I tend to set my novels in places that are familiar to me from my own life – places where I’ve lived or worked, where I’ve visited many times or have a family connection. Over the course of nine books I’ve gone from London to Nottingham, taking in Derbyshire, southern Buckinghamshire, Bath and Reading along the way.

So when I first conceived my new thriller, I knew it would start in the beautiful surroundings of the Yorkshire Dales. As a family, we’ve been to the Dales many times during the New Year break – just like Helen, Jason and their friends do at the start of The Weekend.

Luckily we’ve got a stack of photo albums from our visits to Hebden, Pateley Bridge, Grassington, Keldy Forest, Darley and many other places, which gave me a head start when I was doing location research. I’ve also been able to look back on home videos that I shot at the time that capture the landscape, the walks and the wild, rugged beauty of the Dales.

Some of my other research was a little trickier – like finding out how an average person might go about laundering a large amount of money. With each book, there aways tends to be research into various criminal activities, but I can’t reveal too much more about that yet without giving away plot spoilers…

One of our winter walks in the Yorkshire Dales

I’m pleased to report that I’ve now completed the structural edit on The Weekend. It’s a stage of the process that can take a while because it means fixing issues with the plot, with key characters and the overall arc of the story. There are at least two more stages to work through yet – a line edit followed by a copy edit – but each one should take less time than the last (in theory).

The morning after pressing send to ping the manuscript back to my editor, I was on a train up to Stirling to take part in the Bloody Scotland crime fiction festival. It was a brilliant weekend and I was lucky enough to be on stage with fellow thriller authors Shari Lapena and Nicci French, for a panel entitled ‘Believe Nothing, Trust No-One’. Naturally I enjoyed some haggis while I was there😊

The Bloody Scotland crime fiction festival

We also had a big family get-together to celebrate my Mum’s 85th birthday, which was a gathering of all the children, grandchildren, siblings and partners. We don’t often all get together and it was lovely to see everyone. Happy birthday Mum!

Behind the scenes of my next book...

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