Thoughts on my second novel - setting, characters, secrets

My second novel After The Storm is set in Belize City and an island in the Caribbean Sea called Roatan. I’ve been to these places and I always felt they would make a great setting for a novel. Roatan is a beautiful island but it also has a kind of frontier feeling where the normal rules do not apply. I kept a journal when I was there and took lots of photos and these helped me create the atmosphere of the island. The Roatan in my novel is sun-soaked and stunning on the surface but with something dark underneath. 
CHARACTERSFor me fiction is alwaysabout the characters. There are four main characters in After The Storm. British couple Anna and Rob and American couple Owen and Kim. On their first night in Belize Anna and Rob meet Owen and Kim who have a handsome old sailing boat which they have been living on for three years. Owen suggests they charter his boat and he will take them to the island of Roatan, where the diving is sensational. Anna does not want to go at all but Rob is really keen and he persuades her it will be a great adventure. Unknown to them Kim is desperate to go home to Florida. It is Owen who is determined to continue their life on the boat. So straightaway we have conflict of wishes between the four characters and a boat can be a very claustrophobic place when tensions start to build.
CONTRASTThe two women in After The Storm are very different. Anna fears a lot of things in the physical world – cockroaches, wasps, flying, lack of privacy, storms at sea.  She is however emotionally strong and empathetic. She is a speech therapist who works with old men who have had strokes and she tries to help them to speak again. So she is able to look beneath the surface of things and she is a great believer in the power of truth to heal. Kim in contrast is streetwise, capable and resourceful. She knows how to gut fish, how to cook on a boat when it’s pitching up and down, how to adapt and make the best of things. She’s a doer who gets on with things. They are very different women and as a consequence do not really get on. The two men are different too. Rob is laid back and Owen is troubled but they do get on, from their first meeting.
They set off. But why does Owen never sleep and why does Kim keep a knife zipped into her money-belt at all times.
SECRETSThe strapline of the book is Some Secrets Destroy You. Rob, Owen and Kim all have secrets that they are keeping from the others. Some of these secrets are trivial, some are more serious and some are deadly. The underlying theme of the novel is that you need to bring dark and fearful secrets out into the light of day in order for them to lose their destructive power. Those secrets need to rise to the surface and on the surface die.


And finally the storm of the title is both a weather storm and a psychological storm.


At my book launch Waterstones Brighton 22 January 2015
My two novels AFTER THE STORM and THE LIE OF YOU are published by Head of Zeus books.