transgender attorney. Now she and her law partner are drawn into a dark world of offshore bank accounts, computer hacking, murder, and the devastating impact of sexual abuse... At first, the death of millionaire businessman Charles Parsons seems like a straightforward suicide. There's no sign of forced entry or struggle in his lavish New Jersey mansion--just a single gunshot wound from his own weapon. But days later, a different story emerges. Computer techs pick up a voice recording that incriminates Parsons' adoptive daughter, Ann, who duly confesses and pleads guilty. Erin McCabe has little interest in reviewing such a slam-dunk case--even after she has a mysterious meeting with one of the investigating detectives, who reveals that Ann, like Erin, is a trans woman. Yet despite their misgivings, Erin and her law partner, Duane Swisher, ultimately can't ignore the pieces that don't fit. As their investigation deepens, Erin and Swish convince Ann to withdraw her guilty plea. But Ann clearly knows more than she's willing to share, even if it means a life sentence. Who is she protecting, and why? Fighting against time and a prosecutor hell-bent on notching another conviction, the two work tirelessly--Erin inside the courtroom, Swish in the field--to clear Ann's name. But despite Parsons' former associates' determination to keep his--and their own--illegal activities buried, a horrifying truth emerges--a web of human exploitation, unchecked greed, and murder. Soon, a quest to see justice served becomes a desperate struggle to survive. Survivors Guilt is by Robyn Gigl

When real crimes ‘spark’ novel ideas by Sherryl Clark

 

I often wonder how many crime writers, like me, turn to the pages of the newspaper first that deal with crime reports and investigative articles on real life murders. One of my longtime favourite crime reporters is John Silvester, at The Age in Melbourne, who has a weekly column called “The Naked City” (and a fascinating podcast as well).

It was from Silvester’s early books, co-written with fellow journalist Andrew Rule, that the first ideas and sparks came for my crime novel, Trust Me, I’m Dead. They wrote extensively about the Melbourne Gangland Wars in which over 20 people were murdered, but the ones that stuck with me the most were those where innocent women and children were killed or were witnesses.

One of these was Jane Thurgood-Dove, shot in her driveway in front of her kids – for no apparent reason. She had no gangland connections at all. It took a long time before police discovered the actual hit was supposed to be on another woman, wife of an underworld gangster, who lived up the street. And who in Melbourne could forget the brazen shotgun and pistol murders of Jason Moran and Pat Barbaro in a van in which five kids were sitting in the back seat? Two of them were Moran’s twin children.

Up until then, many people in Melbourne figured if crims were knocking each other off in a war, who really cared? But after these killings, things changed, not least the intensity of police actions to quell the war. In my novel, this idea that innocent women and children get caught up in violence through no fault of their own plays out through Judi Westerholme’s brother, who is murdered despite appearing to have changed his life and started again. Answering the question of why becomes vital so Judi can save her own life and that of her niece.

When it came to writing Mad, Bad and Dead, another crime against a woman and child was like a nagging tug at the back of my mind. Vicki Jacobs, who was living in country Victoria in 1999, was shot in the head and body while lying in her bed. Police said it was a cold-blooded execution. The most horrific part of this was that Ms Jacob’s six-year-old son was asleep next to her when it happened. As well, a young niece was sleeping in another room. That callous murder and trying to imagine what the children went through sparked the initial chapters of Mad, Bad and Dead.

It was believed that Ms Jacobs’ murder was in retaliation for her testifying against her ex-husband who had murdered two mechanics in South Australia. The court was told the murders were ordered on behalf of the Hells Angels motorbike club. Ms Jacobs had been offered police protection, but felt she didn’t want her young son to grow up away from family and friends.

For my novel, rather than follow the realities of this case, I used it as an inspiration. It meant I needed to come up with my own motive for the murder of my character, Kate, which of course included finding a credible villain and plenty of red herrings. I sometimes feel like a magpie, with a huge box of cuttings from newspapers and a number of true crime books to delve into for sparkers (I find the ones that are collections of newspaper articles the best. 

