Moments In Crime

Writing Online

It’s not clear what the full implications are of digitalization and the internet for book publishing. We can see what it’s done to the pop music industry: virtually destroyed its business model. The process has been a terrifying warning about the inability of an entire industry to respond to change. The great music conglomerates had the chance to move on from the wasteful practice of manufacturing and distributing silver discs. Now they could distribute their music almost for nothing. They could escape the tyranny of songs having to be part of albums. And since the new digital music occupied no warehouse space, nothing would ever have deleted. Everything ever recorded could be made available for ever.
    Instead the pop world went collectively insane. They put software on CDs which failed to stop them being copied but succeeded in damaging the computers of people who played them. They sued their own customers. They failed to develop a means of transferring music online and when a teenager did it for them, they spent millions of dollars pursuing him through the courts rather than hiring him. Prince sued his own fans for posting pictures of him on their websites. Meanwhile the market declined and declined.
    It’s difficult to imagine the same thing happening in publishing. The book is just too good an invention. It’s cheap, portable, resilient, re-usable. One day there will be a portable reader that can contain thousands of books, but even Amazon’s new invention, the Kindle, doesn’t quite seem to have got there yet.
    But the internet is still changing the experience of being both a writer and a reader and blogs like this are only one example. J.D. Salinger famously said that when you read a book you like, you want to call them up on the phone. Readers don’t call us up on the phone, but they do email us pretty frequently.
    Another intriguing question is whether the form of the internet can permit new kinds of narrative. As far as we’re concerned, we not just answering the question; this week we’re going to try to answer it. This week, we’re going to write a story live, online. It’s a story called Your Place and Mine and we will start it tomorrow, Monday 6 April, between 6.30pm and 7.30pm (British time) and continue at the same time every day until we finish it on Friday - if we don’t collapse first. You can find out about it here.
    Wish us luck!

As for dinner, Sunday night is leftovers night in the French-Gerrard household. So, it’ll be some of the stuff we’ve mentioned in the last few days and whatever in the fridge needs eating up. Thanks for having us here.

The Disappeared

Nicci Gerrard: There have been some nasty stories in the British newspapers recently - I don’t just mean the terrifying epic reports from Zimbabwe or Tibet, but ones closer to home, that show society’s ugly underbelly. Most recently, the story that has occupied a fair amount of slightly queasy media attention has been the abduction of nine-year-old Shannon , who was discovered several weeks later in in the storage compartment of a bed at the flat of her step-father’s uncle. Her step-father has now been charged with possession of indecent images of children on his computer. This distressing tale stands like an exact opposite to the one of little Madeleine McCann, who disappeared in Portugal last summer, and was the subject of near-hysteria in the UK. Maddy, as she came to be known by everyone, was tiny, blonde, dimpled and photogenic; her parents were middle-class professionals who were attractive in front of the camera. Shannon comes from a chaotic family, and her mother, who has six children by five men, was inarticulate and defensive in front of the press. We could not identify with her in the way we did with Madeleine’s mother: the coverage has been accusatory and full of implied blame, rather than sympathetic.

For more than fifteen years, I was a full-time journalist on a Sunday newspaper, the Observer. I started as a literary editor, but after a year or two became a reviewer, interviewer and feature-writer. During my time there, I covered several stories that sunk like hooks into my consciousness. This was truest of the trial of Rosemary West, more than a decade ago - it was the first trial I ever covered (I was never a news reporter nor a crime correspondent; until then I had written about the arts). Rosemary West and her husband, Fred West, had kidnapped, sexually tortured and murdered, more than ten young women and girls. They had buried them (vertically) in the cellar and the garden of their demi-detached house in Gloucester. Fred West never came to trial because he killed himself in prison, so Rosemary stood trial alone. She looked very English: stout, dark-haired, with glasses and heavy face. She did not look monstrous at all, just stolid, dull, a bit bemused. And yet the details that emerged, in the ten weeks of the trial, were ghastly and those of us who were there would never forget them - they still haunt me now, a description of an unravelled world, like a Hieronymus Bosch canvas. Among her victims were her sixteen-year-old daughter, her eight-year-old step daughter and an eight-month-pregnant lodger. She was a mother who killed her children; a very English murderer who made her victims cups of tea between sessions of sexual torture.

