How to Kill a Crime Writer

A Prologue and a Half

Play dead. Play dead. Play dead.

The wound at the back of her head is still leaking blood, but Leah Rebecca Overton blocks out the pain and cracks open her eyes. The light is dying, and far above her, leaves tremble in the wind. Other than the scrape of a shovel digging into earth, and the grunts of exertion from the man intent on burying her alive, it's deathly quiet. This woodland is in the depths of a vast, privately owned country estate, miles from the nearest road.

Another shovelful of dirt lands on her chest, and it takes everything she has not to flinch. Not yet, she tells herself. Play dead. She has to bide her time. Gather her strength before she acts.

No one will be coming to her aid. The cops aren't an option. Not in this rural county, where sheep and shotguns outnumber the residents, and secrets usually stay buried. And "usually" is the keyword here because pressing into her back are the skeletal remains of the poor soul she'd unearthed from this makeshift grave just seconds before she heard the roar of the gamekeepers' quad bikes. She could've run. Didn't. Knows what Jed, her mentor, would've said about her decision to stay and fight: "Why take unnecessary risks, girl?"

The answer's simple: Because it's who she is. It's who she's always been.

The odds had been against her but that was nowt new, and the shovel she'd brought along had come in handy. Took one of the men out with a blow to the throat. Sideswiped the second, enjoying the crunch of cartilage as his nose imploded beneath his balaclava. Would've dispatched the ringleader too if he hadn't snuck up behind her and slammed his shotgun into the back of her head, rendering her temporarily unconscious.

More dirt peppers her body, and she hears her assailant muttering, "Bye-bye, bitch."

Rage gives her the strength she needs, and she curls her fingers around the femur belonging to his previous victim. The time for playing dead is over.

Not finishing her off was his first mistake. Calling her a bitch will be his last.

That's how my mother began Overlooked, the sixth-and final-novel in her bestselling Private Investigator Leah Rebecca Overton thriller series.

It's quite hard-hitting, isn't it? And no wonder, because "always begin a book with a bang" had been Mum's motto, and she'd followed this to a tee. For example, Book Three kicks off with a passenger plane crashing into Ilkley Moor, and in Book Four's prologue, Leah Rebecca Overton heroically slides her motorbike under the wheels of a malfunctioning self-drive to stop it from smashing into a Tesco Express.

For my mother's sake, I wish I could do that too (begin this book with a bang, I mean, not crash a Ducati into a runaway Tesla). But seeing as what happened to me was far more implausible, it's probably best if I stick to the truth.

Little Shop(pe) of Horrors

It all kicked off on an otherwise typical Monday morning in early autumn, four months after I'd made the fateful-and ultimately near-fatal-decision to move into my dead mother's cottage in rural Shropshire.

I'm not great at recalling specific dates and times, but I know for a fact that it began on a Monday because that was the day that Glenn-from-next-door always set off to do his big weekly shop. This meant that Brian and I were rudely awoken that morning by a cacophony of slamming doors, honking car horns, and Glenn and his wife Janet having needlessly shouty exchanges ("I can't find the bags-for-life again, Jan!" "Have you checked the boot, Glenn?" "Course I have, pet-oh, hang on," etcetera).

As I did every Monday, I thought, you're just driving to the Aldi to get some peas, Glenn, not plotting an insurgence against Putin, followed by the more melancholic, had this weekly kerfuffle bothered Mum too?

If it had, she'd never said so-not to me, anyway. One of the most painful aspects about living in my mother's cottage was discovering how little I'd known about her day-to-day life in the hamlet, and it didn't help that this was partly my fault.

After all, I hadn't exactly been enthusiastic about her decision to move to rural Shropshire in the first place. In fact, back when she'd broken the news that she was swapping her Sheffield townhouse for a country cottage in the Midlands, I genuinely thought she was winding me up.

"Don't be daft, Niamh," she'd said. "Why would I joke about a thing like that?"

"Because you're a hardcore townie, aren't you?" She was forever striding along pavements in designer coats, mainlining artisanal espressos, and popping into independent bookstores. "I mean, you've never even been glamping, Mum."

