By Keith Dixon

Excerpt: “Sometimes the scariest part of a thriller isn’t the killer—it’s how close to home the story hits.”

Let’s get one thing out of the way: I didn’t set out to write Killer Plot as a genre-defying, slow-burn, psychological pressure cooker. I was just trying not to be boring. I felt there were enough thrillers where the dead body shows up in Chapter One, the detective frowns a lot, and everything explodes nicely at the end. 

This time? I wanted to see what would happen if the real horror didn’t come from gunshots or high-speed chases—but from a smiling guy in a waistcoat offering you a glass of water.

In Killer Plot, the “villain” gets more airtime than the “hero.” As a British fan of American crime fiction, I’m always interested in incorporating tropes I see as more American than British—and revealing the bad guy from the beginning is something much more typical, I think, of US writers than UK ones: think Elmore Leonard and John Sandford, for example. 

My villain, Dave, is charming, deluded, oddly obsessed with his hair—and deeply dangerous in a surprising number of ways. I wanted readers to see him up close. Not from behind a police desk, but from the inside of his head. Why? Because villains don’t always carry guns and sport sentimental tattoos. Sometimes they wear cologne and talk about branding strategy. So how does that work? What are they thinking?

Kate, equally, is not your usual thriller heroine. She’s not a cop or a forensic pathologist. She’s not out to save the world. She’s just trying to survive her Tuesday. After waking up on a bench with no memory of the night before, and some very compromising photos on her phone, she doesn’t leap into action. She does what many of us might: she panics a bit, weighs her options, and tries not to ruin the life she has. In other words—she’s human.

And that’s where the fun started for me. Because instead of letting Kate act out her gung-ho revenge fantasy—which she was all for—I let her sit instead in the ambiguity. She’s smart, but stuck. She’s angry, but unsure where to aim it. And that’s a tension I find far more compelling than whether or not she’ll figure out the twist on page 280. 

Thankfully, she has help from a policeman who’s even less conventional than she is, the protagonist from Killing the Invisible, the second book in The Porthaven Trilogy: Chief Inspector Walter Watts. He’s the one who drives things forward … at least initially.

Although there’s a satisfying climax here, there’s no neat resolution of people’s feelings. Typically, crime novels end with the world set back to rights after the villain has put it out of kilter. This time I wanted readers to feel the tension I felt while writing it. The “Wait… did that just happen?” sensation that can be as surprising to the writer as, hopefully, the reader. Because sometimes, the scariest part of a thriller isn’t the killer—it’s how close to home the events hit.

So yes, I broke a few rules. I made the bad guy not only uncertain of his own motives, but sometimes even worried by them. I let the victim fight back in subtle, non-Hollywood ways. And I ended things in a manner that might make you stare at your ceiling for a while.

And anyway, I can always blow something up in the next one.