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29th February 2020
03:02pm GMT

However, she said that things started to feel a little too 'Mamma Mia!' with the wedding taking place on the Greek island, noting: "A wedding on a Greek island, where's the darkness going to come from?"
She recalled how the "whole book kind of found its shape" after she and her husband spent a long weekend away in Ireland.
"I'd been to Connemara a lot, I traveled there a lot when I was a kid. My grandfather originally came from there and my dad spent all his childhood summers there. I went there a lot as a child, and I went back there with my husband for a long weekend and we stayed in Ballynahinch which was amazing," she coninued.
"We got the ferry out to Inisbofin and it was standing there - it's such a dramatic place, it's so beautiful but the weather and the elements and feel quite hostile. I thought, this was the perfect place, the perfect contrast to the glamorous wedding that Jules is trying to throw. I felt it could almost become a character in the novel, where it started to bend the human visitors to its whims in a way."
Both The Hunting Party and The Guest List are being adapted for the screen, with a screenplay - and a lead actress - in the works for The Hunting Party's adaptation.
"[The Guest List] adaptation is a long way down the road, they're doing The Hunting Party first - it's really exciting. I genuinely thought that we would sell the option, and then never hear anything ever again because I've heard of that happening so many times," the author told us.
"But they're really on it. They've got a screenplay written for The Hunting Party and they've got a lead actress attached who would be perfect as Miranda. But then they've got The Guest List as well, a kind of second series. They've got the TV/film rights, so it's not that they definitely won't make a film - it's just they're focusing on TV.
"They're talking about a Big Little Lies type format, each one would be about an hour; high production value and quite glossy. Each [season] would be six to ten episodes, I think."
After three historical fiction novels, it was an idea that had been "niggling" at her for a while that sparked her move towards writing thrillers and murder mysteries.
"I'm loving writing thrillers. I'm fascinated by people, and this gives me a great chance to explore that - and people's hidden secrets and darkness and what's going on under the surface. I think it was a thing of trying to write the book that I wanted to read. I had this idea niggling at me for awhile, that I wanted to read a modern take on Agatha Christie - that classic, closed room setup. And then I was like, 'well, I could just have a go at writing it myself',"she explained.
"That's how [the move into thrillers] came about. It was a funny one because I didn't want to tell my editor; I didn't think she'd necessarily want me to go off and take things in a different direction. It was like a bit of a side hustle, writing historicals - editing the final one - while writing The Hunting Party on the side. It was like a secret project."
She also shared a little bit about what fans can expect from her third novel - and why it's "slightly different" than The Hunting Party and The Guest List.
"The Hunting Party and The Guest List are like sister books, they're both set in similar remote locations and they're a similar demographic of people, I guess you could say. The third book is slightly different. It's still the classic murder mystery format, but it is set in a beautiful apartment block in Paris - one of those ones where it's around a courtyard, so you can see into other apartments. It's a bit Rear Window in that sense," she explained.
"All of the suspects in the murder are people who live in the block. We've got the elderly lady with her little dog, some students, the hot guy who lives in the basement flat, this very glamorous couple who throw parties for all the neighbours. They're all implicated in some way, and they've all got a big secret tying them together."
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