The things I heard were grisly, horrible, but what upset me more than anything else - what stayed with me and in the end took me to counselling - was that the girls that she killed had never been missed. Most of them were lost young women. They had been in homes or foster care. They had drifted into the West’s world. Most of them had been dead for years before their bodies were found - and nobody had looked for them, not really. Nobody had cared for them. Only one of the victims came from a middle-class family, and when she disappeared she was the only one for whom there was a nation-wide search or any kind of media attention. I could hardly bear to think that these young people had simply vanished by no-one had really noticed.

At the time of the West trial, Sean and I had just written our first novel, The Memory Game. and we were thinking about our next. People sometimes assume that the trials I have covered (Rosemary West was the first in a series of high-profile trials I attended) were useful to us as thriller writers. But they weren’t - or not in the way that might be expected. In a novel we wrote some years later, The Red Room, we drew on our feelings about those missing girls, writing a thriller which is partly about how some lives are invisible and disregarded - as they weren’t precious, as if we shouldn’t hold all lives dear. I don’t think we’ve ever written a thriller in which life becomes cheap and bodes are only clues.

Tonight is the last evening we’re all together, before our two eldest children go back to university, so we’re having a duck fattee - a Moroccan-style, cinammon-spiced dish with duck, aubergines, pomegranate, walnuts, chickpeas, rice and flatbread.

Creative Writing Class

Sean French: Nicci and I have occasionally taught creative writing classes, mainly for teenagers, or pre-teenagers. It’s always been a treat - a gruelling, scary treat. So much enthusiasm, so much creativity. But always I’ve had a sneaking worry. You can teach piano, teach surgery, teach history. But there’s something troubling about creativity. A writer can follow a particular rule and be utterly uninteresting or be a genius while breaking every rule in the book.
    But let’s be specific. A few years ago, Elmore Leonard produced a list of rules for writers. I don’t want to attack him or the rules, far from it. Leonard may well be the best living thriller writer and the rules are a perfectly sensible guide to a certain kind of plain writing. A writer who followed them would be saved from certain vulgarities and bits of clumsiness. But still...
    I quote them in abbreviated form and add my own comments.

Never open a book with weather.

I see his point. Don’t begin a book with throat-clearing; just get started. However, Bleak House, begins with two pages of nothing but weather, no characters, not even a main verb, just lots of fog, and it is one of the great openings of any novel.

Or what about Macbeth?

    When shall we three meet again
    In thunder, lightning or in rain?

Or even one of my favourite books of all time, The Cat in the Hat?

    The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house all that cold, cold, wet day.

Avoid prologues.

I suppose he’s making the same point as above: just get going. A more boring rule might be ‘avoid a prologue unless you need one’. After all, two of Nabokov’s masterpieces, Lolita and Pale Fire, have prologues that are more than prologues. They alter the whole perspective on what follows. Of course we can’t all be Nabokov in writing prologues, but then we can’t all be Nabokov in writing the rest of the book either.

Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue.

I largely agree with this. But fairness compels me to say that on a page opened at random in Henry James’s The Awkward Age, he uses added, laughed, returned, said and asked.

Never use an adverb to modify the verb ‘said’.

Same book, random page: ‘he answered kindly’, ‘he at last simply murmured’. It depends what style the writer is aiming for. Certainly Henry James would be a very dangerous model for most novice writers. But for ambitious, talented writers that would itself be a challenge.

Keep your exclamation points under control.

I won’t keep doing this, but on the first page of Henry James I opened I counted four. I think Leonard is right here. A modern writer should aim to use no exclamation points at all. If you need one, you should ask yourself if you’re not being clear enough.

Never use the words ‘suddenly’ or ‘all hell broke loose’.

I don’t this is really worth arguing about. I think he means don’t artificially inject excitement into your prose. Fair enough.

Use regional dialect, patois sparingly.

Excellent advice. One of my favourite writers, Rudyard Kipling, was superb a rendering different styles of speech and I wish he’d done less of it. It makes some of his stories almost unreadable. And the attempt by a lesser writer, Arthur Conan Doyle in the Sherlock Holmes stories for example to imitate the speech of American or black characters is always disastrous.

Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

That’s good advice. Except when it isn’t. As far as I can remember, Tom Clancy never describes his characters in any way at all, which is probably a mercy. On the other hand, much of Saul Bellow - at his best, consists of nothing but beautifully observed detailed evocations of what character after character looks like. So, in very different ways, do Nabokov and Updike. One of the hardest tasks facing any writer is to be clear about what sort of book they’re writing. Of course, an even harder task is to then write it.

Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

See the previous example.

Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

I’ve been thinking about this one. It’s either self-evident, or profound, or meaningless. Nabokov said he used to skip long sections of dialogue. Using this technique, a George V. Higgins novel would have taken him about thirty seconds to read.

Leonard’s guide is really a perceptive account of a certain stripped-down style of prose that eschews floweriness, metaphor, overt emotion, opulence. It is the style of Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy and Leonard itself. It contrasts with masters of excess, like Melville and Bellow and Pynchon, whose books, in their different ways, consist almost entirely of the stuff that readers tend to skip.

What a reader needs to decide is: are you a Raymond Carver or a Saul Bellow? But how do you know?

On the other hand, if you’re not a very good writer, you’ll make less of a fool of yourself imitating Carver than imitating Bellow. That’s not a very inspiring lesson, but it’s something.

Mixed Feelings

Last night we watched the terrific French thriller, Read My Lips (2001),  which provided a painful example of what we said before about the uselessness of thrillers to us. The worse than uselessness. A woman who is being bullied at work acquires an assistant. When she discovers he is an ex-con, she uses him to get her own back. (Vincent Cassel and Emmannuelle Devos absolutely outstanding in the lead roles.) So far so promising, but there’s an extra dimension. She is deaf and lip-reads her fellow workers to discover what they’re saying about her. And then he draws her into his criminal world to use her talents to undertake a very risky robbery.
    Damn damn damn. We wish we’d had the idea of using a deaf female character as the lead of one of our books. What makes it even more frustrating is that we had already come across the idea in a classic episode of Seinfeld, where George uses a woman who can lip read to find out what people think of him. It would be OK to lift a comic idea from Seinfeld and use it as a thriller. (The backwards narrative in Memento had also been anticipated by a backwards edition of Seinfeld.) But we can’t lift it from another thriller.
    Terrific film though, like a Hitchcock film done with French grunge and sexiness.

But at least, as you can see above, spring has arrived in our Suffolk garden.

To celebrate it, tonight we're eating sea bass with lots of different spring vegetables.

Detached from Reality

Sean French:

Here’s Philip Larkin writing to a friend in 1944, when he was only twenty-one:

    ‘You see, my trouble is that I simply can’t understand anybody doing anything but write, paint, compose music - I can understand their doing things as a means to these ends, but I can’t see what a man is up to who is satisfied to follow a profession in the normal way. If I hadn’t the continual knowledge that ‘when all this bloody work is through for today I can start work again’ or ‘this half-hour is simply ghastly, but one day it will have been digested sufficiently to be written about’ - if I didn’t think that, I don’t know what I should do. And all the people who don’t think it, what do they do? What are they striving for?’

I think any writer will feel a cold shiver of recognition at that. People often ask us where ideas come from and one answer is that when you’re a writer you have a sort of valve attached to your brain through which all your perceptions and experiences are filtered, a valve which constantly asks: is that something that can be turned into a book?

Years ago, when I used to write a weekly magazine column, I was cycling down a busy road near our house. A woman opened her car door and while I was still in the air a bit of me was thinking: good, I’ve got something to write about this week.

I was talking someone recently who was planning to write a thriller and was preparing for it by reading lots of other thrillers. I couldn’t understand that. Of course, we read thrillers, because we read all kinds of things, but they aren’t much use to us as thriller writers, except negatively. If something is good, then it’s been done. If I met a trawler fisherman, I could imagine thinking it would subject for a thriller. When I read Martin Cruz Smith’s Polar Star, I thought 1) What a terrific book and 2) Damn. He got there first.

Is there a lesson to be extracted from that? Maybe it’s that literature and creative courses are all very well (I assume that if you want to be a writer you’ll be reading and writing like crazy anyway); but if you have experience of something out there in the real world that is new and exciting, then that could be a very good start.