"I fancy a change of lifestyle, and it'll do me good to get in touch with nature."

"Why that part of the country, though?" I'd always assumed she was a hardcore northerner. She'd spent her whole life in Sheffield, and most of her novels were set in Yorkshire. "It's hours away from everyone you know." Including me, I didn't say.

She dodged the question, which wasn't like her, and said instead: "Tell you what, why don't I take you to see the cottage next weekend?"

We spent the four-hour journey there singing along to the ABBA Gold CD that was permanently jammed in her Mini's ancient sound system, which lightened the mood and gave us an excuse to avoid discussing my latest run-in with the bailiffs. "Just wait till you see the place, Niamh," Mum kept saying as we neared our destination, "you're not going to believe it."

She was right about that. As we drove along country lanes that were eerily devoid of traffic, and through villages that were pleasantly devoid of people, all I could think was: Which is it, Mum-midlife crisis or nervous breakdown? I should stress that this wasn't because of the area itself. If anything, the landscape around Buckstone is almost too beautiful-all soft rolling hills, swathes of ancient woodland, and single-lane tracks that go nowhere-and because hardly anyone knows that Shropshire exists, the local wildlife hasn't yet been decimated (there are even some hedgehogs and insects left in the county). No. The issue was that although the hamlet had the charming, timeless vibe of a folk horror film, it consisted of little more than a row of terraced cottages, a twee village hall, a tiny church, and an eccentric volunteer-run shoppe (the shop's spelling, not mine), and I was struggling to picture my urbanite mother sipping tea with a vicar, joining the Nimby brigade, and trying her hand at cozy crime mysteries instead of hard-boiled thrillers.

But if nature was what she was after, she'd come to the right place because the lane we took to reach her new home-half a mile from the hamlet-was so defiantly rural that it petered out into woodland (which, in turn, petered out into Wales). And I could see why she'd been taken with the cottage itself. With its higgledy-piggledy, whitewashed stone walls, quirky lattice windows, and quirkier porch, it couldn't have been more chocolate-boxy, and its front garden was blooming with daffodils and some other attractive plants that were probably weeds.

"Well?" she asked. "What do you think?"

"I really like it." I did. I would've liked it a lot more if it weren't for the proximity of the neighboring properties. Directly opposite lurked a sullen barn conversion that resembled an apocalypse bunker, and the cottage was sandwiched between two architectural opposites: a bleak manor-style house that could've been drawn by an evil child, and an aggressively well-maintained new build that looked as if it had been accidentally beamed out of suburbia. I remember thinking that there was something tragically self-conscious about the newer house-perhaps it knew it was supposed to be on an executive housing estate. In its graveled frontage, two depressed gnomes fished in vain for a garden, and even its wheelie bin gleamed. Of course, I didn't know then that its lack of greenery was down to Glenn's unhealthy addiction to his hedge strimmer; nor could I have known that in eighteen months' time, those gnomes would end up being clues in an incredibly odd murder investigation.

But it was the sinister manor that took up most of my attention. Its front garden was a riot of rose bushes, but the house itself was sepia toned, as if it existed in an era before Technicolor was invented. "That place looks intriguing."

"Isn't it fabulous?" my mother said without any sarcasm. "Apparently, it was the country seat of an aristocratic family which used to own all the surrounding land and properties." Curiously, despite being a socialist, she seemed to fancy the prospect of living in the cap-doffing shadow of a mini version of Downton Abbey. "According to the estate agent, the elderly 'lady of the manor' still lives there."

Although it was a bright spring day, the manor's curtains were all drawn. "Perhaps she's a vampire," I said, unaware that my future self would go to great lengths to avoid being emotionally drained by Lady Sheila Ripley.

The quirkiness extended to the cottage's interior, and in the farmhouse-style kitchen, there was an ancient range cooker that even I found charming, mainly because I assumed that I'd never have to use it. The place clearly hadn't been lived in for a long time and reeked of neglect, but it came across as cozy rather than ominous.

"It needs some remedial work, of course," said my mother, massively understating things.

