#Giveaway: Sound of Broken Glass - Deborah Crombie (With Guest Post)

Deborah Crombie is a native Texan who has lived in both England and Scotland. She lives in McKinney, Texas, sharing a house that is more than one hundred years old with her husband, three cats, and two German shepherds.

The Setting or the Story

Readers often ask, what comes first, the setting or the story? I know you’re thinking, oh, right, the chicken and the egg thing —it’s the unanswerable question.

But sometimes there is a first, and what I always have to say is “it depends entirely on the book.” In The Sound of Broken Glass, the story gets the prize.

The story, in fact, began three books before, in Where Memories Lie. Scotland Yard Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid and his colleague, Detective Sergeant Doug Cullen, were investigating a murder. I needed a character that would not only serve as a witness, but who could tell my detectives something about the victim and impart a crucial piece of information. A young man called Andy Monahan walked into the story. In his late twenties, Andy was a very talented rock guitarist in a failing band. He lived in the flat across the hall from the victim and had an orange cat named Bert.

That wasn’t much to go on, but I knew as soon as I wrote a scene from Andy’s viewpoint that I wanted to know more about him. Why did he live alone? Why, with his talent, was he still playing bad gigs in an amateur band? Did he have family? Where did he come from? And why was he so prickly?

Bits and pieces of Andy’s story grew in my mind as finished that book and wrote another, but I knew I needed a setting for both the past and present parts of it.

A friend was living in south London at the time, in a very unique area called Crystal Palace. He kept telling me I should set a book there, but it wasn’t until I went to visit that I saw how all the pieces would fit together. I knew that Andy had grown up in Crystal Palace, exactly where he’d lived, what had happened to him one August when he was thirteen years old, and how that incident was connected to a murder that Duncan’s wife, Detective Inspector Gemma James, and her team would investigate in the present.

The weaving together of the elements in the book wasn’t quite as simple as it sounds—it never is—but once put together they were inseparable. I can’t imagine that particular story taking place anywhere else. So perhaps in the end it doesn’t matter what sparks the story, as long  as it all fits together in the end.

In the past…
A blisteringly hot August in Crystal Palace, a solitary thirteen-year-old boy meets his next door neighbor, a recently widowed young teacher hoping to make a new start in the tight-knit South London community. Drawn together by loneliness, the unlikely pair forms a deep connection that ends in a shattering act of betrayal. 

In the present…
On a cold January morning in London, Detective Inspector Gemma James is assigned to lead a Murder Investigation Team in South London, along with her colleague, Detective Sergeant Melody Talbot. Their first case: a crime scene at a seedy hotel in Crystal Palace. The victim: a well-respected barrister, found naked, trussed, and strangled. Is it an unsavory accident or murder? In either case, he was not alone, and Gemma’s team must find his companion--a search that leads them into unexpected new discoveries. Ultimately, they will begin to question everything they think they know about their world and those they trust most. 

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