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Synopsis

Abbie Devereaux wakes in the dark, hooded and bound …

She doesn’t know where she is nor who it is feeding her, talking to her – threatening to kill her. Yet Abbie has courage and, above all, hope. She escapes her captor and runs back into the light. But the real world, the safe one, isn’t as she remembers it. There are days missing before she disappeared – days when she quit her job and left her boyfriend, did things she can’t explain to the police, her friends or even herself. Why won’t anyone take her story seriously? Because if Abbie can’t convince anybody that it really happened, then maybe he will come for her again. And she will wake in the dark, hooded and bound …

Download and read the terrifying opening of Land of the Living here

Reviews

Critic Review:

‘A rollercoaster of a read … leaves you emotionally exhausted – desperate to reach the conclusion but reluctant to let the thrill end’ 
Sunday Express

‘Horribly credible, the pace is relentless’ 
Independent

‘Steel yourself for a gripping tale of obsession, madness and fear’ 
Sunday Mirror

‘Dark and gripping’ 
Heat

Interview

Nicci French, aka husband and wife writing team Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, have been enthralling readers with their unique brand of psychological thriller for years. We asked them about the difficulties and rewards of writing as a team.

Why did you decide to start writing fiction together?
Sean
In the first years we were married, we talked about the idea. We knew that people could collaborate in different ways but we were interested in whether two people could write a novel that had one voice, where you were really creating a new person.

How do you manage co-authorship? Do you sit down and write together or do you take it in shifts?
Nicci
When we talk about how we write together we tend to make it sound much neater and better managed than it actually is, it's a rather chaotic and messy business. The one thing we never do is actually sit down and write together, and the thought of one of us dictating to the other is a kind of madness, it just wouldn't work. We spend a long time talking about the shape of the novel, the story, the way the plot goes, the development of the characters and above all the voice of the narrator into whom we both have to write, and once we're satisfied with that then we'll start to write. The writing will quite often take us away from the plan, but that's what we do. One of us will write, say, the first chapter and then hand it over to the other who is absolutely free to change it, edit it, erase it, add other words to it, and then they will write the next chapter and pass it back. It's a question of moving between the two of us. We never decide in advance who's going to write what chapter, there's no division.

Sean
We felt that in order for it to work we both have to be responsible for everything, whether we (individually) have written it or not. If there's any research that needs doing for a book then we both have to do it, we both have to have all of it in our heads.

Nicci
If Sean writes something and I change absolutely nothing about that whole section, but I read it and approve it, then it becomes mine as well. It becomes a kind of Nicci French thing so we both own each word of it.

Do you ever find yourself arguing when you’re writing?
Sean
I think the real argument actually comes at the earlier stage when we're working out the story. We go through a long and painful process of finding something that we're both really passionate and committed to doing, because for a book you're going to be spending a year of your life on it, so you've got to trust each other that it's something we really can do.

Nicci
We don’t argue so much about the fact that words have been changed as about who's going to make the next cup of tea and who's working harder, all the domestic squabbles that every couple goes through, but we're quite respectful of each other in the act of writing. Outside of the act of writing not so much!

Why did you choose to write crime novels?
Nicci
I'm interested in crime in the sense that I'm interested in the strange path that people's lives can go down. I'm not so much interested in the criminal, I'm much more interested in the victim, the effects of the crime and what lies beneath the settled surface. Most people, when you meet them, present themselves as ordered and controlled; they have a self-possessed image. Underneath that everybody is a welter of doubt, grief, loss, nostalgia, love and hate; that’s what I'm interested in. The thrillers that we write are not about fiendishly clever serial killers outwitting the police, they're about ordinary people who have extraordinary things happening in the middle of their lives, and the way that they change and have to resolve things. I think that attracts us to the thriller genre.

You chose to use a female pseudonym, and almost all your novels so far have been written from a female viewpoint. Is there a reason for this?
Sean
The first idea we had was about recovered memory, and 99% of people recovering memory in therapy are women, so it obviously had to be a woman. Once it was a woman as the main character then it just seemed obvious that if we were going to choose a name, that it should be a female name. Women have achieved a kind of independence and equality, a nominal independence, and yet so many things haven't changed. There are so many kinds of unexpected pressures that have come along with that, and that seemed an interesting road to go down.

Nicci
It is that sense of there being a cross-current between what modern women are like now; assertive, independent, strong, ambitious, and yet still very physically vulnerable, but also vulnerable to all the things that attack us from the past, all the things we're conditioned to feel. There's a kind of emotional vulnerability and intelligence, a particular kind of female intelligence that seems to be a good way of looking at the world.

Are you frequently tempted to include issues which you feel strongly about in your books.
Sean
I hope all our books deal with serious issues, things that seem important to us, but one does have this ruthless, amoral commitment to the story. If something isn't working for the story then you have to stop and ask what it's doing there. There may be things you feel really passionately about - political things - and you may be able to work that into the fabric of the book, but if it's not worked into the fabric of the book then you have to re-think it.

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