In looking for good villains this time, it was a saying that nagged at me – “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. I discovered a criminal, Christopher Binse, who called himself “Badness” (a nickname given to him in jail) and at one point, put a public notice to police in the newspaper saying, “Badness is back”. He also used to send Christmas cards to police signed Badness. Binse is an intriguing subject, seeming to have no qualms about enjoying himself while he robbed banks and carried out other armed robberies. He was put in a boys’ home when he was 14, deemed “uncontrollable”, and abused and beaten while there. Now 53, he’s been inside for 36 of the last 40 years, often in solitary confinement and at one point, in shackles.

Binse doesn’t feature in Mad, Bad and Dead at all, but he partly inspired my hitman, as have others who kill for money. That chilling ability to murder or commit crimes with no regret or compunction is something that sends a shudder through us all. One police officer said of Binse, “I would be genuinely frightened if I saw him on the street.”

As for “mad, bad and dangerous to know”? It’s believed to have first been said by Lady Caroline Lamb to describe Lord Byron. The mind works in mysterious ways!

Mad, Bad and Dead by Sheryl Clark (published by Verve Books) Out Now

A dead employee. A missing child. Anonymous phone calls in the dead of night. Judi Westerholme's troubles aren't over yet...  Already struggling to juggle co-running the local pub along with her new childcare responsibilities for her orphaned niece, Judi does not need her life to become any more complicated. Yet, as usual, complications arrive in spades: she starts receiving threatening, late-night phone calls before discovering one of her employees, Kate, shot dead. Judi finds herself caught up in a murder investigation, as well as the hunt for the Kate's fourteen year-old daughter, who has been missing since the murder. Add in the uncertainty of her relationship with Melbourne-based D.S. Heath and the fact that her estranged mother's nursing home keeps urging her to visit, and Judi might finally be at breaking point.

Kathy Wang on Imposter Syndrome

 

The concept for Impostor Syndrome is simple. It asks: what if one of the world's most powerful female technology executives was in fact a foreign spy?

The spy in my novel is a woman named Julia Lerner. Julia’s the COO of Tangerine, a social media and internet giant. When she was placed in the US, Julia’s handlers thought she’d just have a sort of middle class life in the Bay Area. So her ascension to her current level is really a result of her own work and skill.

What the book explores then, is what happens when Julia’s asked to put her job and position in danger, in order to fulfil the requests from the motherland. As by this time, Julia has made for herself an incredible life in the United States: lots of money, an important job where she’s fawned over, a very handsome new husband. Does she put that all at risk and obey orders? Or try and wrest back some control from her handlers?

At the same time, there is a lower level employee at Tangerine, Alice Lu, who one day comes across some unusual activity with the servers. Alice starts to try and figure out who might be stealing data from the company, and that starts a cat and mouse chase between the two women.

This book explores ideas around motherhood, career, money, internet privacy, and espionage - all topics I am interested in. However it is also a love letter to democracy. My parents were immigrants from Taiwan, and they always reminded me that regardless of the many flaws of the US, it was one of the greatest countries on earth. And I wanted to explore that in the novel, the idea that yes, we have these agencies like the CIA and the FBI but that in fact one of our most powerful tools for our national security is that we have democratic processes, we have freedom of speech, we have people from all over the world who come and live here. Alice is herself an immigrant from China, a country that in real life is having escalating tensions with the United States - but in this case, she is the one actually chasing Julia, who is the Russian agent. And Julia herself is conflicted, because deep down she really likes her life in California. She likes her beautiful house. She likes her husband. She likes living as an American as it were, with all its freedoms.

Kathy Wang is the author of Impostor Syndrome (VERVE Books) Out Now

Julia Lerner is one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley and an icon to professional women across the country. She is the COO of Tangerine, one of America's biggest technology companies. She is also a Russian spy. Julia has been carefully groomed to reach the upper echelons of the company and use Tangerine's software to covertly funnel information back to Russia's largest intelligence agency. Alice Lu works as a low-level analyst within Tangerine, having never quite managed to climb the corporate ladder. One afternoon, when performing a server check, Alice discovers some unusual activity and is burdened with two powerful but distressing suspicions: Tangerine's privacy settings aren't as rigorous as the company claims they are and the person abusing this loophole might be Julia Lerner herself. Now, she must decide what to do with this information - before Julia finds out she has it.