It couldn't have been more of a contrast to her usual minimalistic aesthetic. There were only two bedrooms-one of which was little more than a box room-and instead of a lounge, there was a "snug," which did what it said on the tin. "Where will you put all your books?"

"The attic's fairly spacious, so I'm thinking of converting that into a writing room and library."

Behind the kitchen was a tiny cloakroom, and a utilitarian area my mother insisted on calling a "boot room."

"Isn't that discriminatory against coats and hats?" (This made her smile.)

The back door opened out onto a covered patio, beyond which stretched an extensive, tree-strewn garden, which would've been lovely too if it hadn't been hemmed in by the manor's crumbling boundary wall and the suburban interloper's creosoted fence.

"It was the garden that sold me on it." More oddness-she'd never met a houseplant she couldn't murder. "Just look at that chestnut tree, Niamh. Isn't it magnificent? And listen to the birdsong. You don't get that in Sheffield, do you?"

You did, but not at that volume. "Are you sure about this, Mum? They've only just accepted your offer, so it's not too late to back out."

A sigh. "Oh, here we go."

"I'm just worried you'll get lonely out here."

"I've got work to keep me busy. And I can always get a cat."

I still wasn't convinced. She wasn't an impulsive person, and this move smacked of impulsivity. But as far as I know, my mother hadn't regretted escaping to the countryside, which is all that matters. And after I did the same, I also gradually began to adjust to rural living.

Well, very gradually. I'm not usually fussy about where I live, but I'd be lying if I said it was easy coming to terms with the area's lack of diversity and Deliveroo and its abundance of unusually large spiders and local gossip, and never having lived in anything but a flat before, acclimatizing to the elderly cottage's anthropomorphic creaks and groans took some doing too.

Far thornier to navigate was living in the shadow of my mother's death, but it helped that I put in place several grief-avoidance strategies, such as gaming and binge-watching whenever I was awake, and steering clear of the attic and the Death Zone outside. All the same, if it hadn't been for Brian, I'm not sure I would've coped. He was the main reason I'd decided to live there in the first place-it wasn't as if he could've moved in with me, seeing as at the time, I was technically homeless-and it was a welcome relief to discover that we were both undemanding creatures of habit. My days usually involved grief-distracting, snacking, and hiding from the neighbors; Brian's consisted of napping, snacking, and psychologically torturing Lady Sheila's Bedlington terrier. As long as I remembered to feed him, and he remembered not to sleep on my keyboard, we got along swimmingly (in all the ways that matter, my relationship with my mother's cat was the most successful one I'd ever had).

I knew from experience that if you lose yourself in other worlds, and do the same thing every day, time tends to pass in a blur. And as the weeks blurred into months, I stupidly allowed myself to fall into a false sense of security.

Which brings me back to that Monday morning.

Unaware that the blurring would shortly be coming to an abrupt and shocking end, after Glenn had honked off to the supermarket, I dug through my floordrobe for some clothes that weren't too covered in cat hair, and slunk downstairs to give Brian his breakfast.

It's strange to think that the worst thing I expected to deal with that day was a bit of local gossip. Well, that and the dread I always felt whenever I was forced to walk into the hamlet for supplies, but that was my own fault for: a) forgetting to place the online grocery order again; and b) doing absolutely nothing to address my worsening social isolation and anxiety issues. Still, at least I wouldn't have to worry about running into Glenn because it would be hours before he returned from his epic journey to the nearest hub (an upmarket town fifteen miles away that was predominantly populated by spaniels and men in burgundy trousers). To be fair, other than his intrusively noisy shopping and gardening habits, and a suspicion that he didn't believe in the climate crisis, I didn't have anything particularly personal against him, but I preferred to avoid him because he'd found my mother's body. Janet wasn't much of a threat because she rarely ventured out into the wild, and the owner of the barn bunker opposite-aka the Weekend Wanker-wasn't an issue today because he only pitched up on Fridays or whenever his alarm went off. In any case, I'd never actually spoken to him, and according to Glenn, Pam and Elaine from the shoppe, the postie, and the man who delivered the heating oil, the Wanker only ever communicated via abusive messages on the community WhatsApp.

So that just left Lady Sheila.