DIVE a totally gripping, breathlessly twisty crime mystery

Product Information

His theatre work has been produced onstage at major London venues, including The Old Vic and The Almeida, with screen work under option at Northern Ireland Screen and Netflix UK. They are a relegated, forgotten bunch, and the (fictional) attitudes of serving police officers around them reflects that.

I’ll be recording some podcasts with Chloe Timms and Yvonne Battle Felton, and I hope to attend one of the book festivals like Crimefest or Harrogate. Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend was a seminal moment when I read it the first time, but I would say the same of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and Roald Dahl’s The BFG. It’s one of the UK’s biggest crime scenes in that bodies surfacing is a daily occurrence, but it’s also used to traffic drugs and launder money, traffic people illegally and broker organs.We managed to hit 10% of our target last week, with support growing steadily with lots of wonderful feedback and excitement to see the film completed. I sought a clear sense of the cover design six months in advance, the better to begin the thornier work of mentioning the book in other professional matters.

Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). The actual marketing activity consisted of a handful of tweets, and Dive didn’t feature in newsletters or front-facing online activity. Focusing all of the action in and around the Thames also felt like unexplored territory in crime fiction. When I signed up for my first course in 2019, I had a layman’s knowledge of the publishing industry.

It was longlisted for the Bruntwood Prize, and reached the top 26% of submissions for BBC Drama Room, which saw nearly 4,718 applications.

Selling the book on the basis that a female supporting character has a larger role than she actually does felt like lying to readers.Working with an editor wasn’t as painful as it could have been though, and I put that down to working with script editors in the past. The plotting involved tends to orbit those larger-than-life moments, and a dual narrative means I can pack what readers ultimately care about – characters and their own struggles and the relationships between them. Dive’ was a screenplay before it became a novel, and I spent six months writing that before I thought of it in another form. The two form an unlikely partnership in uncovering a particularly nasty case involving drowned girls and drugs. It’s a glaring cliché that police officers possess a dark sense of humour, but in this case, it was definitely true.

Early on, I was told by a mentor to ‘get out of my own way’, which is another way of saying, don’t procrastinate and don’t fixate on things you can’t control.

I’d spent four years working on Dive on-and-off at that point, so it was hard not to take it personally. Jo is Vertebrate's finance director, she has had a very accomplished career in finance and senior management and joins us as a much needed grown up.