10 Thrillers that will grip you
LAURA LAM’S book is a thriller with a rich vein of science fiction running through it, but even though it’s set in the future it was inspired by historical events.
She explained: “The idea came from reading about conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. They were famous in the Vaudeville era.
“They did a film in the 1950s called Chained For Life where one of the twins killed the other twin’s lover and they had to go on trial.
“I started thinking about how interesting it would be to have a conjoined twin. There would be no privacy and you’d be closer to them than anyone else.
“It would eat you up if your literal ‘other half’ kept a secret from you. What if that secret was murder? “Everything spiralled out from there.” The book tells the story of a pair of conjoined twins who have been separated.
“One is accused of murder and her sister takes on her identity to find out what really happened.
“I read books, watched quite a few documentaries, read interviews and I also have twin nephews, Reuben and Cabe, who are not conjoined. I observed how they interacted.”
Although originally from San Francisco, where the book is set, these days Laura calls Aberdeen home.
“I met my husband Craig on the internet when I was 15 and he was 16.
“He found a list of my favourite books on a blog I had written in 2002 and greatly disagreed with the order I had put the authors in.
“He knew a mutual friend of mine so we weren’t complete strangers. We got chatting, fell in love, and flew back and forward between California and Aberdeen for five years.
“We bonded over writing terrible books as teenagers!”
After university, Laura moved to Scotland to join Craig, and they have been married for 7 years.
“I knew what I was getting into but I do miss the weather.
“I miss San Francisco because it was a vibrant interesting part of the United States. That’s partly why I set the book there. It was a way of spending more time there, even if it was only in my imagination.”
For the science fiction elements of the book, Laura kept a close eye on things such as internet blogs about technology.
“I think things like brain implants may one day be possible. I researched a lot on how dreams and memories are stored in the brain.
“One of the ideas that crops up in the book is the notion of people being ‘frozen’ before being brought back to life in the future.”
It’s not something she would rush into, says Laura.
“It sounds scary but I might choose to do it for the chance of eternal life if it wasn’t prohibitively expensive,” she laughed.
“It would be very scary going into a pod and knowing you were going to be frozen. It’s the whole set-up of a book that I have in my head to write one day!”