Latest news with #TheStrangerInside
Irish Times
10-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
‘We came home to find our house on fire. I had a newborn and two toddlers at the time'
Tell us about your latest thriller, The Stranger Inside The Stranger Inside is about a woman whose life completely unravels when she's framed for her husband's murder. She's imprisoned, separated from her child and left to piece together what really happened from behind bars. But when she realises her daughter may be in danger too, she makes the desperate choice to escape. This story is my most fast-paced. You've just signed a big UK and US deal for your next novel, Beautiful Liars. What's the storyline? Beautiful Liars is set in Dalkey, a place that looks idyllic from the outside, privileged, and picture-perfect. But beneath that surface, things quietly break apart when 17-year-old Saskia Foley vanishes during what was meant to be a harmless game of dares in the woods. It follows three mothers, each tied to the incident, each protecting her own child. And there are wolves. Your debut novel, Breaking, was shortlisted for the 2023 CWA John Creasey Dagger Award. What's it about? Breaking follows Mirren Fitzpatrick, whose child goes missing while on holiday in the Florida Keys. As the search intensifies and the media spotlight grows, the story becomes less about the child and more about what the mother is hiding, and what the world expects her to be. You benefited from the advice of writer friends Andrea Mara and Glenn Meade. Tell us more Andrea and I became friends when our sons were in the same class at school. We got talking, and when I told her I'd always wanted to write fiction, she encouraged me to go ahead and just start. Glenn told me if it doesn't move you, it won't move the reader. That line has guided a lot of what I write. READ MORE [ Amanda Cassidy: 'My writing comes straight from the heart' Opens in new window ] Your second novel, The Returned, draws on a real-life event: a fire that destroyed your home We came home to find our house on fire. I had a newborn and two toddlers at the time so we were lucky no one was hurt, but I still have flashbacks to the melted toys and smashed glass everywhere. Channelling that reality into The Returned felt cathartic. Has your journalism background influenced your fiction? As a journalist, you witness the extremes of human behaviour. Every day you are covering stories of grief, joy, resilience and cruelty. You see people in their rawest moments, and I often wanted to change the endings of the stories I covered. Fiction gave me that freedom. What are your career highlights so far? Seeing Breaking on a bookshop shelf for the first time will always be special. Being shortlisted for the Dagger Award in London. More recently, getting the call about Beautiful Liars being picked up in both the UK and US was incredible. It was evening time so I had to get dressed and walk down to the local Texaco to buy a bottle of bubbles and 7Up for the kids! How important is setting in your novels? My time as a travel journalist gave me access to some amazing places that left a deep impression on me. I love writing books that feel rooted in a specific atmosphere. What projects are you working on now? Right now I'm launching The Stranger Inside, which I think makes for a great, pacy summer read. Then I'll start writing the next book. Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage? My dad brought me to Corleone in Sicily, the original Godfather house. [ 'I wanted to write the ultimate horror story': Meet the women haunting your worst nightmares Opens in new window ] What's the best writing advice you've heard? Write drunk, edit sober. That's more of a metaphor than a lifestyle choice. Who do you admire the most? People who keep going when things are hard. You're supreme ruler for a day. What law do you pass or abolish? I'd abolish 'thank you' texts in the school WhatsApp after birthday parties. Could you recommend a book, podcast and film? The Night I Killed Him by Gill Perdue. Gill writes with heart as well as tension, which is rare in crime fiction. Film wise, my daughter is making me watch all the Final Destination movies. The Nobody Zone is an atmospheric true-crime podcast about a man who may or may not have been a serial killer in London in the 1980s. Which public event affected you most in recent years? The death of Ashling Murphy . I still think about her and her family. The most remarkable place you've visited? Whitehaven Beach in Australia. Your most treasured possession? My gold locket. My laptop, because it holds everything from my brain. And a sign from my late father's first pub that says 'Cassidy's'. The most beautiful book you own? A beautifully bound edition of A Little Princess, a very special gift. Dream dinner party guests? Stephen King, because he's a master storyteller with a deep understanding of people and fear. I'd invite Joan Didion for her razor-sharp observations. