Recently, Crime Time very kindly invited me to write a guest post about the process of writing my upcoming novel, The Shadow Men, and to expand on some of the themes it touches on.

All told, it’s taken me just over two years to take The Shadow Men from blank page to publication, though the idea for a third Anna Scavolini novel had been knocking around since before Cruel Summer was even published. It’s been a long and often tortuous process, and certainly the most complex narrative I’ve constructed to date, split between two protagonists - each, unbeknownst to the other, pursuing a seemingly separate investigation, with the link between them only revealed towards the end. It all took an inordinately long time to work out, and I often found that the act of changing some small, apparently inconsequential detail would have unforeseen consequences for another, seemingly unconnected event elsewhere in the narrative.

Check it out!