Rebecca Alexander on Transforming a ghost story into procedural crime

From the very beginning, A Baby’s Bones was a crime story. Burial rites were very important in the Elizabethan era. Being denied a regular burial was a punishment, and the dumping of two people down a well suggested they had been murdered. Someone was trying to conceal the crime. I loved writing fantasy elements like the suggestion that the house is haunted, but at its heart, the book was about a possible crime far in the past. I leave it to the reader’s imagination to decide whether Solomon Seabourne’s efforts at alchemy had any effects, in the past or present.

The contemporary strand did have to change. I think investigating such brutal events must affect people working on it, and Sage and her students are overshadowed by the bones emerging from the well. The place, the story of the bodies and the associated burial tell a story that affects the people around it, from the family living in the cottage to the villagers. I’m not one of those writers who can plan meticulously, so the moment I started writing a scene in the sixteenth century cottage the atmosphere started to affect the story. I think the jury is still out on whether the house is haunted and whether it affected the behaviour of the people around it – I shall leave it to the readers to decide for themselves. But some people are vulnerable to atmosphere and to the violent events they are excavating.

I’m a big fan of crime, mostly (but not exclusively) by female authors. I want to understand what intersection of thinking and emotions cause people to commit crimes. When I was working as a psychologist I found people were often planning acts they had seriously considered, like the mercy killing of a sick or demented relative, for example, or even getting revenge on someone. They rarely acted on these impulses, but the idea was there. I wanted to explore the motivations of the different characters, from the deceived wife to the lovelorn man to the rejected lover. Why do people lose it and try and kill someone? Sometimes even the person themselves can’t understand after the red mist has cleared.

Researching the forensic side was fascinating. Val McDermid’s Forensics was an inspiration here, as well as texts on the work of forensic archaeology. Sage’s systematic consideration of the evidence as it’s revealed is very like solving a crime. Archaeologists find artefacts and interpret them in the same way that we form a theory of how a crime was committed. We’re all, as writers and readers, building stories as Sage shows us the evidence. Writing, for me, is like reading in slow motion, I don’t know what’s going to happen next either.

A Baby’s Bones by Rebecca Alexander (Titan Books)

Archaeologist Sage Westfield has been called in to excavate a sixteenth-century well, and expects to find little more than soil and the odd piece of pottery. But the disturbing discovery of the bones of a woman and new born baby make it clear that she has stumbled onto an historical crime scene, one that is interwoven with an unsettling local legend of witchcraft and unrequited love. Yet there is more to the case than a four-hundred-year-old mystery. The owners of a nearby cottage are convinced that it is haunted, and the local vicar is being plagued with abusive phone calls. Then a tragic death makes it all too clear that a modern murderer is at work...

Books to Look Forward to From Quercus, Riverrun and Maclehose Press

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July 2018

Captain Damian Seeker has gone north. Charged with preparing the way for the rule of the major generals, he is now under the command of Colonel Robert Lilburne at York. But when Lilburne orders him to a small village on the North York moors with details of the stringent new anti-Royalist laws, Seeker finds that what should be a routine visit will reveal a plot to rival anything in scheming London.  An invitation to dinner at the house of local businessman Matthew Pullan lifts the lid on the bubbling cauldron of grudges and resentment that is Faithly village. The local constable, drunk on the tiny bit of power he holds, using it to avenge old resentments. The hated lord of the manor, the last of a staunchly Royalist family who has managed to avoid suspicion of treachery - for now. The vicar on trial for his job and his home, accused of ungodly acts. And the Pullans themselves, proudly Puritan but disillusioned with Cromwell's government, respected and despised in Faithly in equal measure. The man for whom this unlikely gathering was organised - The Trier, the enforcer of Puritan morality for the local villages - hasn't shown up. And by the end of the night, on of those gathered around Matthew Pullan's table will be fatally poisoned.  Seeker must find out the motive behind the death - mushroom misidentification, petty revenge, or part of a larger plot against Cromwell's government in the north? But who in Faithly, if anyone, can he trust? And when the most painful part of his past reappears after eleven years, will the Seeker meet his match? Destroying Angel is by S G Maclean

