Meet the Author
Harriet Tyce, A Lesson In Cruelty, Wildfire, £16.99
True to its title, the chilling opening of former barrister-turnedbest-selling author Harriet Tyce’s latest novel is a visceral description of a would-be killer’s plans for an unsuspecting quarry oblivious of being observed.
“I’m outside waiting, WATCHING, but I want to be inside,” says the killer. “God, I want to be inside.”
In the tortuous and, we warrant, unpredictable plot that follows, the author deftly pitches several strangers on a collision course with not only each other but with the truth, and, ultimately, the architect of incredible evil.
Set in Oxford and Scotland’s Great Wilderness in Wester Ross, it’s a heart-stopping, page turning, psychological thriller. Meet Anna who is on the brink of freedom after a three-year prison sentence, student Lucy who is pursuing the twice-married Oxford professor with whom she’s obsessed and Marie the Highland recluse locked up for too long with child killer Janice.
Edinburgh born and bred, Harriet – who graduated from Oxford University in 1994 before spending a decade as a criminal barrister in London – has come a long way since the launch of her debut, Blood Orange, in 2019. It took the gold Nielsen Bestseller Award in 2021, was optioned for film, and was followed by further bestsellers The Lies You Told and It Ends At Midnight. Speaking to P.S. from her home in London with pooches Golden Retriever Isla and Labradoodle Coco at her side, the mum of two grown children says: “Four books in five years! I’m still gobsmacked that it has happened.” She’s now landed a three-book deal for more in the genre.
A Lesson In Cruelty, she says, explores “the suffering of women within the criminal justice system” while at the same time showing “the capacity of women for cruelty”. She explains: “The primary themes are prison and aspects of redemption and punishment, what works and what doesn’t, explored in a slightly gothic way. “Weallthinkweare okay, but if guard rails fail it doesn’t take as much as you think for your life to go out of control,” she muses. “What is the saying? ‘We are all just four good meals away from anarchy.’”
But it’s not the novel she had planned. Her initial thoughts were of a fictional distillery in Dundonnell, Wester Ross, and “bodies in whisky casks”. While it didn’t come to fruition, the location remained.
Harriet – daughter of William, the retired judge, Lord Nimmo Smith and his wife Jennifer, a classicist and an academic – already knew the area from her school days, but on her return for research purposes with her husband, she admits: “It got under my skin.”
She explains: “When I was in sixth form, I went on an expedition to The Great Wilderness. We were dropped at Poolewe and spent a couple of days walking, ending up at Dundonnell after having climbed An Teallach. We stayed in the bothy Shenavall. It was a house that you would find in the suburbs and there it was in the middle of this remote spot.” The location informs an important part of the fiction.
She smiles: “It’s one of the most beautiful places in the world.”