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who created Fleabag, for her wit. I'd also want Gillian Flynn there because I'd say she's deliciously dark. And I'd have to have Andrea Mara and Catherine Ryan Howard there to gossip about everyone over wine when they leave. Best and worst things about where you live? The best thing is that I'm only 10 minutes from the sea. The worst thing is that I'm a 10 whole minutes from the sea. Your favourite quotation? 'Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.' I like this quote by Rainer Maria Rilke because it's so beautifully brutal about how life is a little of everything all at once. Your favourite fictional character? Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley. Ripley does terrible things yet we still root for him. I've also always loved Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Alice has such a strong sense of self. She's grounded, yet whimsical and intellectually curious, without being naive. I relate to those contrasts. A book to make me laugh? Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q Sutanto is such good fun. A book that moved you to tears? Poor by Katriona O'Sullivan. I found her honesty completely affecting. The Stranger Inside is published by Canelo Crime
Irish Examiner
09-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Meet Amanda Cassidy — the Irish crime writer about to take off internationally
Bestselling novelist Amanda Cassidy is a dreamer. She's always been a dreamer — but a dreamer with a streak of pragmatism. 'I don't wait to be hit by inspiration. I sit down and do the work. Because it is work,' she says of her writing. 'But what's really driven me is that I want my children to see what's possible. I want them to know that expression matters, and that you can dream, but you can also deliver and you can also get paid for it all at once.' Dreaming, delivering, and getting paid for it is a philosophy that's clearly working for the Dublin-based 40-something as not only is her fourth novel, The Stranger Inside, about to hit bookshop shelves but her already completed fifth book, Beautiful Liars, due in spring of 2027, has landed her one of the biggest international publishing deals in recent years for an Irish author, with Century in Britain and Putnam, the publishing house behind global smash Big Little Lies, in the US. It's big-league stuff that's likely to turbo-charge her career. 'It's a modern-day retelling of Little Red Riding Hood,' is Cassidy's pithy synopsis of Beautiful Liars. 'It's been so much fun to write. This is the book I'll dedicate to myself.' When I later ask what makes a best-seller, she answers: 'Craft, timing, marketing, and just a little lightning-in-a-bottle type of magic.' Cassidy writes crime, with plots often inspired by events from her own life — a house fire ( The Returned) and a summer in a French chateau ( The Perfect Place). The Stranger Inside, a thrillingly tense page-turner, has its protagonist, midwife Ciara Duffy — 'a woman who's been framed, hunted, worn down, and fearless in equal measures, and she's trying to escape the trap of who she's been told that she is' — driving the gripping narrative. It is, Cassidy says, 'slightly based' on work she previously did in the Irish prison service, in that her experiences in that environment provided the spark of an idea and got the wheels of her brain whirring with 'what it might be like to be there and to be completely innocent of something that you've done, and the stakes are so high that you have to get out no matter what, in order to save your child'. Women are well-known lovers of crime fiction, both as readers and writers of the genre. Cassidy has a credible theory on why that is: 'I think it gives us the power to explore justice, vengeance, vulnerability as a really powerful narrative playground when you're coming to telling stories. 'In real life, women are often the victims of crime, especially domestic abuse, stalking, or sexual violence. I think writing crime flips the script a little bit and women become a solver or the avenger or even a criminal. I think it's a way to process fear and trauma and rage.' Amanda Cassidy at her home in Foxrock, Dublin: 'In real life, women are often the victims of crime, especially domestic abuse, stalking, or sexual violence. I think writing crime flips the script a little bit and women become a solver or the avenger or even a criminal. I think it's a way to process fear and trauma and rage.' Photo: Gareth Chaney Cassidy — a fan of the trailblazing 'queen of crime' Agatha Christie — has always loved words, and throughout her life writing has been a kind of therapy, almost. For her, writing isn't about being productive or clever, she says, 'it's just needing to find this place to go and the world feels a bit too tight, maybe — I'd say writing saved me hundreds of times'. Her background is in journalism (she continues to write for print publications and also works in corporate storytelling, 'helping leaders tell their brand story'). She worked as a reporter for Sky News, Newstalk, and this newspaper, covering crime, politics, and human interest stories. That career 'gave her structure' in her writing and taught her how to edit, script-write, and push for clarity from a story. Lockdown gave her the space to try her hand at fiction, and a friend — award-winning crime fiction author Andrea Mara — gave Cassidy permission to 'write a bad book', advice that 'unshackled' her and allowed her to write more freely. 