Andrea Mara is back with her new crime thriller, No One Saw A Thing. A heart-stopping premise – a woman’s child goes missing after stepping onto an underground carriage and we cannot wait to know what comes next! She shares her inspiration with us…
Truth is stranger than fiction, or so it’s said, and happily for me, my kids spent most of their early years putting the heart crossways on me by temporarily disappearing and providing inspiration for future books.
It turns out that there’s an element of Karma at play here, because once upon a time back in the eighties, I did exactly the same thing to my parents. We were in London on holidays – my mum, my dad, and my three younger sisters. I was twelve at the time. We arrived in a Tube station, and myself and my six-year-old sister got on the train. Before my parents and siblings could join us, the doors slid shut. As they watched in horror, the Tube pulled away from the platform, with my sister and me inside. My dad, apparently, shouted ‘Tower Bridge! Tower Bridge!’ through the closed doors and although we didn’t hear it, the person beside us did, and told us where to get off the train.
My dad told me this story again recently, and two things struck me – first of all, that my dad sent us to our destination and not the next station (it was the eighties, things were a bit more free and easy back then) and also, that the person who put us off at Tower Bridge just let us go and didn’t stay with us (see point about the eighties above).
It all ended well though – the rest of our family found us ten minutes later at Tower Bridge, and we got on with our touristing. It was only when my dad reminded me of the story a couple of years ago that I decided to turn it into a book.
Clearly, nobody was terribly worried about letting a twelve-year-old get off a Tube on her own back in the eighties, so in No One Saw A Thing, the children are a little younger – Faye is six and Bea is two. They’re whisked off on the Tube, leaving their distraught mother, Sive, on the platform. When Sive reaches the next stop, only two-year-old Bea is there. Nobody has seen where Faye went, and Bea is too young to say. The story unfolds over a day in London as Sive and her husband, Aaron, search frantically for their missing daughter, wondering if she has walked off, or been abducted by a stranger, or if the answer lies closer to home…
You can now order No One Saw A Thing by Andrea Mara on our website.
