What if you saw something terrible, something life-changing, but when you spoke up, no one wanted to believe you?
This was the first flicker of the idea that would eventually become Witness. Not a fully formed plot or character, just a question. A whisper. But it stayed with me and from that spark, a story began to grow.
Like many of my ideas, Witness came together from several different strands. I had that initial question, and I had the idea of a character, and then I had this desire to write a domestic noir where the domestic doesn’t fall apart at the first hurdle – this has always been one of the things I found niggling about domestic noir; how quickly supposed loving partners, families and friends turned on each other. In my life, I like to think that all those people have my back, and would stick their necks out for me a long time, without starting to question whether or not it’s actually me who’s the bad guy.
And part of it came from something even more personal. A conversation I had years ago with a friend, who said, ‘I think the scariest thing in the world is being right, and not being believed.’ That line echoed. It made its way into the DNA of Witness, and maybe even into the soul of its narrator, Sadie. When you’re already telling the truth, where else can you go?
Sadie is an ordinary woman, a teacher, a wife, a stepmother, a friend. She’s not a detective. She doesn’t go looking for danger. But one day, she sees something. And what she sees will change everything.
Of course, the novel is about more than what happened that day. It’s about what comes after. The silences. The doubts. The consequences of telling the truth, and the cost of staying quiet.
As I started writing, themes began to surface and intertwine: the burden of guilt, the fragility of trust, the slipperiness of memory. I found myself returning again and again to the idea of what it means to be a good person, and how far someone might go to protect the life they’ve built.
Here’s a line from the novel that captures that quiet, creeping tension:
‘How long can I keep seeing something that doesn’t seem to be there?’
That moment, when Sadie is questioning herself, despite the fact she knows what she knows, lies at the heart of the novel. Is it easier to just pretend you don’t know what you know? How many people would just let it lie?
Writing Witness wasn’t always easy. The story twisted in ways I didn’t expect. Characters revealed things I hadn’t planned. Sadie turned out to not be as perfect as I thought she was. There were entire plotlines that ended up cut, reshaped, or buried. But I kept coming back to that original spark, that question of what happens when someone tells the truth and is met with disbelief.
And I kept writing for the reader. For the person who picks up this book late at night and I hope thinks, ‘Just one more chapter.’ For the reader who feels a chill of recognition, who finishes the final page and wants to talk about it immediately.
Witness isn’t a story about a crime. It’s a story about what it means to speak up. To live with what you saw. And to reckon with what happens when your version of the truth threatens to tear your life apart.
I can’t wait to share Witness with you. If you’ve ever questioned what you saw, or feared that speaking up might cost you everything, this one is for you.
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