Thriller from West Sussex author explores the world of online dating

Fiona, who lives in Bracklesham Bay, explained: “It's about the whole dating thing. I was talking to women friends about how they met people and about how it has all changed. There was a friend of a friend at a lunch who said that she had got a date organised through a dating app and that the guy that she was going to meet had sent her map coordinates for somewhere on Salisbury plain. I said ‘You are not going to go, are you? He is obviously an axe murderer!’ She did go but there wasn't a second date and it just seems to me that people are taking risks. You start thinking about the what ifs. People are casting their bread on the water a bit these days. Obviously you hear lots of very happy stories of what happens and how it all works out well with people meeting the love of their lives but there is still a risk in doing that. Dating apps are now the mainstream actually for how people meet other new people these days. I think Covid has intensified that. People are still working from home and the interactions that you have in terms of meeting other colleagues at work or going to the pub are just not happening. It's just a completely different world now – and it's good for a thriller writer!

“I have set it on the south coast but it's a made-up name. I decided not to go for a real place because you can get terribly hung up on the minute details of whether you turn left or right here and so on. And really place is not the most important thing for me. For other writers place absolutely is but for me it's the characters I'm really interested in and I can just look out the window and see what's there. I have got a friend who does write about the town where she lives but she gets endless letters and emails saying ‘But that's one way this way!’ or ‘You can't go there!’”

Fiona came to writing after a career in journalism at the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and Mail on Sunday. Through her work as a journalist, she reported on many high-profile crime cases and found her interests often lay on those characters just outside of the spotlight. Talking to Strangers is Fiona’s fifth book and sees Fiona return to the journalist's perspective as a murder investigation takes place.

"I was always a general news reporter. I never specialised. I just liked the variety, just to see lots of things. I was interviewing all sorts of people and I loved that but in 2008 I was working at Daily Mail and my husband and I decided that we would go and volunteer for VSO. We'd been talking about it for ages and we thought that we would wait until we had retired but it got to 2008 and I was in my mid-50s and I thought ‘This is mad! Why don't we just do it now?’ We went off to Sri Lanka for just under two years, and it gave me headspace. I just needed the time to think what else I wanted to do in my life.”

And so the writing began.