Cara Hunter: Letting the Story and Characters Evolve in Crime Fiction
Cara Hunter is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling crime novels Close to Home, In the Dark, No Way Out, All the Rage, and The Whole Truth, all featuring DI Adam Fawley and his Oxford-based police team. Close to Home was shortlisted for Crime Book of the Year in the British Book Awards 2019. No Way Out was selected by the Sunday Times as one of the 100 best crime novels since 1945.
Cara’s novels have sold more than a million copies worldwide. She lives in Oxford, on a street not unlike those featured in her books. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
In this post, Cara shares the production challenges of her latest book, how her planning process was different this time around, and more.
Cara Hunter
Name: Cara Hunter
Literary agent: Anna Power, Johnson & Alcock
Book title: Murder in the Family
Publisher: William Morrow
Release date: September 19, 2023
Genre/category: Crime/Thriller
Previous titles: The DI Adam Fawley series: Close to Home; In the Dark; No Way Out; All the Rage; The Whole Truth; Hope to Die
Elevator pitch for the book: Written like a screenplay, and drawing on a wealth of mixed media, this is true-crime reality TV meets Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. Six law enforcement experts revisit a notorious unsolved murder on a hit cable show, but the killer twist is that they all have something to hide, and one of them is the murderer…
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What prompted you to write this book?
I grew up on Agatha Christie (still the best model for any aspiring crime writer), so the inspiration for this book was to take the time-honored scenario of an isolated group of people of whom one must be the culprit, and re-imagine that for an era of true crime.
I’m a huge fan of true crime in all its forms, and some of my favorite series have fed through into the development of the book, from the format of Wrong Man, to the first-person perspective of Murder on Middle Beach, to the ‘disintermediated’ narration of American Murder: The Family Next Door.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
This book was a joy to write—fiendishly complicated (like three-dimensional chess!) and a whole new challenge for me as I’d never written a screenplay before, and in essence, that’s what this is. It took about six months to get to final draft, and then a few more months for the production process, so in all it was one of the quicker ones for me.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
The style of the book would be quite a challenge for any production department, since there are so many different pieces of artwork (maps, photos, CVs, floorplans, press cuttings) as well as different layout conventions for things like texts and social media chatrooms. That takes some getting used to!
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
One thing that was a new experience for me was not knowing who the killer was at the outset. I’m usually a pathological planner and have a huge and detailed synopsis before I get started, but this time, although I was very clear about the setting and the characters, I actually didn’t know ‘whodunnit.’
I just went with the flow and let the story and the people evolve and develop, until it became obvious to me who must have committed the crime.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
The feedback I love the most is when readers tell me that the style of my books allows them to be detectives themselves. I use a lot of mixed media in the Fawley series—maps, interview transcripts, crime scene drawings, podcasts, body maps, the works—and Murder in the Family takes this even further by stripping out the conventional narrative altogether.
A lot of people have already told me how immersive this is, and it really gives them the chance to solve the crime themselves. So I hope readers will have a lot of fun doing that, and more than anything else I hope they’ll have trouble putting it down—one journalist in the UK called it ‘a bingeable box-set of a book’ and I couldn’t put it better myself!
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Never give up! Whether it’s the lonely journey to getting published, or that mid-first-draft lull where it feels like you need a snow-plough to get through, patience and perseverance will win through in the end.