Believe Me is by J P Delenay.  I'm just an actress. I wanted to stand on a stage and have people applaud. How on earth did I get into all this?Claire Wright likes to play other people. A struggling British actress, in New York without a green card, Claire needs work. She takes the only part she's offered: as a decoy for a firm of divorce lawyers, hired to entrap straying husbands, catching them on tape with their seductive propositions. The rules?  Never hit on them directly. Make it clear you're available, but they have to proposition you, not the other way around. The firm is after evidence, not entrapment. The innocent should have nothing to hide.  Then the game changes.  When the police start investigating one of Claire's targets for murdering his wife - and potentially others too - they ask her to help lure their suspect into a confession. Claire can do this. She assumes a voice and an attitude, something from an old film noir. A master class in deception. But who's deceiving who?  And that's when Claire realises she's playing the deadliest role of her life. 

July 1983, Essex. Fox Farm is, thanks to two corpses, neither picturesque nor peaceful. The body in its kitchen belongs to eminent historian Christopher Cliff, who has taken his own life with an antique shotgun. The second, found on the property boundary, remains unidentified.  DI Nick Lowry's summer is neither sleepy nor serene. And the two deaths are just the half of it. The fact County Chief Merrydown was a college friend of Cliff's means Lowry is now, in turn, under scrutiny from his severely stressed and singularly unsympathetic boss, Sparks.  To catalyse his investigation, Lowry enlists the services of DC Daniel Kenton and WPC Jane Gabriel. Gabriel needs direction, if she is to begin a career as a detective. While Kenton, who appears solely focused on beginning a relationship with Gabriel, needs distraction.  Both the heat and the investigation soon intensify. The team find themselves interrogating enigmatic neighbours, antiques merchants, jilted lovers and wronged relatives; all the while negotiating the caprices of Sparks - whose attitudes remain as dated as Fox Farm's antiques.  Only when they fully open their eyes and minds will they begin to unpick a web of rural rituals, dodgy dealings and fragmented families - and uncover not just one murder, but two.  Yellowhammer is by James Henry.

Stick Together is by Sophie Hénaff.  After their successful solving of three cold cases exposing corruption at the very highest level of the Paris police force, Anne Capestan's squad of misfits and no-hopers should be in a celebratory mood. However, now despised by their colleagues at 36 quai des Orfevres and worried for their future, morale has never been lower among the members of the Awkward Squad.and  Capestan does her best to motivate her troops, but even she cannot maintain a cheerful facade when she has to investigate the murder of Commissaire Serge Rufus, the father of her ex-husband. Worse, it soon appears that his murder is linked to two other victims, both of whom were warned by the killer before they struck . . .

August 2018

After an attempted assassination of a prominent minister goes spectacularly wrong, No sooner has Akyl Borubaev been reinstated as an Inspector in the Bishkek Murder Squad than he's suspended for alleged serious crimes against the state. Akyl is a fugitive from his former colleagues and involved with one of Kyrgyzstan's most dangerous criminals.  On the run, caught up in an illegal scheme that can only end badly, it's time for Akyl to take a stand for everything he believes in.  An Autumn Hunting is by Tom Callaghan.

A Summer of Murder is by Oliver Bottini.  When the fire brigade is called to a burning shed in the Black Forest idyll of Kirchzarten, a volunteer is killed as a weapons cache beneath it explodes. Louise Boni, back with Freiburg Kripo after treatment and recuperation for her alcoholism, is assigned to the task force dealing with this case. The meagre evidence they have points to a possible connection with German neo-Nazis or illegal arms dealers from the former Yugoslavia, while the arrival of secret service agents suggests more is at stake. For Louise to solve the riddle she needs to overcome the ghosts of her past that continue to haunt her.

