I am excited to be taking part in the blog tour for Gone Without a Trace by Mary Torjussen which is released today! We are joined on the blog by Mary Torjussen who talks about her Top 5 Twists in Crime Fiction!
1) The
Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
Agatha
Christie’s novels were my first introduction to adult books and I read them
avidly, trying desperately to work out who the culprit was and why they’d
committed the crime. Through reading her novels I learned about plot devices
that crime writers use, such as red herrings, and this made me realise that the
novel didn’t just happen, but was planned in meticulous detail. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was the
first time I’d encountered an unreliable narrator and I remember the shock I
felt as I realised the author’s deception. I re-read it immediately to work out
how she’d managed to fool me and from then on I read crime novels in a much
more analytical way.
2) Sister by Rosamund Lipton
In Sister we read about
Beatrice and her search for her missing sister, Tess. Its theme is sisterhood –
or love – and the lengths to which we’ll go to find and protect the ones we
love, but it contains another theme, one which I love most in a novel, which is
how much we can ever know someone, despite our close relationship to them. The
novel is suspenseful throughout and the twist is so huge that I went straight
back to the beginning and started again. I have four sisters and recognised
instantly the intensity of feeling that Beatrice would have, yet as we all live
in different cities with our own families, I realised after reading this novel that
there’s the distinct possibility that I only see the aspects of them that they
want to reveal.
3) Tell
No One by Harlan Coben
Tell No One has one of the
best twists I’ve read. It occurs right at the start, so I hope I’m not giving
too much away, but when David Beck, widowed for several years, receives an
email telling him to view a website at a specific time, he clicks on the link
to see CCTV footage which shows his wife, in real time, walking across a road,
looking up at the camera and saying, “I’m sorry.” Though this scene is early in
the novel, by the time I read it my pulse was already racing. Published in
2001, it was both the first novel I’d read by Coben and the first I’d read
where technology was used both to reveal and to heighten pace and pressure.
This had a huge influence on me in the way I write.
4) We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Right from the start of We Need to
Talk About Kevin, we know that Eva is married to Franklin, and that their
son, Kevin, murdered pupils at his own school. The book is epistolary, with
each letter being written by Eva to her husband. Though at the start I wondered
why Shriver had chosen such a device, I became engrossed so quickly that I
forgot to consider this again until the end, when her reasons became
horrifyingly clear. Shriver is brutally honest about Eva and Kevin’s
relationship and it’s incredibly hard to read at times, but what was obvious to
me was that she knew him. She understood him. And what happened then became
inevitable, in a perfect example of characters determining plot.
5) The
Widow by Fiona Barton
This
novel has everything: secrets, lies, betrayals, unreliable narrators and a twist
that blew me away. In The Widow, like
all the best crime novels, nothing is quite what it seems. This terrific story,
full of dark, claustrophobic oppression, considers what it’s like to live with
someone who’s committed a terrible crime. I can’t be the only reader who
wondered how on earth this theme had never been dealt with before, nor the only
writer who kicked herself for not thinking of it first. Fiona Barton keeps us
guessing right to the very end, but more than that, has written a novel which stayed
with me for long after it was finished.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
No one ever disappears completely...
You leave for work one morning.
Another day in your normal life.
Until you come home to discover that your boyfriend has gone.
His belongings have disappeared.
He hasn't been at work for weeks.
It's as if he never existed.
But that's not possible, is it?
And there is worse still to come.
Because just as you are searching for him
someone is also watching you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mary Torjussen has an MA in Creative Writing from Liverpool John Moores University. She worked for several years as a teacher and lives outside of Liverpool, where Gone Without a Trace is set.
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