LIES THAT POISON by Amanda fleet
Do you love psychological thrillers? Discover a new writer who will have you gripped from start to finish. This is a novel with a stunning twist that you won’t see coming.
When Tom Bowman moves to a pretty Yorkshire village to start a new business, he meets two women who will change his life.
Alys is a young woman with a troubled past, including an abusive boyfriend. She says she doesn’t want another man, but a relationship soon develops between her and Tom.
Tom’s other neighbour is Hannah, an elderly woman who is often confused between past and present. 50 years ago, her sister died tragically young. Now, she sometimes thinks that Tom is the man who was to blame.
Hannah hates Alys, and warns Tom that he is in great danger from the woman he’s falling in love with.
Who should he believe and who is poisoning his mind with lies?
In a pulsating conclusion, Tom will face a heartbreaking choice with the potential to shatter everything he has built.
Perfect for readers who love C. L. Taylor, Ruth Ware or Clare Mackintosh.
Author Bio
Amanda Fleet is a physiologist by training and a writer at heart. She spent 18 years teaching science and medicine undergraduates at St Andrews University, but now uses her knowledge to work out how to kill people (in her books!). She completed her first degree at St Andrews University and her doctorate at University College, London.
She has been an inveterate stationery addict since a child, amassing a considerable stash of fountain pens, ink and notebooks during her lifetime. These have thankfully come in useful, as she tends to write rather than type, at least in the early stages of writing a book.
During her time at St Andrews, she was involved with two Scottish Government funded projects, working with the College of Medicine in Blantyre, Malawi. While in Malawi, she learned about the plight of the many street children there and helped to set up a Community Based Organisation that works with homeless Malawian children to support them through education and training – Chimwemwe Children’s Centre. It was this experience that helped to shape the Malawian aspects in her first novel, The Wrong Kind of Clouds.
Amanda lives in Scotland with her husband, where she can be found writing, walking and running. The Wrong Kind of Clouds is her début novel and was published by Matador in early 2016.
Questions I Often Get Asked
When did you start writing?
I’ve been writing for years and years and I don’t really remember exactly when I started. I do remember writing terrible things in my teenage years, which, looking back, were probably a way of making sense of what were pretty difficult years in many ways. My protagonist was definitely me in all of the long, rambling novels I wrote about her and she did seem to be battling the same kind of issues that I was! Thankfully, I think they have all been lost in one of many moves over the years. I hope so, anyway.
What was the first book you wrote?
Other than the teenage angst stuff? I wrote my first ‘proper’ book over a decade ago. It may yet get published. I was too insecure to try and find an agent or a publisher for it when I wrote it, but I still love the story. It’s a thriller – a race against time – and is the only thing I’ve written so far that actually uses any of my knowledge of physiology, as one of the central aspects of the book involves a pharmaceutical company and their secrets.
Have you written in any other genres?
Well, Lies that Poison is a psychological thriller but next to be published is a crime novel (that was actually written before Lies That Poison). There should be at least another one in that series too. I’ve also written the first two parts of an urban fantasy trilogy that may eventually be published, and a book that slightly defies fitting neatly into any single genre. It explores the choices a person makes when facing a life-threatening issue and how her friends react and adjust to those choices.
How long does it take you to write a book?
How long is a piece of string? From first concept to fully edited version probably takes me about nine months to a year, I would say, depending on the book. Six or so months for plotting and getting to the end of a first draft and the rest in re-drafting and editing. However, I find it really difficult to re-draft immediately after writing a first draft and have to leave it alone for a while. I generally start working on something else at that point so although the total time working on a book might be 9-12 months, that isn’t a continuous stretch; it gets broken up by working on other things.
Are you a plotter or do you just write the book and then fix later?
I’m most definitely a plotter! I like to know at least the key points and the overall structure before I start writing. I tend to have my key points written out on large index cards with notes on the intervening scenes written on smaller index cards. I have been known to colour-code the index cards relating to the different strands or sub-plots, too. I’m a very visual person and it helps me to see the structure of the book laid out like this (on my dining room table!). Once I have this basic structure down, I find writing flows much better. And I don’t necessarily write the scenes in order. As long as I have that structure, I find I don’t have to work sequentially through the whole book.
Do you write straight into a computer or do you write by hand?
I’m an inveterate stationery lover! All of my initial planning, character development, plot development and so on is done by hand, with a fountain pen, usually in an A4 notebook with beautiful paper in it. These notebooks are like scrapbooks – I have pictures pasted in of room layouts or what kind of house I think the character lives in, plus pictures of people, objects, scenery... anything that adds to my own image of the character or setting of the book. Before writing a scene, I also make notes on what the scene needs to do – whose point of view the scene is from, how it fits in, key things that need to happen and how it ends. Once all this planning and note-making is done, I write straight into the laptop, but I do need the paper-planning in front of me.