The Victim's Story - by Gillian Philip

This week saw official publication day for my new crime novel, THE OPPOSITE OF AMBER.

Publication day, I always think, should feel like a birthday – well, it’s your book’s birthday after all – but the truth is, it usually passes unnoticed in the haze of activity before and after. There are blog tours (a lovely kind of tour where you never have to leave your desk), and the nervous wait for reviews...

I’ve been especially anxious about this one because it’s a bit of a departure for me. It isn’t as fast–paced as my other books; indeed it isn’t really a ‘thriller’ as the blurb describes it.

I found myself engaged by what was going on in my heroine’s head, and that seemed as important to me as the ‘whodunnit’ element of the story (and indeed it’s directly relevant...)

I got the idea for the story while watching a documentary about the infamous murders in the Ipswich in 2006. It focused on the families of the victims, who were all street girls, and it was moving to see that aspect of the deaths given prominence for once, rather than the horror. I think that’s what inspired me to write about the family of a similar girl, and how the death impacted on them – I didn’t want to write about the killer, or the investigation. The victim in a crime story so often seems almost an irrelevance...

So THE OPPOSITE OF AMBER is the story of two sisters whose different choices in life lead to very different paths. The older, more responsible Jinn is drawn into prostitution when bad boy Nathan comes back into her life, and Ruby fights in vain to get her sister back.

It’s a story about sibling love, and loss, and obsessive romantic love.

But it is, also, a murder mystery...


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