This week I was very fortunate to get to speak to Katharine Johnson, author of thriller The Silence. Ever since my early obsession with the Agatha Christie novel Sleeping Murder I have had an interest in stories about secrets and repressed memories, and this book fits that bill perfectly.

Naturally I wanted to get behind the book and find out where Katharine got her inspiration from for this dark tale.

 

Tell us the basic premise of your book?

Doctor Abby Fenton has a rewarding career, a loving family, an enviable lifestyle – and a secret that could destroy everything. When human remains are discovered in the grounds of an idyllic Tuscan holiday home she is forced to confront the memories she has suppressed until now and relive the summer she spent at the villa in 1992. A summer that ended in tragedy. The nearer she gets to the truth the closer she comes to losing her sanity. In order to hold onto the people she loves most, she must make sure they never discover what she did. But the reappearance of someone else from that summer threatens to blow her secret wide open

 

What made you choose the location of Tuscany and do the locations hold any significance for you personally.

I chose Tuscany because I love its multi-layered character. Beautiful locations often harbour a gruesome history. I wanted the backstory of The Silence to take place somewhere beautiful so that in Abby’s memory it would have a dreamlike quality, making it hard for her to decide if the events were real, and also somewhere hot so that as the temperature rises so do the tensions among the dysfunctional family she’s staying with.

I also felt that because many of these tiny mountain villages are so remote and the vegetation so fast-growing that it would be easy for a crime to remain hidden for many years. But with the trend for foreigners to restore old houses and turn them into holiday homes it was inevitable that the secret would be uncovered at some time.

Tuscany does have a personal significance for me. I’ve lived in Florence and have had a house near Lucca since 2003 where I wrote much of The Silence.

 

The book deals with secrets and the effects they can have on a person – did you find it difficult at all getting into the mind of your lead character?

The main character in my previous book was a 21 year old man with a violent temper living in the 1930s so by comparison writing Abby was a breeze! The thing about Abby is that because she’s very good at compartmentalising, her adult life is very normal – she could be any mum you see at the school gates and she has two little girls so I can relate to that. The dark secret obviously required imagination as my life is far less interesting but that’s what I love about writing – putting myself inside someone’s head and thinking, how would I deal with that situation?

 

What made you want to become a writer?

I’ve loved writing since childhood and wrote my first book aged nine about the adventures of a naughty chimp, probably influenced by Paddington stories which I loved. I’ve written for a living all my adult life but mostly as a magazine journalist. I’ve written about yachts, planes and automobiles but my favourite subject is houses. I’ve visited so many intriguing places with stories to tell although often these stories couldn’t be included in the feature, including a house that was haunted by Katherine, wife of John of Gaunt, one where a horrific suicide took place and one which the police interviewed me about because they were investigating the owner.

 

Do you have a favourite author?

So many! Overall it would have to be Barbara Vine. I love the way most of her characters are people on the outside of things and much more interesting than they appear

 

Who would you most like to sit down to dinner with to talk about books and solving crimes?

Patricia Highsmith – she could really get into the mind of a criminal

 

What are you working on next?

I’m really excited that my next novel The Secret will be published by Crooked Cat Books in 2018. Like The Silence it is about a secret harboured by Villa Leonida in the fictional mountain village of Santa Zita but this secret goes back to wartime. It’s about two girls growing up in Mussolini’s Italy. Their paths diverge after one of them marries into the family living in Villa Leonida where she discovers nothing is as she imagined, leading to a secret which has devastating consequences…

 

 

Well I am loving reading The Silence so I cant wait for the next book Katy! Thanks for chatting with me, look forward to another chat about your journey back to the sinister Villa Leonida……

 

Grab a copy of The Silence here;

http://mybook.to/TheSilence

 

You can keep up with Katy by following the links below!

https://katyjohnsonblog.wordpress.com/

https://www.facebook.com/Katharinejohnsonauthor/?ref=bookmarks

http://www.twitter.com/kjohnsonwrites

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