Fiona Barton doesn’t consider herself much of a planner, preferring to let her characters dictate their own fates. But after creating Elise King in Local Gone Missing, the detective—and the story—demanded more.
“I certainly wasn’t planning on writing a series,” Barton admits. “I’ve written three Kate Walters books. After the first, I thought, ‘I like this character.’ So, she stayed for three books, and then I thought, ‘I’m going to try something different.’ So, I wrote Local Gone Missing and introduced Elise King and all of her problems. And Kiki is a big player in that. Then I started thinking that, actually, they’re quite a nice pairing, so I carried on for another book.”
Elise King is a sharp investigator, but she’s also deeply human, grappling with personal struggles that make her all the more compelling. In Local Gone Missing, what begins as a seemingly cozy mystery in a seaside town quickly escalates into a full-fledged police procedural when a local man, Charlie, vanishes.
The inspiration for the novel stemmed from a brief but unforgettable encounter. “It was just a 10-minute conversation with a stranger, but it burrowed into my brain,” Barton recalls. While at an event abroad, she met a man who confidently name-dropped members of the royal household. But Barton, a former journalist who had covered royal stories, immediately recognized the lies. “Unluckily for him, he’d picked a subject I knew about. I caught his eye after one particularly outrageous claim, and he went quiet, pretending to see someone across the room, and left.”
That brief moment fascinated her—the idea of someone reinventing themselves with nothing more than confidence. “There must be hundreds of men and women doing just that at this precise moment. Until a simple twist of fate—someone who can lay bare the lies—arrives. The jeopardy is palpable—and delicious.”
Her latest novel, Talking to Strangers, takes a different but equally chilling approach, beginning with the murder of Karen, a single woman in her mid-forties who was using a dating app to find love.
“I didn’t want Karen to be the body in the ditch and that’s it,” Barton says. “I wanted the reader to see Karen as she was—a lovely woman who was wanting to find love.”
The story unfolds through three perspectives: Elise King, a tenacious detective; Margot, a journalist chasing the truth; and Annie, a grieving mother whose child was murdered years earlier.
“It started with me wanting the detective and the journalist as investigators,” Barton explains. “They’re two very different people trying to get to the same truth, and that creates friction. But I also wanted a third strand—Annie, a mother still grieving the murder of her 8-year-old child.”
For Barton, multiple viewpoints enrich a story. “I like stories with different narrators. As a journalist, I always spoke to a lot of people. You want as many points of view as you can get.”
As the novel developed, a theme emerged: loneliness. “All three women are alone, and I thought it was really interesting to look at how that has changed their lives.”
With Talking to Strangers, Barton delivers another tightly woven thriller that doesn’t just unravel a crime—it explores the human connections, risks, and secrets that shape people’s lives. Whether crafting complex investigators, exposing hidden identities, or peeling back layers of grief and hope, Barton proves once again that the most compelling mysteries are the ones rooted in the human experience.