September 2018

'Island of the Lost was the isle's name long before the hospital was built. In winter, they say the fog falls so heavy there that you can't see your hand in front of your face. Storms rage so forcefully you can be blown from the cliffs. Once St. Christina's was built, the name took on a new meaning. Very few who went into that place ever left.'

Christmas day, and DCI Tom Reynolds receives an alarming call. A mass grave has been discovered on Oilean na Caillte, the island which housed the controversial psychiatric institution St. Christina's. The hospital has been closed for decades and onsite graves were tragically common. Reynolds thinks his adversarial boss is handing him a cold case to side line him.  But then it transpires another body has been discovered amongst the dead - one of the doctors who went missing from the hospital in mysterious circumstances forty years ago. He appears to have been brutally murdered.  As events take a sudden turn, nothing can prepare Reynolds and his team for what they are about to discover once they arrive on the island . . . The Darkest Place is by Jo Spain. 

Alain Delambre is a 57-year-old former HR executive, drained by four years of hopeless unemployment.  All he is offered are small, demoralizing jobs. He has reached his very lowest ebb, and can see no way out.  So when a major company finally invites him to an interview, Alain Delambre is ready to do anything, borrow money, shame his wife and his daughters and even participate in the ultimate recruitment test: a role-playing game that involves hostage-taking.  Alain Delambre commits body and soul in this struggle to regain his dignity.  But if he suddenly realised that the dice had been loaded against him from the start, his fury would be limitless.  And what began as a role-play game could quickly become a bloodbath. Inhuman Resources is by Pierre Lemaitre.

October 2018

Leave No Trace is by Mindy Mejia. Ten years after a boy and his father went missing in the wilderness of Minnesota's Boundary Waters, the boy - who is no longer a boy - walks back out of the forest. He is violent and uncommunicative. The authorities take him to Congdon Mental Institution in Duluth, on the edge of mighty Lake Superior.There, language therapist Maya Stark is given the task of making a connection with this boy/man who came back from the dead. But their celebrity patient tries to escape and refuses to answer any questions about his father or the last ten years of his life. In many ways he is old far beyond his years; in others, still a child.  But Maya, who was abandoned by her own mother, has secrets, too. And as she's drawn closer to this enigmatic boy, she'll risk everything to reunite him with his father who has disappeared from the known world - but at what cost to herself?

The Burning House is by Neil Spring.  It was a victimless crime...  Estate Agent Clara is struggling to make a sale. With her abusive ex-husband on the brink of finding where she's hiding, she needs to make a commission soon or lose her chance to escape.  Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness has remained unsold for years, and Clara is sure that an 'innocent' fire will force the price down. But the perfect crime soon turns into the perfect nightmare: there was a witness, a stranger in the village, and he's not going to let Clara get away with it…. 

When one Israeli citizen disappears from Charles de Gaulle airport with a woman in a red dress, you could put it down to youthful indiscretion.   When a second from the same flight is disappeared from his hotel room by a girl with a gun, you might just have a diplomatic crisis on your hands.  Enter Colonel Abadi, recently appointed head of the special branch of Unit 8200, Israel's most secretive intelligence service.  His only allies are his deputy back in Israel, the dazzling and hot-headed Lieutenant Orianna Talmor, and a hungover French detective, hung out to dry by his superiors.  Together they face a squad of ruthless Chinese commandos who have no qualms about leaving Paris littered with bodies.  And then there are their enemies in the Paris establishment and the labyrinthine, back-stabbing Israeli intelligence community.  All in all, it could be a long night.  A Long Night in Paris by Dov Aflon.

