Some years ago, with an engineering degree in tow, I sought out a career that would also allow me to write. I soon found myself working as a technical writer in the technology industry. This has provided me with many of the tools I find useful for writing fiction today – creating outlines, plotting, meeting deadlines, and editing.
My fledgling writing adventures were not in the thriller genre but included experimentation with poetry, one-act plays, and short stories. Some of my warmest school memories are of time spent in English class. The English teacher didn’t always share my taste however, asking me on one particular occasion to stop reading a creative essay aloud as my descriptive paragraphs were making her ill!
As I worked away in the technology industry, the whisperings in my head urging me to try a novel, became more frequent. With a rough outline for a novel sketched out in a notebook, I sat in the quiet of the study at home one night and started to write. My first attempt was a novel of two halves that started out as a romantic memoir but morphed into a thriller half-way through. Someday I may revisit it.
Writing that first novel proved a valuable experience. Stories with a mystery at their core are what I like to read, but I also discovered that they were what I liked to write. Now, with two published novels to my my name, I can safely say that writing makes me feel at home. Some people hug trees. I write.
Four friends go to a remote cabin one summer. Only three return.
Life is good for university friends Sarah, Ruth, Charlotte, and Kathy: exams are over and they’re escaping to a cabin by the Blue Pool.But when Sarah disappears without a trace, life for the others will never be the same again.
Twenty-five years later a man walks into a police station, claiming to know about the missing girl. Suddenly, the three women – now estranged – become suspects. Forced to revisit that horrifying weekend, they must confront buried memories and decades-old fears.
For not everything was as it seemed. And the greater the secret, the deeper it lies…
The Blue Pool features the disappearance of a young woman during a weekend away with her friends and then follows the fallout twenty five years later when someone comes forward saying they know what happened, where did the inspiration come from?
The Blue Pool was inspired in part by a number of young women who vanished in Ireland in the 1990s never to be heard of again. These women were mainly in their late teens and twenties. Many of them disappeared while they were travelling. One 21-year-old vanished while hitch-hiking home from Dublin to Kilkenny one night in November 1995. A witness saw her using a payphone. She was never seen again.
Another 18-year-old vanished without trace just yards from her parents home as she walked home in 1998. This particular case was very puzzling as the girl was almost home. Passing motorists witnessed her approaching within yards of her parents’ driveway, but for some reason, she never made it to her house. No trace has ever been found.
The most high-profile case involved an American student from Long Island. She disappeared in 1993. The 26-year-old woman was living in Dublin. She’d taken a bus to the countryside and was last seen outside the highest pub in Ireland – Johnny Fox's Pub on top of the Dublin mountains. Her disappearance became one of the most high-profile unsolved crimes in the history of the Irish State.
If you had to give an elevator pitch for The Blue Pool, what would it be?
The Blue Pool explores how far someone will go to protect those they love.
