Tell me what inspired you to write about chocolate running out? The word ‘chocopocalypse’ popped into my head – I first wrote it as a hashtag on twitter at the end of one of my usual silly tweets. But I couldn’t get it out of my head and the story grew and grew. How hard […]

Tell me what inspired you to write perfect remains and perfect prey? I’ve always loved reading crime and thrillers, and given my career as a barrister it was natural ground for me. What I wanted to avoid was rewriting other detectives currently at the top of the genre, and it seemed to me that there […]

Tell me what inspired you to write your first book? I was working in Westminster. It is an incredible environment with thousands of people all operating in close quarters. I saw first-hand all the stories and characters that existed in that world. I knew some of those stories deserved to be told. No one else […]

Tell me, what inspired you to write about your latest book? I originally wrote these stories over 20 years ago to entertain my children on wet holiday afternoons in our caravan. Over the years I occasionally wondered if they might be publishable, and as it turned out they are. Do you try and read the […]

Tell me what inspired you to write about your latest book? It was actually a tweet. I probably can’t say what the tweet was without spoiling things, but I was sitting in a coffee shop with a notebook, doodling and playing with ideas. I knew I wanted to write something new and sci-fi-ish, but I […]

Tell me what inspired you to write about your latest book? The first spark for Sirens came when I was young and drunk, at a pill party in Manchester. No-one knew who owned the house and there was a lot of mystery about the man who did. There was talk of a girlfriend who’d vanished […]

Tell me what inspired you to write about your latest book? When I was eight, my lightkeeper Dad was posted to Tarbat Ness Lighthouse in North-east Scotland. This was the first time we’d ever lived actually at a lighthouse, and from the ages of eight to eleven it was the most amazing place to grow […]

Tell me what inspired you to write about your latest book? Liz & Kate: We were thinking about fairy tales, and how they could be inverted. So we came up with the idea of a male sleeping beauty. And then we decided to set the ‘fairy tale’ bit of the story in the past, so […]