10 Page-turning tales of secrets and lies
AGED just 22, newly qualified solicitor Caroline England marched up to the imposing great door of one of the UK’s most notorious prisons and banged loudly.
“Miss England, where’s your sash?” chortled the hardened Strangeways warder, letting her in.
It was not the first time she had heard the joke.
“These older guys were a bit too much really,” Caroline remembers.
“Then you’d go in and see the criminals and they were really respectful. It was a surprise because I had always held the view that criminals were bad, but there are so many more layers to it than that.”
The woman who has dealt with murderers and rapists tells iN10: “Strangeways was a real eye-opener. There were all sorts of reasons for people turning to crime.
“I saw the human side. And that’s what I wanted to explore in my writing – that we are all flawed and have different degrees of badness.”
Caroline could not have known back then that her professional world would change so dramatically.
She says: “It never entered my head that I would become a writer.
“Writing a novel was a grand, romantic notion. Something other people did.”
She finally began writing shortly after becoming a full-time mum to daughters Elizabeth, 22, Charlotte, 19 and Emily, 17.
Caroline says: “I really enjoyed writing but it also satisfied my work ethic.
“It made me feel I was doing something useful when the girls were at school.”
“I think my career in the law has influenced my writing. I saw people at their lowest ebb, emotionally stressed and raw, having to bare their souls and admit to their darkest deeds, sometimes keeping secrets and telling lies – like the characters In my books.”
She writes from her home study with the family’s three cats for company. And with a string of manuscripts just waiting to be published, her efforts are bearing fruit.
Caroline – who is married to solicitor Jonathan – sucessfully published her first book Beneath The Skin last year, with readers comparing it to TV’s Cold Feet.
Her latest offering, My Husband’s Lies is a suspenseful “domestic noir”, it opens on the afternoon of Nick and Lisa’s wedding. Their close friend is spotted on a hotel window ledge, poised, it seems, to jump. And as the shock ripples through the group of friends, secrets and lies begin to emerge.
Caroline smiles: “My girls are very proud of their mum going from solicitor to full-time mum to author.
“My husband is also proud, though he always suspects I’m writing about him. I’m not – well, I hope not seeing as my second book is called My Husband’s Lies!”