She puts on a good show, Tina Baker. She put it on when she was a TV soap opera critic, and she put it on when she went on Celebrity Fit Club – to combat ‘widescreen bum’ – and won it. She puts it on in the flesh too, or at least on Zoom, where she rocks up looking a million dollars, glammed up despite having been quite recently ill – properly, hospital ill – and only just back to teaching the fitness classes that are how she earns her living.
And she puts it on, terrifically, as an author of gritty psychological thrillers. ‘Unputdownable’ is a bit of a cliché to describe the gripping books in this genre, but Ti na’s really are: raw and extreme and viscerally full of life. She rolls her sleeves up and properly gets her hands dirty, delving into the muck and murk that make up the lives of ordinary women under duress in her latest, Make Me Clean, the story of Maria, a cleaner with a mounting bodycount. Authenticity matters to Tina – really, really matters.
‘I swore that I’d write as honestly as I could, and have the honour of doing it to the best of my ability,’ she says. It’s a truism
