CASE FILE: The Shape of Lies

The Shape of Lies - what hides behind the story

Inspiration

The inspiration for this book came from a moment when I was stuck in a traffic jam, listening to the radio, and someone phoned in to a talk show. I had a sudden thought:

How would it feel if a voice came over the radio – a voice you recognise but never expected to hear again?

It can’t be him. You know that, because you killed him.

From that starting point, I worked backwards. Who was this woman, what had she done, and why had she managed to keep it hidden for so long? That led me to a younger Anna, arriving at university from a sheltered background and determined to reinvent herself. I needed to understand the first small choices that could eventually lead to one catastrophic mistake, and how that mistake might shape every lie she told from that point onwards.

Characters

One Woman, Two Identities

At the heart of the book is a woman living two carefully separated lives.

The young, immature Anna of those university days has transformed. Now, by day, she is the ‘very picture of respectability’ – a primary school head teacher expected to embody values such as honesty and truth. At night, she transforms into Saskia – a confident and formidable poker player.

The contrast between the two women initially seemed absolute, but the more I wrote, the more similarities emerged. Both roles require discipline, observation and an ability to read other people. At school, Anna must remain calm and dependable. At the poker table, Saskia must conceal what she feels and judge when someone else is bluffing.

The real difficulty was not creating two identities. It was understanding what Saskia gave Anna that her ordinary life could not.

The transformation is both physical and psychological. Anna twists her hair into a knot, pins on a blonde wig, and applies dark red lipstick and black eyeliner. But the disguise does more than change her appearance. Anna is steady, cautious and sensible. Saskia allows herself to take risks, attract attention and behave as though she has nothing to fear.

The question for me was whether Saskia was merely a disguise or the true Anna.

The People Around Anna

Every character has to earn their place in the story. For The Shape of Lies, the challenge was to create people who would exert different kinds of pressure on Anna, without any of them feeling as though they existed only to move the plot forward.

With Dominic, I wanted to create a man who genuinely appeared to be Anna’s ‘warm blanket’ – a devoted father and the dependable centre of her family – while hinting at something more troubling beneath the surface. His childhood experience of lies and abandonment has left him obsessed with honesty and with preserving the perfect family he believes he has created. I needed his buried resentment, possessiveness and capacity for revenge to remain largely concealed, yet be present strongly enough that his later behaviour would feel like a revelation of his true nature rather than a sudden change of character.

Scott had to be charming enough for Anna to love, while allowing the flaws beneath that charm to grow steadily more destructive. His gambling addiction affects his judgement, but I did not want it to excuse his choices. The balance was in making the reader understand why Anna trusted him without making her seem naïve.

Cameron presented a different challenge. I wanted him to appear, at first, as someone offering help rather than as an obvious threat. His power lies in recognising vulnerability and understanding how easily assistance can become control. The more respectable he appears, the more dangerous he becomes.

Roger Jagger is the physical counterpart to Cameron’s quieter menace. I wanted the possibility of violence to enter the room with him before he had done anything. His appearance, silence and reputation had to do more work than any explicit threat.

Together, they allowed me to surround Anna with four different kinds of pressure: love, memory, control and the threat of violence.

Research

Inside the Poker Room

To write Saskia’s character convincingly, I first had to understand how poker is played, how experienced players read one another and what it feels like to risk a large amount on an uncertain hand.

My nephew took me to a Manchester casino, where I could listen to the clatter of chips, the occasional shouts from the main floor and the quieter concentration of the poker room. An experienced poker player checked my early drafts to ensure the technical details – including the flop, turn and river – were accurate, even though they were alien words to me.

But the research was not only about terminology. Poker has its own rhythm. Players study one another for signs of weakness, conceal excitement and calculate risk while appearing entirely composed. Those elements became increasingly important as I developed Saskia’s character.

The river card is the seven of spades! There’s already a seven on the table, so together with the three aces, I have a full house. Only three hands can beat me. My heart is hammering in my chest, and I can’t believe that no one else can hear it.

