Tag: thriller

Blog Tour/Q&A: Forget My Name by J. S. Monroe

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Forget My Name Blog Tour

I’m delighted to be hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for Forget My Name by J. S. Monroe. It’s described as ‘a dazzling psychological thriller full of unexpected twists, topped by a savage climax’.  Thanks to Jade at Head of Zeus for inviting me to take part in the tour.

I have an absolutely fascinating Q&A with the author in which, among other things, he reveals the secrets to keeping a reader reading, what he’s been reading recently and what he’s working on next.  (Fans of Find Me and Forget My Name, you really need to read the answer to that question!)

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Forget My Name jacket imageAbout the Book

How do you know who to trust……when you don’t even know who you are?

You are outside your front door.
There are strangers in your house.
Then you realise. You can’t remember your name.

She arrived at the train station after a difficult week at work. Her bag had been stolen, and with it, her identity. Her whole life was in there – passport, wallet, house key. When she tried to report the theft, she couldn’t remember her own name. All she knew was her own address.

Now she’s outside Tony and Laura’s front door. She says she lives in their home. They say they have never met her before.

One of them is lying.

Format: Hardcover, ebook (416 pp.)    Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 4th October 2018          Genre: Thriller, Suspense

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Forget My Name on Goodreads

Interview with J. S. Monroe, author of Forget My Name

Without giving too much away, can you tell us about your latest thriller, Forget My Name?

Forget My Name is an amnesia thriller. It opens with a young woman arriving off the train in a rural Wiltshire village. She is suffering from stress-induced – psychogenic – amnesia and can’t remember her own name. To make matters worse, she has lost her bag with all her ID in it – her phone, bank cards, driving licence etc. All she knows is that she has a connection with this village – she found a train ticket in her pocket – and thinks that she might live here. But when she knocks on the door of her ‘home’, a couple she’s never met before answer the door… I like to dig myself a nice big hole at the beginning of a thriller and see how I can get out of it.

For you, what are the key elements that make a thriller ‘thrilling’? (If that’s not asking you to give too much away!)

I try to imagine someone reading my book late at night and telling themselves: just one more chapter. My goal is to make sure that they keep saying that all night long. So each chapter should end with something that makes the reader want to keep reading. Pace is important, too, both at a micro and macro level – I mix up the length of sentences as well as the length of chapters. And with thrillers, it’s essential to keep the jeopardy dial on 11. But none of this will make for a good thriller unless you create characters that the reader will want to root for.

Are there particular scenes in Forget My Name you found especially challenging – or rewarding – to write?

Without giving too much away, there is a big scene on a canal in the middle of the book, involving a dangerous psychiatric patient and a police Armed Response Unit. My Wiltshire detective, DI Silas Hart, finds himself in the middle of it and I worked hard to get the scene right: a mixture of procedural accuracy, tension and emotion. The key to the scene comes a few chapters before when an important clue is given by switching the first person narrative to third person. I’m intrigued to know how many people will spot this…

When writing a book, what do you find the most difficult to perfect: the first chapter, the last chapter or some other part?

It used to be the first chapter but I’ve learnt not to sweat or lose too much sleep over it now. I get something down early and then refine it later. A big mistake when you are trying to write a novel is to spend hours – days, weeks, months! – on that first chapter, honing and honing it, only for an editor to come along later and say they’d prefer to start the book at chapter 2…

As well as psychological thrillers like Forget My Name and Find Me, you’ve written a number of spy novels (published under the name Jon Stock). You also wrote a novella set in Cornwall, To Snare A Spy, which has a 15 year-old protagonist.  Do you enjoy experimenting with different genres and, if so, where might you venture next?

I am planning to stick with my J .S .Monroe novels for the time being. I’ve just signed a contract with Head of Zeus to write two more of them and they’ll be a hybrid mix of psychological thriller and police procedural. I have only recently introduced police elements to my writing and I’m really enjoying it, but I don’t want to write an all-out police procedural thriller. I also think we are moving away from the pure psychological thriller. Readers are looking for something more and I think that a hybrid model fits the bill.

Having said all that, I haven’t ruled out writing more spy thrillers. Warner Bros. spent five years and a lot of money developing the film of Dead Spy Running, one of my spy thrillers. If that ever gets made, I’ll happily write some more of them.