Nicci Gerrard: Well, I think that’s all true - but I don’t feel a cold shiver at the thought, but more of a warm tingle. I’m not sure that writing makes one feel detached from reality and often feel it does exactly the opposite: makes you - no, makes me - look at life more attentively. It’s not only that there’s a part of you - sorry, me - that stands back a little, assessing experience as it happens; it’s also that there are things that I perhaps wouldn’t have paid much attention to if I wasn’t a novelist. A tone of voice, a gesture, a phrase. Ordinary life becomes very rich and full of interesting detail. One of the lovely things about collaborating with Sean is that we are looking at the world together; interpreting it together. It’s like a shared adventure.

Anyway, a few months ago, I was invited to a school reunion and went with a mixture of avid curiosity and trepidation. I have lost touch with almost everyone I used to know and so with each face I saw, I was also seeing the face of thirty years ago. Each middle-aged woman was a teenage girl as well. We talked about the past with an urgent, giggly nostalgia; we swapped anecdotes about changing rooms, school dinners, misdemeanors. There was much that I didn’t remember, or remembered differently. There was much that wasn’t said - no-one mentioned the nasty arguments, the bitchiness. After an hour or so, the excitement had faded and a mild sadness set in - about time passing, about lost friendships. Then I went away and Sean and I wrote about it, turning the reunion into a crime scene, in which bitter memories surface and past scores are settled.

Things which to other people can seem tranquil and comforting can, if looked at in a certain way (in a Nicci French way, for instance) become dark and disturbing. We often say that any family, however happy, can provide the subject for a dozen thrillers. Come round to our house at breakfast and I’ll show you what I mean.

For supper we’re having wild mushroom risotto - using the last of the porcini mushrooms we picked ourselves in Sweden last year (Sean is Swedish and we go there every summer, spending most of our days wandering through the pine and birch forests looking for edible mushrooms and then drying them). And now I think about it, we’ve used mushroom-picking in our novels.

Randomizer

Sean French: You know the game Randomizer? Well, it’s not exactly a game as such. It’s a thing that writers do when they should be writing. You set your ipod or other musical device on shuffle and see what the first five songs are that come up and what, if anything, they say about you. So, let’s play Randomizer (there’s quite a choice, since I’ve got 14,406 songs on my ipod, lasting a potential 40.6 days.

The final movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet no. 14, op. 131, played by the Hollywood String Quartet.

The Hollywood Quartet were an interesting group. Their lead violinist, Felix Slatkin, was leader of the 20th Century Fox studio orchestra. His wife, Eleanor Aller, was principal cellist first of the Warner Brothers orchestra than at 20th Century Fox (their son is the celebrated conductor, Leonard Slatkin). The second violinist, Paul Shure, was leader of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski (of Fantasia fame). And the violist, Paul Robyn, was principal viola at the Warner Brothers orchestra. Those were the days.

They formed the quartet as a respite from what they were playing during the day (although some of it would have been the great scores by Erich Korngold and Miklosz Rosza). They were a great quartet and their recording of the Schubert Quintet is one of the greatest classical records ever made.

What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve? performed by Rufus Wainwright.

I’m glad this one came up. We’ve been to a few pop concerts as a family - the White Stripes at Alexandra Palace, the Red Hot Chili Peppers on a glorious summer evening in Hyde Park and a wonderful early concert by Rufus Wainwright at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge. The song’s written by one of my favourite composers, Frank Loesser, who wrote Guys and the Dolls and the too-little-known How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying.

Omaha by Moby Grape.

I’ve got a weakness for jangly guitar bands. Interesting fact about Moby Grape: on the cover of their first album, one of the band stuck it to The Man by surreptitiously ‘giving the finger’. The cover had to be altered to remove the offending digit. In recent reissues it’s been restored in all its glory.

The first movement of Symphony no. 30 by Haydn.

The odds were in favour of a Haydn symphony coming up. I’ve got all 104 on my ipod. At four movements each, that’s 416 ‘songs’. Haydn may be a victim of living too long and being too good. 104 symphonies, virtually all of them masterpieces, and he invented the string quartet as well.

Little Deuce Coupe by the Beach Boys.

A perfect song to be listening to on a (mainly) sunny spring morning. I just realized that I’ve listened to this song hundreds of times and I have no idea what a Little Deuce Coupe actually is. Some kind of car obviously.
Nicci Gerrard:

Where Is My Love by Lucinda Williams.

