‘My debut novel, Fever City, began life as a detective story set in 1970. A secondary story briefly touched on a kidnapping which had taken place years earlier.
‘But as I moved forward with the manuscript, an unexpected thing happened. The secondary story began to emerge as the principal one. The kidnapping story, set in Los Angeles in 1960, seemed to possess a power all of its own. ‘Despite my attempts to focus on what I considered to be the “main plot”, the kidnapping component kept growing with such urgency that eventually I felt compelled to focus on it alone, and abandoned the other parts of the novel.
‘However, there was still something missing: an entrance into the kidnapping story. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find an opening that worked.