To Snare A Spy was also great fun to write. I was asked to come up with a ‘cross-generational’ spy thriller by a friend who owns The Nare, a wonderful luxury hotel in Cornwall. (Being writer-in-residence was one of the best gigs I’ve ever had!) He wanted it set in and around the hotel, which is on the Roseland Peninsula. I’m very proud of the result. I also ate too many cream teas.

Forget My Name was published on 4th October.  Do you have any publication day rituals?

Launch dates are fairly nebulous things these days. 4th October was interesting as it was Super Thursday. Forget My Name was published with 750 other books. Some years I’ve had a launch party but this time I just had a dinner with some local friends and raised a glass to Jemma, the amnesic woman who arrives in a village not dissimilar to where I live…

You have a background in journalism.  What impact has that had on your writing? For example, do you find it easier to work to deadlines?

I think that’s very true – publishers seem to like hacks as we are used to hitting deadlines. We are also very familiar with the day-to-day discipline of writing. Once I’ve started a new book, I set myself a target of 1,000 words a day. I also do a lot of research, particularly in the realm of neuroscience, and I think my journalism background helps when I’m interviewing doctors and scientists.

Diane Setterfield, author of The Thirteenth Tale, has said she is ‘a reader first, a writer second’.  Is that a view you share?

I’m a reader when I’m not writing a book, but I find it more difficult to read widely once I’m underway on a thriller. During the research stage of a novel, I’ll catch up on other people’s thrillers – I’ve just read and really enjoyed Under The Ice by Rachael Blok – but I tend to read outside my genre when I’m writing, and only in small doses. Short, literary books such as The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride, for example. I’m enjoying that at the moment. I don’t want to be too influenced by fellow thriller authors while I’m actually writing!

What’s your favourite and least favourite part of the writing process?

The actual business of putting 1,000 words down on a page each day is a bit like running. I love it when it’s over! Some days it’s very hard work, and I wonder how and why I’ve ended up earning my living this way. At other times, when the words are flowing, I feel a life-affirming euphoria, but that’s very rare. I also enjoy the polishing process, after all the hard, coal-face work has been done. I used to work in an office and commute four hours every day. I know I’m extremely lucky to be working from home now, and doing something that I love.

What are you working on next?

My next thriller is a modern, high-tech take on an old trope: the doppelgänger. A woman wakes up one morning and is convinced that the man sleeping next to her is not her partner but an imposter… A truly terrifying form of infidelity.

JSMonroe_NewAbout the Author

J. S. Monroe read English at Cambridge, worked as a freelance journalist in London and was a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4. Monroe, the author of five other novels, was also a foreign correspondent in Delhi for the Daily Telegraph and was on its staff in London as Weekend editor. He lives in Wiltshire.

Connect with J. S. Monroe

Website  ǀ  Facebook  ǀ  Twitter  ǀ  Instagram ǀ Goodreads

Blog Tour/Book Review: Paris in the Dark by Robert Olen Butler

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I’m thrilled to be hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for Paris in the Dark by Pulitzer Prize winning author, Robert Olen Butler.  Described as ‘fleetly plotted and engaging’ and ‘a page-turning novel of unmistakable literary quality’, Paris in the Dark is the fourth instalment in the author’s ‘Christopher Marlowe Cobb’ historical thriller series.

My grateful thanks to Anne Cater at Random Things Tours for inviting me to take part in the tour and to No Exit Press for my review copy.

Paris in the DarkAbout the Book

Autumn 1915. The First World War is raging across Europe. Woodrow Wilson has kept Americans out of the trenches, although that hasn’t stopped young men and women from crossing the Atlantic to volunteer at the front. Christopher Marlowe ‘Kit’ Cobb, a Chicago reporter and undercover agent for the US government is in Paris when he meets an enigmatic nurse called Louise. Officially in the city for a story about American ambulance drivers, Cobb is grateful for the opportunity to get to know her but soon his intelligence handler, James Polk Trask, extends his mission. Parisians are meeting ‘death by dynamite’ in a new campaign of bombings, and the German-speaking Kit seems just the man to discover who is behind this – possibly a German operative who has infiltrated with the waves of refugees? And so begins a pursuit that will test Kit Cobb, in all his roles, to the very limits of his principles, wits and talents for survival.