I fell in love with Lucinda Williams a few years ago - her big, gravelly, lived-in, raw Southern voice - and for several months played her over and over. I think one of the (many) differences between me and Sean is the way we listen to music: he loves almost every kind of music, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of it, classic, jazz, blues, rock, punk and post-punk and rap and hip-hop all sorts of genres that I’ve never even heard of, and he listens to music, very loudly, as he works. I have a much more limited range and I get stuck on one artist at a time. (Actually, this is the way we read books as well - he reads twenty-five at a time, and I read one).

The People’s Revolt from Heaven’s Gate

Heaven’s Gate was a box-office failure, a rather glorious failure of a film - but the music, by David Mansfield, is gorgeous, Apparently Mansfield did some instrumental improvisations around Eastern European folk songs, and Michael Cimino, the director, was so impressed he asked him to do the whole score - most of it is on guitar, violin and mandolin, and the result is twangy and haunting.  I love it. It’s one of the things I wanted to be able to play on the violin, when I started to learn it a few years ago. But I was a dreadful violin player, cloth-eared and thick-fingered, and I gave up long before mastering Mansfield’s tunes.

Alexandra Leaving by Leonard Cohen

I used to listen to Leonard Cohen a lot when I was a teenager; I would lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and drone along to his alluring drone and feel blissfully sad. I still listen to him a lot - and this one, which is from a few years ago, is appropriately doom-laden, monotonous and sombre.

My Happiness by Ella Fitzgerald

Well, this isn’t really about happiness, it’s about remembering the happiness that’s gone: very croony and sad. I think it’s quite old and has been sung by lots of different artists, but I love Ella Fitzgerald’s immaculate voice, its purity - though sometimes I think it’s almost too perfect.

Perfume by Sarah Lee

What can i say? I don’t know what this is? My computer isn’t telling me where it’s from. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before. I’ve got nothing else by Sarah Lee. But I’m listening to it now and it sounds good. I’m glad to have found it.

Sean French: Tonight we’re having a simple meal of pasta with a very simple sauce I make  myself. Roast a small handful of pine nuts. Put into a food mixer with a jar of sundried tomatoes in oil, a couple of dried chillies, a clove of garlic, a bit more oil (something fairly bland like rapeseed; olive oil is too strong), salt and pepper. Incredibly quick and easy and comforting. Afterwards, we might watch a film noir, maybe Otto Preminger’s Daisy Kenyon, which we’ve just bought on DVD.

Where Life Meets Fiction

Nicci Gerrard: This is a picture of our black labrador Maisie. We always swore we would never get a dog - after all, we had four children already, and having a dog is rather like having another child, except they eat furniture instead of slamming doors and they don’t grow up and leave home.
    After we moved to the country, we gave in to a succession of demands: we bought a rabbit with soft floppy ears, many hamsters who had rather short lives, three guinea pigs who chirped like canaries in their run, several budgerigars that bred and had featherless, pink chicks, cockatoos with messy habits, hens (that turned out to be cockerels, crowing triumphantly but producing no eggs, which was the whole point of getting them), and even three cats. Eventually, pathetically, we caved in and got Maisie, who has indeed turned out to be like a child to us - a very cowardly, neurotic, needy, restless, agitated, messy, greedy, adoring, stubborn whimpering child who has eaten many pairs of shoes, gobbled down many birthday cakes, tipped over our rubbish bins. And sure enough, while our other children are growing up and one by one are leaving, the tide of mess receding, Maisie will never leave.
    Our characters are rarely autobiographical - but Sludge, the dog in Losing You, is a shameless version of Maisie. And in this photograph, Maisie is hurling racing around on Mersea Island, which was the inspiration for Sanderling Island in the novel. Indeed, it was taken on December 18th, 2006, the date on which Losing You is set. We went there to check that we had been accurate about the time the sun rose and set, and about how quickly the tide came in. In the summer, Mersea Island can be full of visitors; there are sailing boats and windsurfs zig-zagging out at sea; families take up resident in the rows of beach huts along the shore. But in winter, there’s a forlorn and desolate feeling about the place. The beaches are of shingle and mud; old boats rot at the water’s edge; fog settles in damp corners and the wind lashes at you; sea-birds shriek. It feels very far away from anywhere, on the rim of the world. It’s glorious.
    For anyone who finds themselves near Mersea Island, here’s a tip: near the boatyard, there’s a place called The Company Shed, which is basically a fish shop that selling anything they’ve caught that day, and also a ramshackle, makeshift restaurant that doesn’t cook anything, only serves up oysters, clams, smoked salmon and mussels. Take your own bread and butter, your own bottle of wine if you want, sit at the trestle table with other walkers, while outside a bitter wind sings in the halliards of the fishing boats.

