The Magician’s Wife follows a small-town journalist who gets pulled into the mysterious disappearance of a magician’s glamorous assistant who vanishes during a live TV performance, only to reappear a week later, dead. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

First and foremost, I wanted to write a novel with a compelling ‘impossible’ mystery at its heart, and give the book the kind of hook that would instantly make a reader want to know exactly how such an impossible event could have occurred. My starting point for this particular mystery was the teleportation illusion, a classic of stage magic. A magician’s assistant gets into Box A on a live TV talent show and is supposed to reappear in Box B, but vanishes for an entire week. She then does reappear in Box B on the show’s next round… but she’s dead. My journalist, Clare, is as shocked by this as everyone else. As the books are told from her perspective, she is echoing what a reader is perhaps thinking as the narrative unfolds. It also appealed to me to have a character drawing the reader in who cared deeply about a missing person case, which is the reason Clare became a journalist in the first place, something we learn more about as the story progresses. A broader inspiration for this book (and the upcoming books in the series!) has been my husband, who is a professional stage and TV magician and with whom I worked backstage for a time. It’s been very useful having a magic advisor on hand while writing this book, especially when devising some of the methods and effects!

When creating Clare, did you have a plan for her development and character traits, or did they grow organically as you were writing the story?

I think it was a bit of both! The two main characters in this story are Clare Deyes and Mara Knight. They’re unlikely allies as they’re such different people from different backgrounds. Originally, I conceived The Magician’s Wife in third-person, to centre more around Mara. But compared to Clare, Mara can be cynical and brittle, a little dismissive and subversive. Certainly in commercial fiction, I find that a character with these traits usually has to be offset by a foil, more of an ‘everyman’ that a greater percentage of readers are able to identify with straightaway. It was true of the Sherlock Holmes stories (a big inspiration for me), and I think it still holds today. In contrast to Mara, Clare sees the good in everyone, is optimistic, and friendly. So Clare and Mara have a real Watson/Holmes dynamic. Clare’s the heart and Mara the brain; you can’t have one without the other. And it’s the contrast between these characters’ personalities that drives much of the novel’s pathos and tension. Saying that, some of Clare’s background and core motivations did grow organically as I was writing the book. As much planning as you might do, as a writer you always tend to make some discoveries about your characters as you go along – and these can often be the most exciting parts of the story!

What was the most challenging part about writing a mystery story, where you constantly have to give just enough to keep the mystery alive until the big reveal?

The Magician’s Wife is my first novel in the crime/mystery genre, and I’ve often heard other writers say that it’s possibly the most difficult genre to write in. Not only do you have to create a compelling mystery in the first instance, but you must ensure that you’re feeding clues to your reader in an ‘honest’ way, so that none of the ultimate reveals come out of nowhere. However, one of the most challenging things I found when writing this book – particularly as the story is told from the first-person perspective of Clare – was keeping in my head what a reader/Clare was thinking about the mystery at any given time (the story’s ‘logical progression’), versus what I knew was actually happening. It certainly kept me on my toes throughout the various drafts! I found having a detailed chapter-by-chapter breakdown written out before I started work on the book was invaluable, and I’ll definitely tackle future novels in the series in the same way.

When will Book Two be available? Can you give us an idea of where that book will take readers?

I’m currently working on the next book in The Magician’s Wife series, and it should be widely available to readers in early 2026! It’s called Second Sight and tells the story of a young boy who claims to be having unsettling visions of the future, visions that appear to be coming true. Even stranger, these visions only started happening after a cornea transplant the boy had to save his sight. When the child makes his most disturbing prediction – that his own life is in danger – it’s up to Clare and Mara to get to the bottom of what lies behind it all in order to save the boy’s life. The setting is a bit of a contrast to the world of TV studios and stage magic in the first book, as Second Sight is largely set in an inner-city London housing estate. I’m hugely enjoying writing this series so far and have lots more impossible mysteries up my sleeve for future books. My biggest hope is that readers will enjoy them as much as I do, as entertaining someone who has parted with their money to read my work is – and has always been – extremely important to me.

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