Case File: And So It Begins
- Rachel Abbott
- Apr 1
- 7 min read
Updated: Apr 2
The Inspiration
Readers often ask where the inspiration for a book comes from, and I believe the moment the idea for And So It Begins came to me is the most unforgettable of all. I was giving a talk at a women's prison when I started contemplating how to commit a perfect murder, and the idea wouldn't leave me alone.
I've visited a few prisons, and have consistently found the attendees enthusiastic readers. Apparently, many prisons run active book clubs, but this was my first visit to a women's prison. It was fascinating, although I was a little concerned about discussing my latest novel with the inmates: a book called Kill Me Again didn't seem entirely appropriate, especially since I was told midway through the day that many of the women in the room were "lifers," meaning at least some of them were probably guilty of murder. Fortunately, both staff and inmates appeared to find the book title quite amusing.
After the event, I spoke to the governor, who, of course, could only speak in general terms and couldn't discuss individual cases. I don't know what I'd been expecting of the prisoners, but although some looked as if they had led a hard life, others seemed like women I might sit next to on a train or chat to in a coffee shop – women who, in any other context, I would never have looked at with suspicion. I admit that I rarely think of women as cold-blooded murderers, which might be naive of me, but it was clear that some of those women had possibly killed abusive partners, and I wanted to understand why, if that was the case, they hadn't received more lenient sentences.
The answer was both simple and troubling. A skilled barrister may have been able to argue loss of control – a legitimate legal defence that acknowledges a person can be pushed beyond the point of reason. But most of these women didn't have access to that level of defence, and it felt to me that at least some of them may have slipped through a gap in the system, convicted without anyone making the case that should have been made for them. The governor said they were often too worn down by it all to put up an argument.
I can't remember the governor's words verbatim, but she said something like: 'By the time their life had reached this point, the women are so exhausted, so devastated, that they are ready to plead guilty without even considering their options.'
To be clear, I'm not trying to justify murder. But I couldn't leave the concept of loss of control alone.
And then a different question surfaced: what if someone understood that defence well enough to turn it into a weapon?
That question became And So It Begins.
The World of the Book
The novel opens on the Cornish coast, at a house that feels like a fortress. From the land side, it presents as a long, windowless white wall – blank, impenetrable, giving nothing away. But step inside and the entire rear of the building is glass, the room suspended high above the ocean. It's a house of contradictions, and Sergeant Stephanie King arrives to find it transformed into what can only be described as a macabre gallery. The white bedding is drenched in blood. Two figures lie wrapped in sheets – but whether both of them are dead is not immediately clear.
And it raises the question - where does murder begin? When the knife is plunged into the flesh, or long before that. It's the question the opening scene plants in the reader's mind – and it doesn't let go.
The Masks People Wear: Creating the Characters
Most thrillers ask who did it. This one asks something harder: who is this person, really?
Evie Clarke confesses in the opening pages. I made that choice deliberately, because I wasn't interested in the mechanics of crime – I was interested in the psychology of performance. Evie has remade herself so thoroughly, so carefully, that even those closest to her can't quite see the joins. Writing her meant walking a very careful line. I needed readers to believe in her, to root for her, before I could ask them to question everything they'd assumed. The moment when sympathy begins to curdle into unease – that was the effect I was working towards from the first page.
Mark North presented a different kind of challenge. On the surface he is a gifted, reclusive photographer, described by the people who love him as gentle and sensitive. And he is those things. But trauma has shaped every corner of his life – the windowless walls, the rigid routines, the entire lower floor of his house sealed off because he cannot stop seeing his first wife's body on the tiles. I wanted readers to feel the presence of a man trapped inside his own grief, managing it the only way he can. His complexity is what makes Evie's actions so difficult to judge simply.
Cleo North was, in some ways, the most interesting to write. She is all surface – immaculate, vivid, almost aggressively put-together. But I've always been drawn to the question of what that kind of perfection is for. In Cleo's case, it's armour. Something happened long before the events of this novel, on a storm-lashed sea wall, and she has been carrying it ever since in the only way she knows how: by making sure nothing shows.
