Blog Tour - Close to Home by Cara Hunter

Today I am pleased to welcome Cara Hunter to my blog. Cara is currently taking part in a blog tour to celebrate the publication of her debut novel. Close to Home. 

Close to Home is a really good book, full of twists and turns and kept my attention to the very end. When I choose a new author to read, I often refer back to Richard and Judy and their WHSmith Book Club. I have been a fan since the very first list and I still think that they have a great eye to picking great books that a wide audience will enjoy. Therefore when I saw that Close to Home had made it on to the new 2018 Book Club list I knew I was in for a good read, and I definitely was not disappointed. 

Last night, eight-year-old Daisy Mason disappeared from a family party.

No one in the quiet suburban street saw anything - or at least that's what they're saying. DI Adam Fawley is trying to keep an open mind. But he knows the nine times out of ten, it's someone the victim knew. That means someone is lying...

And that Daisy's time is running out. 

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 9780241283097

Cara Hunter joins me to talk about detective stories on the small screen ......

Watching the detectives…

“It reminds me so much of Broadchurch”. That was pretty much the first thing my editor at Penguin ever said to me and it was just about the nicest compliment she could have chosen. Right from the start, one of the things I wanted to do with Close to Home was give readers the same sort of experience they get from crime TV.

There’s so much superb writing for the screen now – look at Line of Duty or Hinterland. Tightly plotted, with enthralling characters, and fantastic twists. I wanted to recreate some of that same pace and energy on the page, which is what inspired me to develop what I suppose you could call the ‘signature style’ of the DI Fawley books (the second, In the Dark is out in July, and the third next winter). There are lots of short scenes, lots of different points of view, and lots of different types of narrative, from blog posts - like this one! - to Twitter feeds and police interview transcripts. This keeps the story bowling along, and at the same time it also gives the reader the chance to turn detective themselves, as they piece together all the various strands of evidence and come up with what they think really happened.

Another thing TV crime is really good at is using setting to maximise the menace. I’ll never forget the brooding flatlands of True Detective I, and the cinematography of Hinterland is likewise outstanding. As one person on Twitter put it, the show manages to make the Welsh hills feel like Mordor. For the Fawley books, the setting is Oxford, which has a huge TV ‘hinterland’ of its own, of course. It’s such a gift for me, as a writer, because everyone already has a picture of Oxford in their heads from Morse or Lewis, so I have the luxury of taking all that for granted. I can ‘turn the camera the other way’, and show them a side to the city that’s much ‘closer to home’….  

 I am already looking forward to Cara Hunter's next novel and I recommend Close to Home to all my blog readers.

Thank you to the publishers, Penguin Random House, for inviting me to take part in the blog tour and a copy of the book in return for an honest review and to Cara for visiting me on the blog tour.