His words would bounce off her, and he would still be rotting where he was afterwards, and she would still be here. It wasn’t like with Pete. Carter had nothing to hold over her. No way of hurting her.
I think of myself as writing standalone thrillers, and so my intention was to leave Amanda here – that this was the last I’d see of her. It was only when I was some way into writing a draft of my second book (The Shadows in the US; The Shadow Friend in the UK) that I realised I needed a detective, and it occurred to me that I could bring Amanda back in a way that might develop her character and give her some degree of closure. So while The Shadows can be read as a standalone, it is a sequel of sorts.
My intention afterwards was to leave things there. But, once again, things did not turn out quite the way I planned. (Narrator’s voice: “Do they ever, Alex?”) While Amanda is not in my third book – The Angel Maker in the US; The Half Burnt House in the UK – it does feature a cameo appearance by a character Amanda speaks to in The Shadows. Which means that all three books must technically take place in the same fictional universe, and that perhaps, whatever I might like to think, I’m not writing standalone thrillers after all.