November 2018

Bloodline is by Nigel McCrery. When Isabel, a British university student, travels to a remote Spanish town it isn't only to enjoy the atmosphere. It's also to trace how and why her family name might have derived from the town, a quest her father, Sebastian made nine years ago, not long before his death in a car accident. But as Isabel, aided by local guide Mauricio, starts digging into her family's possible links with Alarcon, she's unprepared for the dark secrets uncovered; secrets that the current ruling nobility of Alarcon are keen to keep buried.Ten days into her stay in Alarcon, Isabel mysteriously disappears, presumed dead. Inspector Mark Lapslie and DC Emma Bradbury are sent out to investigate alongside the local Spanish police. A possible gangland link is suspected - Isabel's stepfather in Valencia is a retired British gangster and a mob-hitman from Malaga is identified in Alarcon at the time of Isabel's disappearance. But Mauricio, suspects the Mayor's son, Dario, is the real culprit - to uncover the truth, Lapslie and Bradbury must delve into the murky, chequered past of Isabel's gangland stepfather while also following in her footsteps through Alarcon's dark and tempestuous history.

Clare Cassidy is no stranger to murder. As a literature teacher specialising in the Gothic writer RM Holland, she teaches a short course on it every year. Then Clare's life and work collide tragically when one of her colleagues is found dead, a line from an RM Holland story by her body. The investigating police detective is convinced the writer's works somehow hold the key to the case.  Not knowing who to trust, and afraid that the killer is someone she knows, Clare confides her darkest suspicions and fears about the case to her journal. Then one day she notices some other writing in the diary. Writing that isn't hers...  The Stranger Diaries is by Elly Griffiths.

December 2018

Village of Lost Girls is by Augustín Martínez.  Five years after their disappearance, the village of Monteperdido still mourns the loss of Ana and Lucia, two eleven-year-old friends who left school one afternoon and were never seen again. Now, Ana reappears unexpectedly inside a crashed car, wounded but alive and next to the body of a man.While the people of the village struggle to comprehend the startling turn of events, the case reopens and a race against time begins to discover the identity of the dead man and who was behind the girls' kidnapping. Most importantly, where is Lucia and is she still alive? Inspector Sara Campos and her boss Santiago Bain, who are called in from Madrid's head office, are forced to work with the local police. Five years ago fatal mistakes were made in the investigation conducted after the girls first vanished, and this mustn't happen again. But Monteperdido has rules of its own.

Books to Look Forward to from John Murray Press

June 2018

This is What Happened is by Mick Herron.  Something's happened.  A lot of things have happened.  If she could turn back time, she wondered how far she would go.  Twenty-six-year-old Maggie Barnes is someone you would never look at twice. Living alone in a month-to-month sublet in London, with no family but an estranged sister, no boyfriend or partner, and not much in the way of friends, Maggie is just the kind of person who could vanish from the face of the earth without anyone taking notice.  Or just the kind of person MI5 needs to thwart an international plot that puts all of Britain at risk.  Now one young woman has the chance to be a hero - if she can think quickly enough to stay alive.

October 2018

At a restaurant in Sloane Square, a politician confides to journalist Jon Swift that he is concerned for his own safety; a few months later he is found dead in his flat. But when the police and even Swift's paper refuse to investigate the death further, he must take matters into his own hands.  Soon Swift finds himself hunting down the killers on a global scale and, between MI5 and Russian thugs, a suspicious death in London unravels into an international conspiracy that stretches all the way to the Kremlin.  On their trail, it's not long before Swift becomes a target himself . . .Moscow Midnight is by John Swift.

November 2018

Old spooks carry the memory of tradecraft in their bones, and when Solomon Dortmund  sees an envelope being passed from one pair of hands to another in a Marylebone cafe, he knows he's witnessed more than an innocent encounter. But in relaying his suspicions to John Bachelor, who babysits retired spies like Solly, he sets in train events which will alter lives. Bachelor himself, a hair's breadth away from sleeping in his car, is clawing his way back to stability; Hannah Weiss, the double agent whose recruitment was his only success, is starting to enjoy the secrets and lies her role demands; and Lech Wicinski, an Intelligence Service analyst, finds that a simple favour for an old acquaintance might derail his career. Meanwhile, Lady Di Taverner is trying to keep the Service on an even keel, and if that means throwing the odd crew member overboard, well: collateral damage is her speciality.  A drop, in spook parlance, is the passing on of secret information.  It's also what happens just before you hit the ground.  The Drop is by Mick Herron