Come A Little Closer by Rachel Abbott @RachelAbbott #BlogTour @MauraRedPR #MyLifeInBooks

 They will be coming soon. They come every night.

Snow is falling softly as a young woman takes her last breath.

Fifteen miles away, two women sit silently in a dark kitchen. They don't speak, because there is nothing left to be said.

Another woman boards a plane to escape the man who is trying to steal her life. But she will have to return, sooner or later.

These strangers have one thing in common. They each made one bad choice - and now they have no choices left. Soon they won't be strangers, they'll be family...

When DCI Tom Douglas is called to the cold, lonely scene of a suspicious death, he is baffled. Who is she? Where did she come from? How did she get there? How many more must die?

Who is controlling them, and how can they be stopped?

Come A Little Closer by Rachel Abbott is published on 13 February 2018 by Black Dot Publishing. My thanks to Maura Wilding PR who invited me to take part on this Blog Tour.

I'm pleased to welcome the author, Rachel Abbott here to Random Things today. She's talking about the books that are special to her in My Life In Books.

My Life In Books - Rachel Abbott

The first book I remember holding as a child is The Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling. I remember the cover to this day – dark red, with a big elephant on the front. My dad used to read the stories to me then, but I loved the feel of the book – it had thin shiny pages, with wonderful illustrations.

After that, I moved fairly quickly on to Enid Blyton’s The Secret Seven and Famous Five, both of which I loved because they were little mysteries. It was obviously in my blood from an early age.

I think I was about eleven when my mum thought that I was up to reading Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell and I loved that book so much. I recall being cross with Scarlett for having a thing about weedy Ashley Wilkes when she could have focused on the wonderful Rhett Butler. I think that book taught me a lot about the importance of strong characters in novels.

During my teens I read anything and everything – from romances in my mum’s magazines to Agatha Christie. But it was Daphne du Maurier who changed the way that I thought about books. Reading Rebecca was possibly the biggest influence on me. Fear comes in all guises in the book and that in itself was a lesson in how to create suspense. But the biggest surprise was that a murder has been committed and yet, as a reader, I was desperate for the killer to get away with it! I can still remember the tense moments as almost the full cast of characters wait for the magistrate to turn up at the house, and can still feel the unnamed protagonist’s dread of what was to come. It was a significant influence on my feelings about right and wrong (in a story, obviously!).

I studied English Literature to ‘A’ level, so obviously I read Shakespeare, poetry, and a whole range of books that I wouldn’t normally have considered. Of those, the one that stood out the most was The Go-Between by LP Hartley. I love the opening line. “The past is a foreign country. The do things differently there.” It made me realise how important an opening line can be.

I went through all kinds of reading phases after that, from romance to witchcraft, but my love affair with thrillers was just beginning, and so many of the stories have stayed with me. I particularly enjoyed books by Minette Walters – I think my favourite was The Dark Room, but I loved all her early books. So tense and thrilling – I was beginning to get a feel for the kind of books I would like to write.

I remember the day that I bought my first Harlan Coben book. It was at Stansted Airport, and I had never heard of him! The man in the bookshop said he thought I would enjoy it, and it was an airport exclusive – not available in most of the bookshops that I haunted. The novel was Tell No-one and what I loved was that the story seemed so improbable. I couldn’t see how it would play out, and that’s what kept me turning the pages. And that’s also why I have read every one of his novels since then.

Now, I read thrillers almost exclusively. I look for writers who not only have a strong plot line, but who excel at characterisation and a sense of place. There are too many to mention them all, but I would always read anything by Sharon Bolton, Clare Mackintosh and Kate Rhodes. So many great writers, and never enough time to read them all.

Rachel Abbott - February 2018 

Rachel Abbott's debut thriller, Only the Innocent, was an international bestseller, reaching the number one position in the Amazon charts both in the UK and US. This was followed by the number one bestselling novels The Back Road, Sleep Tight, Stranger Child, Nowhere Child (a short novel based on the characters from Stranger Child), Kill Me Again and The Sixth Window. Her most recent novel, Come a Little Closer, is available from February 2018.

Rachel's novels have now been translated into over 20 languages and her books have sold over 2.8 million copies in the English language. 

In 2015 Amazon celebrated the first five years of the Kindle in the UK, and announced that Rachel was the #1 bestselling independent author over the five-year period. She was also placed #14 in the chart of all authors. Stranger Child was the most borrowed novel for the Kindle in the first half of 2015.

Rachel splits her time between Alderney - a beautiful island off the coast of France - and the Le Marche region of Italy, where she is able to devote all her time to writing fiction. For more information, see Rachel's website, or follow her on Twitter.

Website : http://www.rachel-abbott.com 
Blog : http://rachelabbottwriter.com/
Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/RachelAbbott1Writer
Twitter: @RachelAbbott

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