with Tim Weaver
We are delighted to welcome author Tim Weaver to Omnimystery News today.
Tim's fourth mystery featuring missing persons investigator David Raker — though only the first to be published in the US — is Never Coming Back (Viking; July 2014 hardcover and ebook formats) and he tells us today how the series has developed and evolved.
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Photo provided courtesy of
Tim Weaver;
Photo credit Sharlé Weaver
Never Coming Back isn't a book I could ever have handled as a debut author. Writing is something I feel very fortunate to have been given the opportunity to do, let alone get paid for, but I'm not too proud to admit that — for me, at least — it has come with a vertical learning curve.
Although I'm very proud of my 2010 UK debut, Chasing the Dead, I think there are things in it that, given the chance, I would certainly do differently now. That doesn't mean I harbour regrets — not at all — and, at the end of the day, Chasing the Dead was good enough to land me a publishing deal with Penguin. But, as you scale that learning curve, you become better at what you do, you refine your technique and find your voice, and I think you become more aware of how to engage with an audience. In the end, Chasing the Dead — despite its flaws — became the bedrock on which my second and third novels, The Dead Tracks and Vanished, were built, books that were — happily! — received very positively by readers and critics. And I think, without the experience of writing my debut, of learning from it, of adapting my approach, it's unlikely I'd have ever found the confidence to attempt something as ambitious as Never Coming Back.
One of the things that's important to me, as a writer of a series, is that the novels constantly evolve; that they try different things, go in different directions, and the core characters change and develop. So, even before I'd got to the end of Vanished, I'd decided that I was going to do something completely different with the fourth book. The first three David Raker novels were all based in and around London, but Never Coming Back isn't. It's set in two places: a fishing village on England's south coast — and in the neon glitz of Las Vegas.
The latter was a direct response to my love of American crime fiction, which I grew up reading, but it also serves the fundamentals of the plot: Never Coming Back centres on family secrets, and the lengths to which we'll go to bury them, and I liked the idea of deep-seated lies being as prevalent in an insular, rainswept seaside community as they are in the scorched, sprawling deserts of the Mojave. The book also represents a personal journey for Raker, as the village happens to be the place he grew up in, while Vegas is a town he knows well from the years before his wife died. To speak about the specifics of the plot is a bit of a tightrope walk because the parts I want to talk about most are so closely aligned to the biggest reveals. But the idea was definitely to challenge myself, to try to take the series somewhere new and unexpected, and to give readers something they weren't expecting.
Of course, that's not to say I wasn't worried, or didn't have doubts about such a stark change of direction. I'm generally not much of a worrier in life, but I worry about my writing all the time! I'd actually be deeply suspicious of anyone who claimed writing a full-length novel was a walk in the park. I feel pressure with every book, and it's pressure I put on myself, because when you gain a little momentum, and especially when you start to realise readers are actually quite invested in your world, you feel a responsibility to them. More fundamentally, I suppose, you don't want to disappoint them. I try to be honest about that, but I hope I also communicate the wonderful moments that come with being a writer too: the research, the moments of inspiration, when you finish a book, and — best of all — when readers email you, or grab you at an event, and tell you that the change of direction you decided to take was very definitely worth it.
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Tim Weaver is the thriller series featuring missing persons investigator David Raker. He is a former journalist and magazine editor, and has written extensively about videogames, film, television and tech. He lives in Bath, England.
For more information about the author, please visit his website at TimWeaverBooks.com or find him on Facebook and Twitter.
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Never Coming Back
Tim Weaver
A David Raker Mystery
Emily Kane arrives at her sister Carrie's house to find the front door unlocked, dinner on the table, and the family nowhere to be found — Carrie, her husband, and two daughters have disappeared. When the police turn up no leads, Emily turns to her former boyfriend David Raker, a missing persons investigator, to track the family down.
As Raker pursues the case, he discovers evidence of a sinister cover-up, decades in the making and with a long trail of bodies behind it.