More information about Kathy Wang and her work can be found on her website. You can also follow her on Twitter @bykathywang. 

How a Small Nevada Town Inspired a Crime Novel by Heather Young

 

One hundred miles east of Reno, Nevada, there is a town. You can’t see it from Interstate 80, but I stumbled upon it one day when the pumps at the Exit 105 Chevron were broken. Lovelock, it’s called. “Lock Your Love in Lovelock,” says the billboard on the interstate. As I drove its short main street I slowed the car. I tried to imagine why 1,847 people might choose to live there, in the middle of the desert, so far from anyone else. 

This wasn’t unusual for me; I’ve always been fascinated by small towns. I grew up in a subdivision, but my parents grew up in picture-perfect Midwestern villages, with elm-shaded streets and white-painted bandstands. Each summer we visited my father’s hometown, and I walked to the soda counter and swam in the community pool. It was a theme park version of the perfect childhood, and when we left I’d feel cheated. My parents had had that life. Why couldn’t I?

Then, when I was in high school, my mother said she wanted us to move back to Iowa, and suddenly I could imagine nothing worse than living in those cornfields, far from the malls and multiplexes of my teenaged suburban world. You’ll be Homecoming Queen, my mother promised, as though there were nothing better than being Homecoming Queen in a small Iowa town, and I realized the nostalgia I’d always heard in her voice was really regret. She’d never wanted to leave. But my father had always wanted to live in the wider world, so we didn’t go back. And ever since, I have driven slowly through small towns. I think about my mother, who wanted to stay, and my father, who wanted to leave. I think of my own internal conflict: my heart is drawn to the slow beats of these lovely pastoral villages even as my mind revels in the kinetic energy of the large city where I’ve chosen to live instead.

Lovelock, though, is not a lovely pastoral village. It’s an unsightly scab on a bleak landscape. Its drab commercial buildings house pawn shops and slot casinos. Its houses are small and nondescript, with sandy lots and concrete sidewalks cooking in the sun. Yet its existence out there in the desert struck me as kind of wonderful, as if I’d found a secret pocket in the lining of a raggedy coat. I’d assumed the appeal of small towns lay in their quiet beauty: in grassy town squares, white-steepled churches, and graceful homes with wraparound porches. But it couldn’t be beauty that kept people in Lovelock. I knew that someday, I would set a story there. 

The Distant Dead is that story. It’s about a man who moves to Lovelock seeking sanctuary only to meet death at the hands of the demons he tried to outrun. It’s about a woman who feels trapped in the town where she was born, and a young boy, burdened with a terrible secret, who wants a place to belong. All three wrestle with the idea of home: what it means, how much it matters, and whether it’s possible to leave it and start fresh. Through their interwoven stories, I examine the mystery at the heart of the question I’ve asked myself my whole life: how the same small town can offer succor to one person and feel like a cage to another.

The answer, it turns out, lies in the human connections that are only possible in small towns. The bartender at the Whiskey Barrel on Main Street explained it when she told me how she’d married her high school boyfriend, followed him while he served in the Army, then moved back with him when his tour was over. There are prettier places, she allowed. But they wanted to raise their children alongside people they’d known since they were born. The owner of the town’s only coffee shop echoed her. She knew the town was struggling, but her family had been there since the beginning. Leaving would feel like a betrayal. Anyone else in Lovelock would tell you the same thing: they don’t stay because they like the weather. They stay because their people are there. Their history is there. Their dead are there. 

That’s also, of course, why they leave. Because for some, the fact that their name makes everyone in their town nod in recognition is a claustrophobic horror, and the generations that came before are not a legacy to be honored but a haunting to be outrun. 

But whether they stay or go, they will always feel the weight of home in a way I never will. My investigation of this one small town taught me that this—the birthright my parents denied me when they left Iowa--is why I’m fascinated by all such places. I will never be known the way my parents were. Nor will I ever know anyone else as deeply or effortlessly as the people in Lovelock know one another. I desperately wish I had had that opportunity. I’m profoundly grateful I did not. And so I will always drive slowly through small towns, feeling envy and relief in equal measure. 

