UK edition

In the crisp, morning hours, the police are called to a suspected murder at a farm outside a small English village. A beautiful young woman has been found dead, blood all over the cottage she lives in. At the same time, police respond to a reported female suicide, where a car has fallen into a local quarry.

As DCI Louisa Smith and her team gather the evidence, they discover a link between these two women, a link which has sealed their dreadful fate one cold night, under a silent moon.

An unsettling and compulsively readable novel that will keep you gripped until the very last page.

Inspiration

Under a Silent Moon was my second Nanowrimo novel. I started it in November 2006; by the end of that month, I’d got to about 60,000 words, but I was very far from completing the story. So in November 2007, I was a Nano ‘rebel’ and continued the plot where I’d left off. By December 2007, I had about 130,000 words, and still no sign of an ending. After that I left the story alone to brew, while I got on with Into the Darkest Corner and my other novels. I still loved this one, though, and I always intended to get back to it one day…

More than anything else, I wanted to write a novel that included some realistic source documents alongside the narrative. Under a Silent Moon does that: it’s a police procedural, with a Major Crime team investigating two unexplained deaths; but as well as the story, told by various people involved in the case, the book has witness statements, emails, forensic reports and analysis documents and charts, the idea being that the reader has access to everything they need to solve the crime alongside the investigators. For those who enjoy flicking through a book and seeing diagrams, forms and other interesting diversions, there are clues to be had if you know where to look. And yet the book can be read just as well without paying too much attention to the extra content.

And for those who are particularly keen, more documents will be available online in due course…