Mystery murders cast long shadows for Eastbourne author

“It's a standalone book, completely different to my Eastbourne books, four books in the series. This book is my second stand-alone. It was quite tempting to stick to the South Downs but I really wanted to move away from the location that I used for the last four books. For this one my starting point is this remote farmhouse in Lincolnshire. And the story is that nine people were found dead there. Nobody knows who they were or why they were there or why they were killed and this all happened ten years ago. The main character in the book is Clare Brown. She’s 27 years old. She’s an only child. Her parents were killed in a car crash. She used to have a black cat called Ollie. But the problem is that all of that is a lie. It's very clear that she has been running from something bad but it is not clear what it is. But she is very much wanting to live under the radar. She has had periods of being homeless and she scrapes a living by cleaning people’s houses for cash but she does everything she can to be invisible. The other character is an investigative journalist who has written an award-winning true crime podcast series called Black Valley Farm. The podcast sets out to discover the truth behind the deaths of the nine people ten years ago. And the two storylines converge....”

Sheila has been a published author for ten years: “One of the reasons I write crime fiction is that it gives me a good structure to explore the things that interest me. The structure is that there has been a crime or a murder that needs to be solved but the book is really about a young woman who is dealing with trauma and anxiety. More broadly it is about various people coming to terms with things that have happened to them in their past, the different ways people survive trauma and are changed by it and reform themselves just to keep going. Sometimes people coping with trauma do things that are broadly positive but sometimes they are so badly damaged by what happened to them that they damage other people.”

The books have come rapidly for Sheila. She says for a long time in a sense she was waiting to become the writer she wanted to be: “And I think there were two clear reasons for that. One was a lack of confidence and the other was a lack of maturity. But I started writing 17 years ago and became published ten years ago. The big moment came after my daughter was born and I had a real light bulb moment. I remember walking through the park and having this absolute moment of clarity that if I didn't start doing this thing that I wanted to do for so long then the day would come when I would be lying on my deathbed regretting never having started it and so I did. There were plenty of false starts and stops along the way but finally I did it.”