The Distant Dead by Heather Young (Verve Books) Out Now

A body burns in the desert... Does the boy who found it know more than it seems Sal Prentiss, orphaned and burdened with a terrible secret, just wants a place to belong. Sal lives with his uncles on a desolate ranch in the hills, and finds himself at the centre of a brutal murder mystery when he discovers the body of his maths teacher, charred almost beyond recognition, half a mile from his uncles' compound. In the seven months he worked at Lovelock's middle school, the quiet and seemingly unremarkable Adam Merkel had formed a bond with Sal and was one of the few people to look out for the boy. Nora Wheaton, the school's social studies teacher, sensed a kindred spirit in Adam - another soul bound to Lovelock by guilt and duty. After his death, she delves into his past for clues to who killed him. For Sal's grief seems shaded with fear, and Nora suspects he knows more than he's telling about his teacher's death.

Books to Look Forward to From No Exit Press (Incl Oldcastle Books & Verve)

 February 2022

Berlin, 1989. Anne Simpson, an American who works as a translator at the Joint Operations Refugee Committee, thinks she is in a normal marriage with a charming East German. But then her husband disappears and the CIA and Western German intelligence arrive at her door. Nothing about her marriage is as it seems. Anne had been targeted by the Matchmaker - a high level East German counterintelligence officer - who runs a network of Stasi agents. These agents are his 'Romeos' who marry vulnerable women in West Berlin to provide them with cover as they report back to the Matchmaker. Anne has been married to a spy, and now he has disappeared, and is presumably dead. The CIA are desperate to find the Matchmaker because of his close ties to the KGB. They believe he can establish the truth about a high-ranking Soviet defector. They need Anne because she's the only person who has seen his face - from a photograph that her husband mistakenly left out in his office - and she is the CIA's best chance to identify him before the Matchmaker escapes to Moscow. Time is running out as the Berlin Wall falls and chaos engulfs East Germany. But what if Anne's husband is not dead? And what if Anne has her own motives for finding the Matchmaker to deliver a different type of justice? The Matchmaker is by Paul Vidich. 

March 2022

Shoot The Moonlight Out is by William Boyle. Southern Brooklyn, July 1996. Fire hydrants are open and spraying water on the sizzling blacktop. Punk kids have to make their own fun. Bobby Santovasco and his pal Zeke like to throw rocks at cars getting off the Belt Parkway. They think it's dumb and harmless until it's too late to think otherwise. Then there's Jack Cornacchia, a widower who lives with his high school age daughter Amelia and reads meters for Con Ed but also has a secret life as a vigilante, righting neighbourhood wrongs through acts of violence. A simple mission to strong-arm a Bay Ridge con man, Max Berry, leads him to cross paths with a tragedy that hits close to home.  Fast forward five years: June 2001. The summer before New York City and the world changed for good. Charlie French is a low-level gangster-wannabe trying to make a name for himself. When he stumbles onto a bowling alley locker stuffed with a bag full of cash, he brings it to his only pal, Max Berry, for safekeeping while he cleans up the mess surrounding it. Bobby Santovasco - with no real future mapped out and the big sin of his past shining brightly in his rearview mirror - has taken a job working as an errand boy for Max Berry. On a recruiting run for Max's Ponzi scheme, Bobby meets Francesca Clarke, born in the neighbourhood but an outsider nonetheless. They hit it off. Bobby gets the idea to knock off Max's safe so he and Francesca can escape Brooklyn forever. Little does he know what Charlie French has stashed there. Meanwhile, Bobby's former stepsister, Lily Murphy, is back home in the neighbourhood after college, teaching a writing class in the basement of St. Mary's church. She's also being stalked by her college boyfriend. One of her students is Jack Cornacchia. When she opens up to him about her stalker, Jack decides to take matters into his own hands.

April 2022

A Dangerous Language is by Sulari Gentill. When Rowland Sinclair volunteers his services as a pilot to fly the renowned international peace advocate, Egon Kisch, between Freemantle and Melbourne, he is unaware of how hard Australia's new Attorney General will fight to keep the reporter off Australian soil. In this, it seems, the government is not alone, as clandestine right-wing militias target Kisch...A Communist agent is murdered on the steps of Parliament House and Rowland finds himself drawn into a dangerous world of politics and assassination. Once again, he stands against the unthinkable with an artist, a poet and brazen sculptress by his side...

