I love weddings. Don’t get me wrong — they’re wonderful occasions. But as someone in her early thirties, I’ve attended a LOT of them in the last few years… and as an author there’s a sneaky little part of me that’s always on the lookout for inspiration. And it occurred to me that a wedding might be the ideal setting for a murder mystery.
You’ve got old friends, newer friends and family members all gathered together in one place: and perhaps some hidden histories, buried secrets and resentments bubbling away under the surface. You’ve got nerves and emotions running high, that expectation that everything has to turn out perfectly. You’ve got free-flowing alcohol, people leaving their inhibitions behind as they get into the swing of things.
And then there’s all the stuff about how much it costs to get to the venue, the price of gifts on the registry, the angst over whether you’re on the good table or whether you’ve been relegated to the one with all the weird uncles and oddballs, the anticipation of the drama that comes with the speeches: will they cross a line, go too far? I knew I could have a lot of (evil!) fun with all of it.
Then I decided I’d dial up the tension a notch by setting this fictional wedding on an island so that I could trap all my characters together in one place and make sure all those tensions are dialed up a notch further. As a result, they’re forced to look rather too closely at one another, and at themselves. Of course, there’s also the practical fact that when someone is murdered no-one can escape, not even the killer…
I chose the west coast of Ireland for the setting. It’s a beautiful part of the world, with white sands and turquoise waters and wildflower strewn moors, totally the sort of place in which you might choose to get married. But it’s also very remote — and the islands just off the coast are even more so. When I travelled to them on my research trip, I genuinely thought I might drown on the terrifyingly rough boat crossing over… obviously that had to go straight into the book itself!
“I genuinely thought I might drown on the terrifyingly rough boat crossing over… obviously that had to go straight into the book itself!”
Some of the islands off the West coast of Ireland used to be inhabited but are now deserted, as is the case with the fictional Cormorant Island in the book, and when you listen to the wind howling through the ruined houses it’s hard not to think of ghosts. Standing looking out at the Atlantic Ocean you realise there’s nothing between you and the North American continent except thousands of miles of water: a very isolating thought. There’s a real feeling of being cut off from the rest of the world, and a sense that it wouldn’t be all that easy to get back…
I wanted the wildness of the island to form a contrast with the glamour and perfection of the wedding in the book: the big white tent, the no-expenses-spared catering, the magnificent spectacle of the wedding cake. Jules, the bride, is something of a perfectionist… and she expects everything to be perfect. But you can’t control nature, and unbeknownst to any of them, a storm is approaching from far out in the Atlantic. A storm that will mirror the one taking place within the wedding party itself, with devastating — and deadly! — consequences.
As a civilisation it feels as though we float somewhere between a kind of savage wilderness and our self-curation — that perfect veneer we try to present to the outside world. I wanted to really play with that contrast in the book. On the one hand we have the wedding, which is really the ultimate facade of perfection. On the other we have wilderness of the island, which gradually brings out a wildness within the characters themselves, revealing something violent and animal within as their masks fall away.