Sean French:  Ten years ago we moved out of London to a house in a little village in one of the most peaceful parts of southern England. A local policeman once told me that it had the lowest crime rate in the country. Apart, that is, from England's most notorious serial killer of the 21st century so far, who in 2006 killed five women in Ipswich, our nearest large town. (We drive past the stream where two of the bodies were dumped on our way to the supermarket.)
    When Steve Wright was arrested and charged with the crime, there was no confession and no significant witness. He was convicted based on mobile phone calls, CCTV footage, microscopic DNA traces and a single fibre found on a body that had been in a stream for over a month. Fifteen years ago, none of these would have been available and he wouldn’t have been caught, and if caught he wouldn't have been convicted. Technology has made things difficult for criminals. It’s been hard for thriller writers as well. Losing You is our tenth novel. We wrote our first, The Memory Game, in 1995. Anyone reading it now may well be struck by what isn’t there: no mobile phones, no email, no internet, no satnav.
    I remember one of the exciting scenes in All the President’s Men (released in 1976, based on events five years earlier), involves Carl Bernstein discovering the name of a Republican donor whose cheque has ended up in the account of one of the Watergate burglars. ‘We’ve got to find him before the New York Times does,’ shouts Dustin Hofmann to Robert Redford. And so Robert Redford starts thumbing through piles and piles of telephone directories. Then a woman from the Washington Post archives arrives saying she has found his name in the caption to a photograph. Looking at the scene in 2008, you feel you’re watching something quaintly historical in Dickens or Chaucer. Woodward and Bernstein spend days searching for information they would now find in a few clicks on Google.
    Of course there are now whole thriller genres based on new technology. The TV show, 24, in particular, would be inconceivable without mobile phones. (Although there’s a whole separate argument to be made about how shows like that wildly exaggerate the ability of experts to break computer codes, penetrate unfamiliar networks - as well as drive across LA without getting stuck in traffic.)
    There were many reasons for setting Losing You on an island. One of them was to find a place with no CCTV cameras and poor mobile phone coverage. Bad for local residents, but good for people writing dark stories about them.

What we’re eating tonight: halibut with coriander sauce, steamed green vegetables and rice pudding to follow - and then we’ll watch two or three episodes from the final series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which we seem to have been watching since we first moved here, but can quite never get to the end. 

Blogging This Week: Nicci French

Blogging this week is husband and wife author team, NICCI FRENCH. Their latest book LOSING YOU goes on-sale April 1st. NICCI FRENCH is the pseudonym for the bestselling husband-and-wife team of journalists Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. They are the authors of eight previous novels, including Killing Me Softly, Secret Smile, and Catch Me When I Fall. They live in Suffolk, England.

It’s Nina Landry’s birthday, and she’s supposed to have her kids ready to leave in a few hours for a Christmas holiday in Florida with her new boyfriend, but her fifteen-year-old daughter Charlie spent the night at a friend’s and hasn’t come home yet. Not by ten a.m., not by eleven. Nina is getting angry---they have a plane to catch, and Charlie hasn’t even bothered to pack. As time passes, though slower and slower by the minute, Nina becomes uneasy. Her anger gives way to worry, and that worry quickly builds into panic.

By one p.m., she’s wondering, has Charlie run away, or has something far worse happened? And why won’t anyone---not the cops, not Charlie’s friends, not Charlie’s father---take her disappearance seriously?

As day turns to night on their home of Sandling Island sixty miles from London, and a series of ominous secrets leads Nina from sickening suspicion to deadly certainty, the question becomes less whether she and her daughter will leave the island in time and more whether they’ll ever leave it again.

In Losing You, the newest thriller from the long-acclaimed master of psychological suspense, Nicci French unravels one mother’s life and replaces it with every mother’s worst nightmare.