What inspired SWIPED / Don't Swipe Right?

I spent the best part of a decade going on many, many dates, downloading every dating app on the app store.

And for a while, it was fun. I met a lot of interesting people and tried everything from mini-golf, comedy clubs and wine tasting to baking classes, salsa dancing, board game cafes and rock climbing (and one truly terrible interactive improvisational theatre performance that still haunts me to this day).

But I started to see that swiping through a near unlimited pool of potential dates perhaps wasn’t the healthiest way to meet people.... The apps made people seem very disposable - there was always another person waiting in the wings if things didn’t immediately work out.

I thought this would be the good basis for a murder mystery– what if dates really were literally disposable? And what if someone was using a dating app to find victims?

So, in SWIPED (aka Don't Swipe Right), every man that dates 28-year-old barista Gwen is murdered. Could it be that her latest match - the mysterious Parker - is a serial killer, intent on getting rid of the competition?

Throughout the book, we flashback to each of Gwen's terrible dates. Each one contains clues to the identity of the killer, but they're also full of the awkward, funny and cringeworthy moments that happen on every first date.

I always loved reading murder mysteries, but at the time, there didn’t seem to be many aimed at people from the 'dating-app generation'. So while it's a darkly funny book, hopefully it’s also got the with twists and turns of a classic ‘whodunnit’. I liked the idea of mixing my two favourite genres – rom-coms and thrillers – to make a truly millennial murder mystery.