I’m so pleased to be part of the blog tour for Rachel Abbott’s latest novel, Kill Me Again which was released yesterday by Black Dot Publishing. Rachel is with me today to talk about how to get away with murder.
In the very first of my novels, Only the Innocent, I wanted a man to be murdered and I wanted his killer to get away with it. I didn’t mind that people might guess who the killer was – the book wasn’t really about that. It was about why he had to die. The most important part for me, though, was creating an unbreakable alibi for his murderer, and that took some thinking about. If you want to be credible, it takes a lot of research – checking out train timetables, flight routes, maybe even tide tables. You might also want to check details like the time of sunset according to the month and location of your murder, if that’s relevant. Every detail has to be considered, or readers will see straight through it.
So, alibi is top of my list of techniques for getting away with murder. They couldn’t possibly have committed the crime, because they were in another part of the world or the country, and lots of people saw them there. I could tell you how to set that up – but perish the thought that this blog post becomes a reference manual for would-be murderers! In my latest book, Kill Me Again the alibi set-up works so well that the police are fooled for a long time – yes, even DCI Tom Douglas! But to talk about that here would be a spoiler, so I will resist.
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