Goodreads asked Sally Spencer:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Sally Spencer It's a process. I agreed with my publishers that I would start a new series, and I didn't want to make it another police procedural, since I am also still writing my DCI Monika Paniatowski novels, so I thought I would write about a female private detective called Jennie Redhead. The next questions was where to set the books. I didn't want to locate them in Whitebridge (as the Paniatowski novels are) or anywhere similar to it, but it had to be somewhere I knew about, and since I had studied in Oxford, I thought I'd set the series there. I then decided that it would involve both the university and the town (later books in the series might involve only one of those two components - I don't know yet), and I came up with a plot which would draw both town and gown into it. But even that was only the beginning - the person I thought was the murderer when I started writing the book turned out to be totally innocent when I reached the end of it.

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