Reunion. It’s a word with the potential to inspire curiosity, anticipation and excitement, or the utmost dread depending on the circumstances and people involved. For many, the lure of old flames, old adversaries and old scores to settle is irresistible. In a thriller novel, of course, these are perfect ingredients for driving up the tension.
Two Little Liars is my adult fiction debut and unfolds across two timelines set twenty years apart. In 1996, a group of college students are on a two-day study trip to Blackwater Island, set in the fictional Tithe Estuary, Essex. At the end of the first night a student named Belinda West (known as Bee) is dead following an out-of-control party. What initially appears to be an accidental drowning is soon revealed to be murder; the weapon a broken glass bottle from the island’s witchcraft museum. In 2016 the case remains unsolved and none of the survivors are in touch. Then one of the group, incited by terminal illness and a desire to uncover the truth uses a threat to rally the others back to the island. What begins as a thrashing out of answers soon turns deadly as some will go to any lengths to keep their secrets.
The theme of reunions in a creative sense is evergreen, perhaps even a cliché. But nostalgia sells because as humans we so often cling to it, looking back through our rose-tinted specs to when life was simpler or happier. I am as guilty as anyone: Two Little Liars is, in part, a love letter to the nineties harking back to my own childhood and teenage years. Songs like Bryan Adams’ Summer of ’69, Marillion’s Kayleigh, and Don Henley’s Boys of Summer were destined to be hits, not only for their catchy melodies but for the way they tap into a universal yearning for the years that are gone. Given the chance to reunite with the people who experienced these times with us – to return to that version of ourselves or perhaps prove that we’re no longer that person – it’s easy to see the appeal or, at the very least, succumb to nosiness.
How many of us can say, hand on heart, that we haven’t stalked the Facebook pages of childhood friends, exes (or an ex’s new love) and come away either vindicated or dismayed? Or shared the gleeful satisfaction of Romy and Michelle in their high school reunion movie as they give the mean girls their comeuppance? No reunion, fictional or real, would be complete without a slice of revenge. While murder might be a step too far in the real world (though tempting, there’s a reason my favourite film as a teenager was Heathers) each of my characters faces a reckoning. For a few it’s the judgement of others, or their own consciences catching up with them as they admit to lies they told or things they did the night Bee died, some of which contributed to her fate. For others it will be life or death as the killer is unmasked.
Told from the viewpoint of Erin both in the past and present, the other suspects are drawn through her eyes: the two girls she and Bee shared a cabin with on the island, one of whom is now a washed-up celebrity, the other carrying a hidden trauma from the college trip. Then there’s ‘the one who got away’ childhood sweetheart, along with the college teacher who failed to properly safeguard the students, and finally the wife of the other teacher on the trip. As the events of 1996 unravel it seems all had a motive to kill Bee and most had the opportunity, not least Erin herself who knew Bee as a younger child and has lived in regret ever since. Together, the pair told a lie about a local boy which had devastating consequences, making social pariahs of them both and earning them the moniker of the ‘two little liars’. As the past and the present collide there can be no escape in any sense, especially when stranded on an eerie, tide-ruled island.
The island is inspired by the real life Osea Island in Essex which is set on the River Blackwater. Osea is severed from the mainland for sixteen hours in every twenty-four, with access via a mile-long causeway that appears twice daily for a few hours. Visitors to the island, which is privately owned, are given a causeway timetable which is to be ignored at their peril once the tide starts edging insidiously in.
I spent a weekend on Osea back in 2012, writing an outline for what would eventually become Two Little Liars. It is impossible to cross its causeway without marvelling that it was built by the Romans, or without fear of your car breaking down and leaving you to be swept out on to the estuary. This tidal road even appears as the deadly, mist swathed Nine Lives Causeway in the The Woman in Black film; a perfect location if ever there was one. During the entirety of our stay my friend and I didn’t see another soul, not even to pay for the hire of the bikes we used to explore the island. As day turns to night, peaceful isolation gives way to a creeping uneasiness at being cut off from help. At the same time, you can’t help wondering how inaccessible the island truly is, should a stranger be determined to trespass; an uncomfortable reality Erin and the rest of the group are forced to confront when a stranger arrives on the island by boat during their reunion. Who was really there that night twenty years ago? And is it worse to believe the murderer was an outsider, or someone very much in the closed circle of suspects that they’re now trapped with? One thing’s for sure: not everyone will survive this reunion.
Two Little Liars is published by No Exit Press on 4th June.