In the Aftermath: A Guest Post by Gillian McAllister
Page-turning, shocking and tense, Gillian McAllister’s (Wrong Place Wrong Time) latest places one woman in an impossible situation. Read on for Gillian’s exclusive essay on how she came up with the gripping mystery at the heart of Famous Last Words.
Hardcover $30.00
Famous Last Words: A Novel
Famous Last Words: A Novel
In Stock Online
Hardcover $30.00
From the author of Reese’s Book Club Pick and New York Times bestseller Wrong Place Wrong Time comes an addictive thriller about a new mother’s world upended when her husband commits a terrifying crime. How well does she truly know the man she loves? And what danger does she face if her entire life has been built on a lie?
From the author of Reese’s Book Club Pick and New York Times bestseller Wrong Place Wrong Time comes an addictive thriller about a new mother’s world upended when her husband commits a terrifying crime. How well does she truly know the man she loves? And what danger does she face if her entire life has been built on a lie?
The idea for Famous Last Words, my new thriller, came to me in three lines:
- A gunman has taken three hostages in London.
- One of them is your husband.
- It’s the gunman.
The idea came from wanting to tell a typically male action thriller through a different lens, one that explored more familial, domestic relationships, motherhood, marriage and womanhood in general. There are snipers and gunshots and hostage negotiators in my novel, but there is also, I hope, more humanity than you’d find in most thrillers, too: the hostage negotiator who is overthinking what to say, a new mother whose marriage crumbles under what her husband has done. What I wanted to do – what I always want to do – is to use a crime to explore character, and to put pressure on intimate relationships and watch what happens in the aftermath. In Famous Last Words, you know who did it, and you also know what they did, but what you don’t know is why, and how those around the gunman are going to pick up the pieces.
Beginning a novel that opens with a siege was daunting, and one of the first things I did was to find find a hostage negotiator to talk to. Luckily, they enjoy rapport, as you’d imagine, and getting hold of one on email was relatively easy. But my questions soon spiralled, and what I knew outnumbered what I didn’t. My hostage negotiator talked to me about setting up an RVP (rendezvous point), an inner and outer cordon to keep the public out, at what stage they intervene and enter a hostage situation themselves, but the more he told me, the more I wanted to know. One thing led to another, and eventually I signed up for his day long course (I am now a level one hostage negotiator!). This is what cracked open the novel for me. Research so often is not about the nuts and bolts of how something works (though that is important). At its core, it’s about learning how the people involved in these esoteric situations think and feel. What keeps them awake at night? What would spook a trained hostage negotiator? How do they talk to their kids, to their spouse? Are they ever ‘off’? These questions go to the heart of my novel: the wife whose husband does something unspeakable and makes her notorious, and the hostage negotiator who is, for the first time in his career, completely stumped. And the explosion as these two characters meet: one wanting to prove her husband’s innocence at all costs, and one wanting to prove his guilt to end the siege…
