Killing Time follows a gifted past-life investigator who is looking into a series of modern London murders that echo the crimes of Jack the Ripper. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story? What made the Jack the Ripper mystery particularly suited to the world you’ve created?

I was a Crime scene photographer for the Met police for 24 years, which means yes, I’ve seen awful sights in my time. I’ve also seen a lot of good forensic work and met a lot of skilled investigators in my time. So when I was looking for a new project to include my world of Awakening that I’d set up in my first book, The Many Lives of Adam Capello, I felt it was time to use my experiences to tell a tale of 2 investigations  – one from the past and one in the near future. The mystery of Jack the Ripper is probably one of the biggest unsolved series of crimes in history, with a HUGE amount of interest. What better case to do my dual timeline investigation? 

Awakening is all about discovering and confronting our past. Fantastic if you can pick up knowledge and past skills such as speaking languages, but at what price. What if you found out you’d once been Jack the Ripper? What if the shock was so terrible, your present day mind shut itself off, only to be replaced by the monster within?

What were some driving ideals behind Jason’s character’s development, and what makes him particularly suited to investigating crimes involving past lives?

Jason has a natural talent for reading body language and went on to study the subject in high detail – he excelled. His ability makes him a great Awakening investigator, able to push further and harder into people’s traumatic past lives to find who murdered them. He knows he’s putting his clients through a lot of pain for a good reason, but it still hurts him too.

Jason is, at the heart of it all, a really nice guy with a conscience. In crime writing that’s a huge no no! We want our detectives to be as complicated and flawed as their quarry to add as much character and drama to the story. So I wanted this skills to play havoc with his love life, as he over analyses everything. And inside he’s very shy, so the extraordinary expert in body language becomes and ordinary guy who can’t read a thing when he really likes someone. He’s just as clueless in those circumstances as the rest of us. 

What interested you about placing the possibility of redemption alongside the idea that a violent past might literally return?

At first I just wanted the idea of a two timeline investigation with the Ripper, but as in any good film / novel, the antagonist must have redeeming features just as the protagonist has a dark side. The more I went into the Ripper’s mind, the more I wanted to find a reason for his savage attacks. It became a mission for me to twist the reader into having some sympathy for this monster, if only to confuse us. Where do our loyalties lie? What on earth could justify that level of violence? That’s what makes this more than just a historic murder mystery, it becomes psychological as well.

How does Killing Time expand the possibilities of the Awakening world established in The Many Lives of Adam Capello, and where do you see the series going from here?

Isambard Smythe is such an interesting character. I’d love to give him his own case to solve, possibly with 19^th century royal connections. Sabina Bjorkman is also a very strong character, even just at the basic, ball busting, beautiful, scary DCI keeping ahead of her ‘superiors’. I’ve committed the sin of writing two related stories in different genres and from different perspectives. Both the novels are connected and yet they run alone as well. They intertwine to develop of their own accord. The next Awakening novel? Either Adam’s next adventure or another crime novel would be sensible – though I do have a great idea for a comically dark story reflecting my film work as a film stand-in. Watch this space.

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