Inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller Vertigo, the author of the “subtle and ominous” (Lee Child) debut Deep Water returns with a wholly original and sinister novel about the beauty industry, a ghostwriter, and the reappearance of the lover she thought was dead. When Maddy Wight is hired to ghostwrite the memoir of world-renowned cosmetic surgeon Dr. Angela Reynolds, she thinks it might just be her chance to get her career back on track. She travels to Angela’s remote estate in the Scottish Highlands to hunker down and learn everything she can. But the deeper she digs, the more elusive the doctor becomes. Is there more hidden beneath the surface of the kaleidoscopic beauty industry than Angela wants to reveal? Sharing the estate is Angela’s enigmatic business partner, Scott, whose mercurial moods change as quickly as the conditions on the darkening moors outside. Confined to the glass-walled house, Maddy can’t shake the feeling of being watched. As objects go missing, handprints appear on the windows, and a stranger lurks in the grounds, she finds herself drawn ever closer to Scott. Returning to London once the book is finished, Maddy is excited for their future together. But her dreams are shattered at the book launch when Angela learns that Scott has leapt to his death from the Scottish cliffs. Which is why, months later and lost in a fog of grief, Maddy is completely blindsided when she sees Scott entering the Tube station just in front of her. It can’t be him, can it? After all, Scott is dead...or is he? In exploring the differences between looking and seeing, surface and depth, and the power of the female gaze, this tribute to Hitchcock’s 1958 film masterpiece If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, how much can you trust what you see?
Author
Emma Bamford is an East Midlands-based author and journalist who has worked at The Independent and Daily Express and most recently as News Editor of the i newspaper. She had a fairly normal life to begin with, growing up with her younger brother and sister under the watchful eyes of her parents in Lincoln and Nottingham. After studying English Literature at Southampton University and Newspaper Journalism at UCLan, she started work as a cub reporter for the Bicester Review and then the Derby Evening Telegraph, cutting her journalistic teeth interviewing organisers of local fetes and grilling parish council members. Fleet Street beckoned and highlights of her career as a reporter and news editor include asking F1 driver Jenson Button what his favourite toasted sandwich filling was, quizzing the incumbent Home Secretary on his preferred kind of cheese (spot a pattern?) and peeing in Bruce Forsyth’s downstairs loo. There was some serious and hard-hitting journalism in there for a fair few years, too. Then, in her early 30s and bored with this ‘fairly normal life’ she’d created for herself, Emma took a career break and, despite protestations from friends and family, answered an advert on the internet for ‘crew wanted’ and flew to Borneo to live on a boat with a man she had never met and his cat. She found herself hunting for elephants in the jungle, visiting deserted islands and running from pirates. Finally she ended up among billionaires, working as a stewardess on a superyacht in Italy. Her adventures form the basis of her first book, Casting Off, which is being published by Bloomsbury on July 3. Emma now works part-time as a freelance to give herself space to write and make the jump from memoir to novels. Her ambition is to make book writing her full-time career. Tropical settings feature high in her inspiration and as her books’ settings, although she lives about as far away from the sea as it is possible, in landlocked rural Derbyshire. And, while she may make self-deprecating jokes constantly, she really is serious about figuring out what is important in life and finding the freedom to be who you want to be.