'When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw' - Nelson Mandela. 1964, Apartheid South Africa. Danie du Plessis, the son of a conservative Afrikaner family, is poised to start a glittering legal academic career at one of South Africa\'s leading universities, when he falls in love with a student, Amy Coetzee. But there\'s a problem: he\'s white, she\'s not. Facing arrest, imprisonment and ruin, the couple flee South Africa, and settle in Cambridge, where friends find them positions at the University. They marry and have two children, and have seemingly put the past, and South Africa, behind them. But in 1968 Art Pienaar enters their lives, and, insisting that they have a duty to fight back, enlists their help in increasingly dangerous schemes to undermine the South African regime. When Pienaar and a notorious drug dealer, Vince Cummings, are found murdered together, Danie\'s activities come to light, and he and his family find themselves in mortal danger. Danie is also threatened with criminal prosecution on behalf of a government desperate to maintain good relations with the apartheid regime. Danie knows he\'s sailed close to the wind. But has he become an outlaw? Can Ben Schroeder persuade a jury that the answer is no? To Become an Outlaw is by Peter Murphy. 

When Rowland Sinclair is invited to take his yellow Mercedes onto the Marouba Speedway, popularly known as the Killer Track, he agrees without caution or reserve.  But then people start to die... The body of a journalist covering the race is found in a House of Horrors, an English blue blood with Blackshirt affiliations is killed on the race track... and it seems that someone has Rowland in their sights... With danger presenting at every turn, and the brakes long since disengaged, Rowland Sinclair hurtles towards disaster with an artist, a poet and brazen sculptress along for the ride. Give The Devil His Due is by Sulari Gentill.

All The Tears in China is by Sulari Gentill. Shanghai in 1935 is a 20th century Babylon, an expatriate playground where fortunes are made and lost, where East and West collide, and the stakes include life itself. Into this cultural melting pot, Rowland Sinclair arrives from Sydney to represent his brother at international wool negotiations. The black sheep of the family, Rowland is under strict instructions to commit to nothing - but a brutal murder makes that impossible. As suspicion falls on him, Rowland enters a desperate bid to find answers in a city ruled by taipans and tycoons, where politics and vice are entwined with commerce, and where the only people he can truly trust are his long-term friends, an artist, a poet and a free-spirited sculptress.

May 2022

Robert B Parker's Stone's Throw is by Mike Lupica. The town of Paradise receives a tragic shock when the mayor is discovered dead, his body lying in a shallow grave on a property on the lake. It's ostensibly suicide, but Jesse has his doubts... especially because the piece of land where the man was found is the subject of a contentious and dodgy land deal. Two powerful moguls are fighting over the right to buy and develop the prime piece of real estate, and one of them has brought in a hired gun, an old adversary of Jesse's: Wilson Cromartie, aka Crow. Meanwhile, the town council is debating if they want to sacrifice Paradise's stately character for the economic boost of a glitzy new development. Tempers are running hot, and as the deaths begin to mount, it's increasingly clear that the mayor may have standing in the wrong person's way.

A Character in Search of a Story

Driving home late on a blustery and rainy night, my route took me past the magnificent lighthouse at St Matthew's Point. Lighthouses are mysterious and wonderful constructions, prone to inspiring writers, which was maybe in the back of mind when I decided to stop and take a closer look. I'd just come to the depressing realisation that the first book I'd written was not going to be the one that catapulted me to the top of the Sunday Times Bestseller List. I was going to have to write another. Anyway the lighthouse did its magic for me that night, when the opening scene of On The Edge - a woman hanging, unconscious and dreaming from the viewing platform of a lighthouse with no idea how she got there - came to me. That opening scene has never changed although its writing has improved over the years it took me to finish the book. 

My protagonist, Jenifry (Jen) Shaw must have been waiting for me at the lighthouse too, because she slipped into the car and started talking as I drove away. By the time I reached home I knew almost everything about her. And most important of all, I knew exactly how she spoke and if you know how a character speaks, you know how they think. Characters sometimes arrive more or less full formed to me - the ones that don't, I've learned how to work with to tease out - but none of them have sprung so full-bloodedly to life as Jen did that night. 

