1--What is the title of your latest release?
THE LAST DAYS OF KIRA MULLAN
2--What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
How do you prove a murder when no-one else believes it happened; how can people trust you when you don’t even trust yourself?
3--How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
Some of our books need to have rural settings; this thriller, which is about paranoia and intimate dread, had to be urban. It is set in a crowded part of London where people rent rooms in cheaply converted houses that have thin walls, where there are eyes everywhere, where strangers press up against each other and where friends can’t be trusted. We set it in an area of London called Harlesden, that has a diverse, shifting population and felt perfect.
4--Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
Yes! Nancy is full of passion and determination. What’s more, she is a very good cook.
5--What are three words that describe your protagonist?
Stubborn, courageous, alone
6--What’s something you learned while writing this book?
That many ‘normal’ people hear voices; it is far more common than most of us assume
7--Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
We edit each other we go along, editing and adding and even deleting (painful!), but then at the end we each do a thorough edit once again before sending the book to our agent.
8--What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
For Sean, Galician rib-eye steak, worth the expense; for Nicci, who doesn’t eat meat, porcini mushrooms; for both, oysters.
9--Describe your writing space/office!
Sean works in a small, bare shed in the garden, where he can’t get internet; Nicci works in an attic that has windows facing in both directions and photos of the children on the walls.
10--Who is an author you admire?
We both love Andrew Solomon who in two books (The Noonday Demon and Far From the Tree) has written with extraordinary eloquence and empathy about the strangeness of being human.
11--Is there a book that changed your life?
For Nicci, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, read as a teenager and then many, many times since: romantic and wild and wonderful. For Sean, the Sherlock Holmes stories, a great detective, a great friendship, a great setting.
12--Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
We handed our first book, The Memory Game, to our agent immediately before going on holiday to Sweden and were in a meadow by a lake when a relative came to find us to say that she had run, and could we call back at once (this was before mobile phones existed). We somehow felt, after we had talked to her, that our life would never be quite the same again.
13--What’s your favorite genre to read?
We have no favorite genres, just favorite books
14--What’s your favorite movie?
Rio Bravo
15--What is your favorite season?
spring, with its sense of newness and possibility and hope
16--How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
Sitting round a table laden with good food with our children and their partners, drinking wine and arguing and feeling infinitely grateful for our luck,
17--What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
Rectify, three series about the aftermath of a murder. Hardly anyone saw it, but everyone who did fell in love with it.
18--What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
If forced, we would say Italian, preferably eaten in Italy.
19--What do you do when you have free time?
walk, swim, read, listen to music, go to the theatre – and sleep!
20--What can readers expect from you next?
We’ve already finished out next thriller, Tyler Green Can Never Be Released. It opens with a man who was convicted of the murder of his girlfriend when he was a young man being let out on license and returning to the group of friends who were with him when the murder happened. Did he do it? If not, who did?
A Novel
From international bestselling master of suspense Nicci French comes a chilling new psychological thriller about a woman determined to get justice for a murder no one else believes happened.
Nancy North is ready to put her life back together. After suffering a psychotic break that ruined friendships, stalled her fledgling restaurant, and forced her to move out of her comfortable flat, she’ll do anything to get back to normal. She and her partner Felix—who has been a saint through her recent troubles—move into a new flat for a fresh start.
Nancy is taking her pills, seeing her therapist, and avoiding unnecessary stress. She’s doing absolutely everything right, but something is still very, very wrong. On the first day in the new flat, she hears them again; the mysterious voices that triggered her first episode. It could just be the unfamiliar sounds of water in the pipes, or the screaming baby across the hall, but deep down she knows something more sinister is going on. Her fears are confirmed when the young woman in the downstairs flat, Kira, is found dead. Felix, her neighbors, and even the police insist it’s a tragic suicide, but the pieces aren’t adding up for Nancy. Can she trust her own instincts, or is it all in her head?
Meanwhile, Detective Inspector Maud O’Connor has misgivings about her colleagues’ investigation of Kira’s death. The boys club at the top seems intent on closing the case as quickly as possible, especially since the only person who thinks it could be anything other than suicide is known to be unreliable. But Maud knows what it’s like to be dismissed as an overemotional woman and isn’t so quick to discount Nancy’s claims. As tensions reach an explosive breaking point, the line between fact and delusion becomes dangerously blurred, but Maud will stop at nothing to ensure that the truth comes to light.
Thriller Psychological | Mystery Woman Sleuth [William Morrow Paperbacks, On Sale: March 4, 2025, Paperback / e-Book , ISBN: 9780063298378 / eISBN: 9780063298385]
Nicci French is the pseudonym for the internationally bestselling husband-and-wife writing team of journalists Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. They are the authors of bestselling novels. They live in Suffolk, England.
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