I have been asked to do some interviews, and it is important to answer questions in a way that makes me look good, rather than bad. I am afraid I am not that good at this. Here are some of the questions I have been asked and my terrible answers:

Q1. Why should anyone buy The Push Over?

According my latest reviews, it is unputdownable and full of dark humour. A great, gripping read with many twists and turns. It was inspired by own wedding, where the reception was held on a boat on the Thames. In the novel, one of the guests gets pushed into the river and drowns, but you don’t find out who until the end. At my own actual wedding no one died. Well that is my story and I am sticking to it.

Q2. How do you spend your time when you are not writing?

I am slave to two ungrateful cats, very similar to the two cats in my novel. I also have a husband who spreads his clothes all around the place (pants belong on the floor, apparently), so I go around sighing a lot. Eating chocolate takes up a considerable amount of my time, then I have to do lots of walking, yoga and tennis to make up for it. Chatting is quite time consuming and I have a lot of that to do. Then, of course, there is my job as a journalist for a PR magazine. In case my boss is reading this, it is important to say that I spend a ridiculous amount of time working, working, working.

Q3. Who are your ideal readers?

My ideal readers are very forgetful and have to keep buying lots of new copies because they mislay the book so often. And then they have to buy lots of copies for their friends too, of which they have many.

Q4.     How do you look so wonderful when you spend so much time eating chocolate and writing fabulous books?

Well, thank you for saying so, but looks are not important to me, as I always say to my children: “It is what is inside that counts”. They always then tell me that I am a terrible liar, that I, like the rest of society, completely judge people by the way they look. They go on to point out I spend an inordinate amount of time buying clothes (always second hand! Such bargains AND good for the environment), that I spend far too much on my haircut, and that I am always making comments about other people’s appearances that prove I am a completely shallow person. But in my defence, I don’t just love my children because they are good looking, but because they dress very well too.

Q5. What made you want to write The Push Over? I don’t know about you, but don’t you find lots of people terribly annoying? I don’t often imagine killing them, but when I do, I don’t like to be the nasty sort of person that enjoys thinking up lots of horrible ways to torture people, so I fantasise about killing people close to me in as nice a way as possible. I realise that it is completely unacceptable to think these awful thoughts and that there simply isn’t any nice way to murder someone, which is why I haven’t followed through in real life!  The great thing about a novel is that you CAN follow through!