Wasps, Trauma and Spheksophobia

Wasps are far more than a source of fear for Anna. They are tied to the most traumatic event of her past, so I needed to understand not only spheksophobia – the paralysing fear of wasps – but also how that fear might affect her judgement and behaviour years later.

I also researched the physical effects of yellowjacket stings, including the speed with which an allergic reaction can turn an ordinary summer day into a medical emergency.

From there, the research moved into darker territory: how someone might deliberately use a nest as a weapon.

Scott was surrounded by yellowjacket wasps. More and more of them were pouring from the planter that I’d kicked. There must have been a nest in it. I saw red welts rising on the surface of his skin. He clutched his throat. He couldn’t breathe.

A Threat With No Distance

The book opens with Anna hearing a voice on the radio that shouldn't exist.

‘My name’s Scott.’ My hands grip the steering wheel a little tighter. The name Scott always gives me a jolt... ‘My story is about a beautiful girl – I called her Spike.’ I hear myself gasp. There is something familiar about his voice... But Spike… There has to be more than one man called Spike with a Welsh accent. Surely?

From there, I had to decide what kind of danger that voice could actually pose. Fourteen years ago, a secret like hers would have stayed buried in old paperwork and other people's failing memories. It doesn't work that way now.

Social media, geotagged photographs, an email address that's easy to find — these turn a secret you got away with into something that can reach you directly. I wanted the threat against Anna to have that immediacy: not someone who knows what she did, but someone who can prove, in real time, that they're watching her right now. It changes what kind of fear she's dealing with, and how fast it moves.

I won't say more about how that plays out. But researching how much of a person's current life and location can be reconstructed from what they've already put online was more unsettling than I expected.

Other research

The research for this book was considerable – everything from how loan sharks operate to how the adoption laws of Nebraska in the USA work. To say more about either would give away too much of the story.

The Locations

I wanted the locations in The Shape of Lies to reinforce the divide between Anna’s respectable public life and the world she keeps hidden.

Monks Lane Primary School had to feel bright, ordered and rooted in values such as truth, justice and honesty. It gave Anna a setting in which she could become the calm, capable woman everyone expected her to be.

The Manchester casino needed the opposite atmosphere. Beyond the noise of the main floor, the poker room is governed by scrutiny and silence. Every gesture is watched and every reaction controlled, making it the natural place for Saskia to exist. I wanted the tension to come from the knowledge that one flicker of fear, one badly timed glance or one moment of hesitation could expose more than a weak hand, making it the natural place for Saskia to exist.

Anna’s Manchester apartment sits between those two lives. I created it as a private changing room between identities – the place where Anna disappears, and Saskia emerges.

The entrance leads to a short hallway. At the end is a tiny living room and kitchen, but I make my way to the bedroom... I can feel the thrill of anticipation, the knowledge that the next three hours will drive every negative thought from my mind and make me feel so much better – more confident, more alive.

Stripping off my jeans, I fling open the wardrobe door and pull out a short black wrap dress. I open the drawer that contains my box of tricks and start to apply make-up – dark red lipstick, black eyeliner. Then I twist my hair into a knot, select a blonde wig and slip on a pair of stilettos.

The multi-storey car parks allowed me to turn familiar city spaces into places of isolation and threat. They also gave Tom Douglas a crime scene that connected the police investigation directly to Anna’s hidden world.

The Welsh cottage and the Nebraska apartment belong to Anna’s past, but I wanted them to feel entirely different. One is dark, neglected and enclosed; the other is remembered through heat, glare and confinement. Both hold parts of her history that she has never truly escaped.

The Dilemma

What interested me most was the point at which a false identity stops being a disguise and becomes part of the person wearing it. At what point did Anna make this choice? What dilemma did she face? Tell the truth and risk harm to those she loved and to the carefully constructed world around her? Or lie and conceal part of who she was for the safety of those she loved?

The research gave each part of Anna’s life its own rules and pressures: the authority of the school, the calculation of the poker room, the fear associated with her past, and the legal reality beneath the choices she made.

But facts alone could not explain Anna. The real task was to understand why she created Saskia, the dilemma she faced, what that second identity gave her, and what might happen when the boundary between the two began to collapse.

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