'What emerged wasn't bad in the end. It was raw and real.' Breaking went on to be shortlisted for a prestigious crime-writing award and was, she says, 'the start of me trusting myself'. Her writing process involves lots of scribbling in notebooks, and walks to mull over characters and potential story arcs. When she begins a new novel, though, she never knows the ending, feeling 'if I tell myself the story, I won't want to keep going'. She does do some plotting but 'for the most part, I want to see what happens'. She says: 'Sometimes I get really excited, thinking, 'Oh God, what's going to happen next?' and my fingers are just typing and I genuinely don't know. So that's fun. And it has to be fun because so much of it is sitting at a computer, writing.' The Stranger Inside was particularly intense to write 'because I was scaring myself writing it — I tend to do that when I'm writing on my own; I'm looking over my shoulder as I'm writing because you get the chills'. The most terrifying moments in the book spring from the humdrum: a momentary lapse, a few seconds' inattention, a bad decision. Who hasn't left their kid in the car for a few minutes to pop to the shop, or indulged in one too many glasses of wine when we're meant to be the responsible adult, or read a text or email we shouldn't? Such everyday slip-ups often have horrifying consequences in the worlds Cassidy creates. Her genius is in showing her readers their own lives in those fictional worlds, tapping into their worst fears and laying bare the potential devastation that can come from a careless choice. Cassidy's fiction holds a mirror up to the reader, scaring them just as much as she has scared herself. She's currently producing a book a year, and it's a schedule that suits her; it helps establish a predictable kind of creative rhythm, 'and it turns writing into a habit'. Amanda Cassidy at her home in Foxrock, Dublin. Photo: Gareth Chaney Cassidy is at her desk from nine to five, with a break for lunch, although she can, she says, write anywhere — on the Luas, in the car, on holidays — and always has her laptop with her. 'It's like my third arm or something.' Nonetheless, she has a work-life balance sussed, partly because she finds writing to be 'really cathartic and therapeutic and relaxing'. It's work but, at the same time, it's not. 'I handed in a manuscript recently and the next day I was like, 'I think I'll write a piece for LinkedIn now.' I was writing because I just love writing. So that part feels to me like relaxing. And then I get out with my dogs and I bring the kids out and go to the beach and that type of thing as much as I can. 'When I first started writing, I was nearly embarrassed to say I'm writing a book because it sounded so indulgent and so fancy. 'But now I get up and I write because this is what pays for my family, my children.' And, for Cassidy, crime really does pay. When I ask if it's possible to make money from novel writing, her response is succinct: 'Yes, it is.' Elaborating, she says: 'If you're dogged and if you're determined and if you're able for rejections, it absolutely is possible to make money writing full-time.' You have to be shrewd, she says, and give the reader what they want. If they're not buying your books, you need to ask yourself why and fix it. You have to make it work. She adds: 'I think, like any job, you're going to get out of it what you put into it. It's very much a long-term career for me and it's a lucrative career for me and it's something that I'm really lucky that I get to do every day — to be able to make things up and get paid for it." Quite literally, living the dream. 'The Stranger Inside', by Amanda Cassidy, published by Canelo, is out now.
Irish Independent
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
New crime novels and thrillers to read this August from Jo Nesbo to Amanda Cassidy
Reviewed this month: The Stranger Inside by Amanda Cassidy, Wolf Hour by Jo Nesbo, Evil in High Places by Rory Clements and The Private Island by Ali Lowe Our thriller and crime critic Myles McWeeney on the best new novels to read this month. Canelo Crime, 256 pages, trade paperback €10.99, e-book £5.99, out August 7
