“Her escape to the country promised many things. Murder wasn’t one of them.”

Recently-widowed doctor Zoe Moreland has left behind her life in a midlands city to become a GP in the Scottish Borders countryside. Her hopes of integrating quietly into village life are dashed when she finds the roasted remains of the local busybody in a Guy Fawkes bonfire.

The police investigation is led by the impeccably dressed DI Erskine ‘Skinny’ Mather, who has recently returned to the Borders from Glasgow to be near his ailing mother. He’s an old flame of Zoe’s friend, Kate Mackenzie, who is deaf and an accomplished lip reader.

Kate wants to discover the killer’s identity herself, to clear her cousin who’s a suspect. She asks for Zoe’s help, but Zoe refuses. She’s got enough on her plate, adapting to life in a new country and dealing with a resentful colleague, a feckless builder and a persistent, exasperating admirer.

Zoe changes her mind, though, when there’s another death and she herself becomes the killer’s next target. She starts to dig beneath the tranquil surface of this close‑knit community to uncover other people’s secrets – while trying to keep her own.

It’s not until Zoe is locked in a life-or-death struggle with an unexpected adversary and faces a devastating revelation that she learns the truth behind recent events.

It’s not until the final page that the reader learns the biggest secret of all.

‘Write what you enjoy reading’

I don’t know how you could do otherwise. I’m not a policeman, or a lawyer or a forensic-anything. But I’ve been reading crime fiction since my mother weaned me off Enid Blyton on to what she enjoyed reading herself. This included the work of writers from the so-called ‘golden age’ of the whodunit, like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Ngaio Marsh. I was hooked. Thanks Mum.

Since then, I’ve read work by many of the crime writers you’ll have heard of, and lots of less well known ones too. I’ve just totted up the books on my ‘to read’ shelf: there are 76, all but two of which could be described as crime novels. My first husband used to joke that he’d told his mates to suspect foul play if he died suddenly, because I was so well informed about ways to dispose of him. Reader – I just divorced him.

No Stranger to Death

Some years ago I attended a Bonfire Night party with my second husband. When I mused out loud that shoving a body into a huge bonfire would be a good way of getting rid of incriminating evidence even if it didn’t consume the entire corpse, his response was ‘Go on then, write it’.

No Stranger to Death is the result of that challenge. It’s set in the Scottish Borders (where we live) and is intended to be the first book in the ‘Westerlea’ trilogy of crime novels. The principal characters are recently widowed Doctor Zoe Moreland, deaf genealogist Kate Mackenzie and Chief Inspector Erskine Mather, who – unlike most fictional detectives – is neither alcoholic or scruffy.

Working to a deadline

Last year I set myself the deadline of 22 July 2010 – the opening date of the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, held annually in Harrogate – to have a completed draft of No Stranger to Death. I achieved this, and am now editing that draft.