Then there is Stephanie King, my detective. I didn't want her to be defined by a personal loss – I've always resisted the cliché of the damaged investigator – but I did want it to be there, present beneath the surface. What interests me about Stephanie is her discipline. She keeps herself tightly contained, which means the moments when something breaks through carry far more weight than any outward display would. And she doesn't suffer fools gladly.
Working alongside her is Angus Brodie – Gus – and he was a character I wanted to feel both formidable and deeply human. There's a confidence to him, a physical ease, but what drives the story is the friction between his instincts and Stephanie's. Where she sees a calculated killer, he sees a victim. That disagreement isn't just professional – it runs through their shared history, and it forces the reader to keep questioning whose judgement to trust. Gus has the nagging sense that something in the case is right in front of him, just out of reach.
These characters were built around a single, recurring question: how much of who we present to the world is genuinely us, and how much is survival? None of the characters are who they first appear to be. Neither, I hope, is the story itself.
The Locations
Setting a book on the Cornish coast sounds like a gift. Dramatic cliffs, unreliable weather, the sea doing half the atmospheric work. But what I needed wasn't picturesque. I needed a landscape that could hold secrets – and more specifically, I needed a house.
Mark North's house is the pivot around which the entire story turns, so it had to be a place that told you something about him before he'd said a word. I gave it a twenty-foot windowless white wall on the approach side – blank, giving nothing away, the architectural equivalent of a shut face. Then I gave it a back wall that was a single sheet of glass, the ocean directly below, nothing between you and the drop. A house that locks the world out and simultaneously offers itself up to the sea. It reflects exactly how Mark operates: impenetrable from one angle, completely exposed from another.
The lower floors were a different kind of problem. The pool, the gym – on paper, a beautiful space. But Mark has sealed it off. He can't go down there because that's where he last saw his wife, Mia. I wanted that room to feel haunted not by any supernatural presence but by the specific, stubborn weight of a memory he can't shift. The space is still there, perfect and unused, and the fact that he can't bring himself to change it says more about him than anything he says out loud.
The gallery in the town was a different kind of contrast. The coastal shops – blow-up sharks, fudge, postcards – and then, a few doors down, a sophisticated space with sombre grey walls and black-and-white photography. Glamour and serious art sitting among the holiday rubbish. It's the same dissonance I wanted running through the whole book: ordinary surfaces, something much darker underneath.
And then there is the courtroom – which I've written about more fully in the Research section. But as a location, it is in some ways the most dangerous. Every other setting in this story carries a physical threat. The courtroom carries something worse: the moment when one version of the truth is chosen over another, and whether it is believed or not.
The Research
Writing this book meant spending time understanding how the loss of control defence works in UK law – not just in principle, but in practice. How evidence is ordered and presented. How a defendant appears to a jury, and how much that appearance matters. How expert testimony around conditions like Adult Separation Anxiety Disorder – essential to the storyline – can reframe an entire narrative.
I knew Evie was going to have to attend court. I knew she would arrive in a prison van – windows set too high to see through, photographers jostling on the pavement outside. She would be driven down a ramp and disappear underground. Swallowed from view. She would have to sit in the dock and look down on the court. So as I stood outside the Old Bailey and watched as a woman accused of murder was swept down into the depths, I tried to imagine how she would be feeling. I'm sure I failed. And then I attended the murder trial. I didn't stay long.
The courtroom in And So It Begins isn't just a setting. It's the arena where the real contest takes place – not between prosecution and defence, but between two completely different versions of the truth.
The Moral Dilemma
Moral ambiguity is, I think, what crime fiction does best. The truth is rarely as simple as it seems, and the most interesting questions are the ones that don't have clean answers.
The book opens with a murder, and the person responsible isn't denying it. But the question that runs through every page isn't really about guilt or innocence.
Is there a set of circumstances in which taking a life is justified – not excused, not explained away, but genuinely justified? Can a victim's pursuit of justice become as monstrous as the crime they are avenging? The jury has to decide. So does the reader. I don't think I made it easy.
The prologue opens with these lines:
So this is how it ends. It is clear to me now: one of us has to die.
Everything that follows is an attempt to understand how two people arrived at that moment – when one of them had to die, and whether either of them could have chosen differently.
And So It Begins is available from bookshops, or from Amazon.
