If you’ve come to writing later in life and are worried about making it in a young person’s game, look to Rachel Abbott for inspiration. Rachel only started writing in her fifties. She went on to become one of the most successful self-published authors in the world, selling more than three million copies of her books. A decade after she put her first book on Amazon, she’s now a hybrid author, known to her fans as ‘the Queen of twisted suspense’, continuing to self-publish one series and with a traditional publishing deal for another. With more than four million copies of her books sold, her latest thriller, The Murder Game, was published in April by Headline’s Wildfire imprint.
It’s a dark, twisty, horribly unputdownable take on a locked-room mystery, telling the story of a group of people invited to celebrate the anniversary of what should have been Lucas’s wedding by playing out a tense real-life mystery at his isolated Cornish mansion.
‘I think it was the whole idea of a murder mystery thing that started it,’ says Rachel, talking from her home in Alderney just before lockdown. ‘I thought, how about if it was real? If it was a real event the people there were forced to investigate, and everybody was provided with costumes and character profiles – but everyone was something very strange. The intrigue of somebody setting it up.’