CRIMINAL mastermind
At the heart of a lot of fiction is the question ‘what if?’ In the hands of bestselling crime writer Gillian McAllister, fast developing a reputation as queen of the moral dilemma, the question becomes ‘what would you do?’
At the beginning of Gillian’s ingenious new high-concept domestic thriller Wrong Place, Wrong Time, lead character Jen watches her teenage son Todd commit a murder. From the opening pages, the book has the reader in a vice-like grip as Jen tracks backwards through time, not just to solve the crime – but to stop it from happening.
‘I watched Russian Doll on Netflix, about a woman who died [and relived] every single day at her birthday party and I was really inspired by that time leap quantity to it,’ says Gillian. ‘Like Groundhog Day. And I thought books in the crime field had never done that structure. My brain put them together and that felt completely logical to me. It was very clear I’d run it backwards. It was clear the inception of her son’s crime was in the past.’
doesn’t mess with its readers’ heads for the sake of it. The concept is central not just to the structure, but the storytelling. ‘I quite like to overlay a crime plot with an interesting structure,’ says Gillian. ‘It was fun to write different stuff to what people might expect. Because the crime is in the past, it justified taking the book backwards. It wasn’t just telling a story