Anyway I had an opening scene and a character desperate to talk to me. What more did I need? I started writing the next day letting my imagination take me where it will and it took me to a lot of strange places. A few months later the first draft was on paper. A bit of tidying, no, a LOT of tidying and On The Edge Version ONE was ready for beta reading. I was still not that far along my 'learning to write' journey, so I honestly thought there'd be a bit of prose finessing to do and maybe a couple of scenes that didn't quite hit the mark. And I was ready to tackle them, to perfect my book before sending it out to the agents and publishers who I was sure would be eager to claim it for their own.

The truth when it came was difficult to swallow. While readers loved Jen, the plot left them cold. It was wild, they said. 'All over the place' is another phrase I remember. I took a deep breath - I am nothing if not tenacious - and rewrote. I eliminated the worst of the excesses: the woman who lived in a tree in Hyde Park; the stolen and hidden baby; and many other plot delights. Then I reread but even I could see what was left was no good, a weak tale, full of unlikely coincidences and plot holes. 

I despaired. I considered abandoning it. Everybody loved Jen. Everybody found the opening intriguing. There were some great sequences. And some of the characters were promising. But without the glue of a story to hold the whole thing together it was a waste of time. What I had wasn't a book but a character in search of a story.

It was time to learn the hard work of writing and I tried. I gobbled up every book I could find on structure. I became familiar with the three-act structure and the five-act, the hero's journey and meaning of midpoint and inciting event. I learned how to turn a scene and build tension. It was all fantastic stuff but none of it gave me Jen's story. 

A wise woman told me to stop worrying about plot and to trust my instincts again. I had an array of characters as well as Jen. Why didn't I work on them and see where that led me. I did as she suggested and plunged myself into background work on one the minor characters who was eluding me. This involved researching the history of tin mining in Cornwall - no hardship because it's an absolutely fascinating subject. While I was researching, I came across Rosevale Mine. It's a small mine, abandoned since before the first world war but in recent years a small band of volunteers has been restoring it using traditional methods - a long, hard tedious job. 

Something about the notion of a small group of people undertaking such a project lodged itself in my head - indeed I have since though that I could write a whole novel about it - and wouldn't let go. Eventually it showed me a whole different side to the character I was working on and from this came the germ of an idea for a different story. A simpler one, that somehow tied the characters, the setting and the action sequences together in a way my previous plot hadn't. 

This story lay underground in all senses of the word. In things hidden beneath the surface and in the dark. In private passions and secret motives. I itched to start writing but I stopped myself. Instead I mined its possibilities. I tracked and planned. I examined each idea and made sure it wasn't leading me down a dead end that I'd struggle to escape from. And then I wrote it. 

I'd love to tell you it was snapped up by a publisher straightaway but the truth is it still needed refining, developing and tightening, although the seam of story pinning it together has stayed the same. 

On The Edge taught me a lot about everything to do with writing and a lot about myself as a writer. How it's a mixture of sweat and inspiration, of unconscious connections sparking naturally but needing to be developed critically. And about how I struggled with the latter. 

On the Edge by Jane Jesmond. (Verve Books) Out Now.

Jen Shaw has climbed all her life: daring ascents of sheer rock faces, crumbling buildings, cranes - the riskier the better. Both her work and personal life revolved around climbing, and the adrenaline high it gave her. Until she went too far and hurt the people she cares about. So she's given it all up now. Honestly, she has. And she's checked herself into a rehab centre to prove it. Yet, when Jen awakens to find herself drugged and dangling off the local lighthouse during a wild storm less than twenty-four hours after a 'family emergency' takes her home to Cornwall, she needs all her skill to battle her way to safety. Has Jen fallen back into her old risky ways, or is there a more sinister explanation hidden in her hometown? Only when she has navigated her fragmented memories and faced her troubled past will she be able to piece together what happened - and trust herself to fix it.

More information about the author can be found on her website. You can also find her on Facebook and on Twitter @AuthorJJesmond