10 GREAT READS FOR WOMEN

Books intended for – and written by – the fairer sex.ex.

Still Dark

Alex Gray, Sphere, £12.99

SCOTS crime writer Alex Gray is busy stirring marmalade in the kitchen of her Renfrewshire bungalow.

It’s a scene of blissful domesticity. But its irony is not lost on the woman whose bloody imagination has led to a string of gruesome, best-selling novels.

Speaking ahead of Wednesday’s International Women’s Day, the mum and grandma accepts that her home life is the antithesis of her imaginary world.

She tells me: “We do have a nice life. We make marmalade, feed the birds and have a sunny outlook. But that’s not at all what I write about.”

Still Dark, out later this month, is her 14th novel and the sequel to The Darkest Goodbye, in which the killer – who has surreptitiously been putting vulnerable people ‘to sleep’ – has yet to be caught.

In Still Dark, we find the murderer back at large; this time targeting the homeless and drug addicts on Glasgow’s streets – where all of the author’s novels are set.

Handing the marmalade spoon to her husband and checking to make sure there’s time enough to chat before the next stage in the operation, she explains: “My ideas, though, do come from real life and the issues happening around me.”

The novelist – a former Department of Social Security visiting officer and teacher – supports a charity for homeless people and visits Scotland’s prisons to give readings and writing workshops.

She reveals that she also “hangs out with quite a lot of senior police officers” and even admits to sometimes terrifying herself. She tells me: “There are a lot of dead people out there.”

But it was her time with the DSS that made her acutely observant of human nature.

She says: “I met the long-term unemployed, pensioners who saved up their pennies not knowing they could get benefits, psychopaths and the wee fly men who worked the system.”

So she knows what she’s writing about.

In Still Dark, she ventures into the world of mental health after her main protagonist, DCI Lorimer, suffers a breakdown in the wake of a catastrophic event.

It’s just one strand of this multi-faceted novel that will have readers gripped.

Alex is already working on a new book, out next year. I’m eager to know more, but she cannily refuses to reveal. In any case, her hubby is at the kitchen door, spoon in hand. It’s time to jar the marmalade.