‘I think because of the pandemic readers are choosing propulsive and absorbing reads’

Tell us about your new work and how it came about – the story behind the story. If Looks Could Kill is the third in the Detective Chief Superintendent Frankie Sheehan series. Alongside unravelling the mystery at the heart of the novel, the murder of Debbie Nugent, I wanted to explore themes of self-image and of how others perceive us. It is a story about the masks we wear both intentionally and unintentionally. The first scene in the book takes us to the Iveagh Gardens in Dublin where a man kills himself quite publicly. The novel then takes us out to rural Wicklow near a fictional town called Ballyalann where my detective, Frankie, is confronted with what looks like the murder scene of...