BOOK CLUB
IMAGE Gytha Lodge is based in Cambridge, and does most of her writing in various of the city’s cafes
“I have a big notebook with blank pages, and coloured pens, and I draw character charts”
lot of experience of that, with a previous abusive partner of mine. It was fascinating to look at that as a professional advantage for Jonah – he’s someone who is that good at what he does, when he needs to be, because he can basically imitate his father for a bit: but he really dislikes the fact that he does it.” “I think that’s interesting, and hopefully quite real – because I think when you can be that mean to somebody, it must come from somewhere. And then because Jonah became a bit less angry, and he had that guilt and that calmness as well – we started to really like each other. So I thought – you can stay. We’ll do a series,” she laughs. Covering the inexplicable complexity and often competitive nature of female friendship, the self-immolating nature of permanent people-pleasing, and the lives and fears of the detectives trying to solve the mystery, this page-turner of a novel is intricately and intelligently plotted, and keeps you guessing right up to its gripping close: it is bound to be one of this spring’s unmissable reads.
difficult time for us both – we both calmed down in the second draft. I realised he didn’t make any sense at first, so I went back and thought, ‘what do I really want to get out of this guy? What is it that makes him tick?’ I’d got someone who basically was, at that point, just tearing into people in interviews, and I thought, well, that’s fine because he can do that at the right time, but the rest of the time he’s not that person. So I started thinking about: what makes someone able to do that? And what is it in their past that makes them behave like that?” Out of this thinking came the notion that Gytha’s fictional detective’s behaviour could be an indicator of a very difficult childhood, and an emotionally abusive parent. “What occurred to me, rather strangely, was that actually, perfect interrogation is basically abuse, if you do it right,” she says. “You’re essentially twisting people to say things. You’re undermining their self confidence at the right time, so that they panic – you’re doing all the things that a really awful and abusive person would do. Actually, I had quite a
that have become a trademark of her fiction. “The more moving parts of a plot that you’re holding in your head, the more having a basic map is really useful – more so when it comes to crime, because you really do have to think about those little moments when a clue is revealed, in a way that you don’t have to if you’re writing any other format. Although having said that, I’ve just been reading Marian Keyes’ latest novel, Grown Ups , which is superb. I always forget this about Marian Keyes until I read her again, but in some ways her books are a bit like mystery novels: there’s a lot of information that’s hidden, and you’re actually untangling it and revealing it through a series of conversations or flashbacks as you read.” Another feature of Gytha’s fiction is that her female victims are bestowed with personality, depth and three fully formed dimensions. The same can be said for her troubled detective, DCI Jonah Sheens, and his policing team. It turns out that Jonah was quite an angry character when Gytha first started writing him. “Though I think I was quite angry as well,” she says. “It was a
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