About the author… Carole Johnstone

She lives in the Scottish Highlands and for the past 10 years has been publishing short fiction. She had a job in healthcare but in 2018 took a long sabbatical and moved to Cyprus where she wrote this, her debut novel. She is now working on a second.

This novel was inspired by… My grandparents’ house in Leith, Edinburgh. It was a 200-year-old Georgian villa, as eccentric as it was rundown. Growing up, it was a magical and often very creepy place to run around in – a world away from our parents’ very sensible suburban bungalow. There was a ghost in our bedroom called Beatrice, a witch in the vaulted cellar and faeries under the rockery at the bottom of the huge garden. When I sat down to write this book, my grandparents’ house was the only house I ever saw.

The most challenging thing about writing it was… I wanted to write a whodunit that had lots of clues and surprising reveals throughout – some large, some small. It’s so important if you’re going to write a story with twists that every single one of them makes sense. That every character stays in character. That everything that happens is rooted in reality. And this requires extensive planning and plotting. My writing habits are… I’m not a morning person, so I write in the afternoon and evening. I also find it impossible to work in any location other than my office with a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. And I always spend as much time plotting and researching as I do actually writing the first draft of any story.