Inside a killer’s head

When writing a thriller, there needs to be a sense of jeopardy for the protagonist. Perhaps a killer is after her, maybe more than one. The killer can be left vague, abstract, distant, and this allows the reader to imagine how terrifying they can be. [nice image by Jiceh, by the way]

Or…

The author can go inside the killer’s head, show the reader what is in there. This approach is less followed, for several reasons.

(1) The writer is not a killer (well, usually, one hopes), and writers should ‘write what they know’.…


66 Metres – Opening

Sixty-Six Metres is the depth at which normal air starts to become toxic to divers. Stay at that depth or below, and you will die.

Nadia has never dived that deep, but to save her sister, she’s going to have to.

Here’s how it all starts…

Prologue

The only thing worth killing for is family.

Her father’s words to her, the day they’d come for him.

She’d been fourteen when two men in combat fatigues and balaclavas burst into the kitchen where she and her father were enjoying breakfast.

Why I wrote 66 Metres

I wrote Sixty-Six Metres over the course of several years, initially stopping after 7 chapters and putting it down for eighteen months while I was working on something else. But it actually started back in 2011 when I had a short story called ‘No Diving’ published online. It takes place in a Welsh quarry called Dorothea, where the bottom is at just over a hundred metres. It’s a dive site that has claimed a few lives, and the story was about a man who had lost his buddy there, and blames himself, so he goes there to commit suicide (to find out whether he does or does not, read the story).…