Today it's my pleasure to welcome Cara Hunter back to the blog to talk about her second novel
In the Dark which was published on Thursday.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your writing journey?
The last few months have been an amazing rollercoaster. It was exciting enough to have Close to Home bought by Penguin, but then finding out it was going to be a Richard & Judy pick, and going into the Sunday Times bestseller list in the first week! I’ve had such wonderful feedback from readers and I’m really excited to see what they think of In The Dark.
If you had to give an elevator pitch for In the Dark, what would it be?
It starts with the discovery of a young woman and a child locked in a cellar in a big Victorian house in a prosperous North Oxford street. Despite the fact that the old man who lives there claims to have no idea who they are, it looks for all the world as if Oxford has its own equivalent of the notorious and terrifying Fritzl case. But as DI Adam Fawley is about to discover, nothing is what it seems….
How much research did you need to do into police procedures to enable you to start writing this series?
Most of what I did before I wrote Close to Home was either on the internet or (I confess!) by indulging my love for TV crime. But I now have a real-life DI who reads my early drafts and helps me make sure that everything is as close as possible to what would really happen in a police investigation.
What inspired you to use Social Media snippets as a tool throughout your stories?
I think crime is always a reflection of the society that provokes it, and the best crime drama (on and off the page) explores the community where the crime takes place. One way I try to do this in the Fawley books is by bringing in wider perspectives - including through the way outside observers react on social media to what they hear and see. Of course, many of these observations are ill-informed, and none of them know all the detail of what is really happening. But sometimes, people who aren’t too closely involved in a situation can have a more astute understanding of it than those dealing with it every day.