Format: Paperback, ebook (256 pp.)    Publisher: No Exit Press
Published: 25th October 2018        Genre: Historical Fiction, Crime, Thriller

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Paris in the Dark on Goodreads

My Review

Finding out a book is set in the First World War immediately conjures up thoughts for me of the trenches of the Western Front, not the cafes and sidewalks of Paris.  Therefore, one of the many things I enjoyed about Paris in the Dark is its depiction of Paris as its citizens would have experienced it in the Autumn of 1915: the influx of refugees, the food shortages, the threat of Zeppelin attacks.  In fact, the Parisians are ‘in the dark’.  They’re being kept there deliberately by their government’s censorship of the press for fear of civil unrest or loss of morale if the citizens learn about the risk from saboteurs, not to mention the truth about the situation on the front line.  As Kit’s spymaster boss, Trask, observes: “If the Germans can bring the battle to the restaurants and the theatres and the front doors of the Parisians, if they can turn women and children and boulevardiers into bomb fodder, they might make some progress in this war.”

The thriller element of the book is set against the backdrop of the political situation of the time with many unhappy about President Woodrow Wilson’s unwillingness to deploy United States forces to the front line.  The implications of what Kit believes he has uncovered as his enquiries progress become more than just a simple investigation into acts of sabotage; they touch on national identity and geopolitics.

As events unfold, Kit’s professional and personal life also start to overlap and the risks he runs become no longer just a calculation that involve him alone.  Kit prides himself on his journalistic ‘nose’ for telling if someone is truthful or trustworthy but it turns out he’s not infallible.  If he was wrong once, perhaps he’s wrong now?

Throughout the book I loved the author’s spare writing style and his deft touch with description.  ‘And I realized that the air had gone chill.  Winter was reconnoitering Paris once again.’  In the breathlessly exhilarating penultimate chapter,  in which Kit is forced to face his deepest, darkest fears, there’s a tour de force of a paragraph in which the author switches from his customary short sentences in a way that brilliantly conveys the dramatic events being described.

I also enjoyed the way the book explores the theme of performance.  For example, the use of theatrical metaphors to convey the sense that individuals adopt many roles, Kit included. ‘For my country, to do my job, I have played roles with a number of people, deceived them, lied to them.’   At times, playing a role involves Kit adopting an actual disguise drawing on the experience of his childhood spent in theatres.    Even when acting in his ‘official’ capacity as a journalist, Kit finds himself adopting a persona, expressing opinions and asking questions in such a way as to get the answer he needs, or that will make good copy.  The theme is deployed humorously as well, such as when Kit is drawn into conversation about his his actress mother. ‘Mama had taken over the stage, as she was wont to do.  Though, to be fair, it was I who’d spoken her entry line.’

Paris in the Dark is the first book I’ve read by Robert Olen Butler.  I thought it was absolutely brilliant.  It ticked all the boxes for me of what I look for in a historical fiction novel: gripping plot, skilful writing, intriguing characters and a fascinating period setting.  At only 252 pages, its size definitely puts it in the ‘read in one sitting’ category but, frankly, even at  twice the size I think I’d have struggled to put it down.    It’s certainly a contender for one of my favourite reads this month, if not this year.  In Robert Olen Butler’s bio below it states that he’s published seventeen novels.  Guess what?  My wish-list just increased by sixteen.

I received a review copy courtesy of publishers, No Exit Press, and Random Things Tours.

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In three words: Compelling, taut, clever

Try something similar…A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway or Mr. Standfast by John Buchan

Robert Olen Butler Author PictureAbout the Author

Robert Olen Butler is one of America’s most highly regarded writers, having published 17 novels, 6 short story collections, and a book on the creative process. Among his numerous awards is the Pulitzer Prize which he won for A Good Scent for a Strange Mountain. Four of his novels are historical espionage thrillers in the Christopher Marlowe Cobb series, a character far closer to Robert than any other he has written. Like ‘Kit’ Cobb, Robert also went to war, was part of the military intelligence and a reporter and editor at an investigative business newspaper. Robert is also a widely admired and sought after university teacher of creative writing and counts among his former students another Pulitzer Prize winner.

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Paris In The Dark Blog Tour Poster