The Second Woman is the third of three connected books, following on from Part of the Family and A Double Life. Each is a stand-alone novel that is also one in a series – not so much a trilogy as a triptych – that can be read in any order, with each book homing in on a strand of a larger, more complex web. I wanted to explore what happens when you look at the same crime from a number of perspectives, always with a woman at the centre of the story.
The genesis of this project was similarly manifold.
As with some of the best tales, it began in a pub, when a journalist friend told me about a trial he was reporting on involving a shipping company accused of dumping deadly toxic waste near a playground in a developing country. In the days that followed, as I read through the court transcripts, I knew I had my crime.
But for me, first as a news reporter and now as a writer of fiction, the most interesting thing about a crime is not the crime itself. In this sense, these books started to brew in my teens and early twenties, as I attempted to reconcile my own memories of the smiling grandfather I recalled faintly from childhood trips to Moscow with the public image of the double agent Kim Philby. As I considered his many faces – father, husband, friend, traitor, hero – questions began to emerge in my mind: How and why do we dupe the people we love; what is the impact on those we betray and on ourselves; and ultimately, what happens when the deceiver is a woman?
These books were inspired, in part, by some of my favourite espionage novels and political thrillers, and they deal, in various settings, with the elements of intelligence that interest me most. They are not traditional spy stories. Rather, they are an attempt to shift the focus so that we might reimagine a traditionally male world through a female lens.
Usually, when we think of women and criminality, we think of strong-armed accomplices or victims – and statistics around women in prison demonstrate that they often are. But not always. When a woman commits a crime that is typically thought of as ‘male’ – and in doing so, demonstrates the characteristics associated with that crime, often at odds with notions of femininity and motherhood – then her actions are almost always perceived, at least in part, through the prism of her domestic setting. She was a mother, a sister, a daughter – and look what she did.
I wanted to explore the distinct duality of roles that women face in their everyday lives and give each of my protagonists her own sense of agency, her own cross to bear and her own distinct flaws. So we have Anna, who must betray her family in order to protect them; we have Gabriela, who, in uncovering a double agent, finds herself living a double life; and we have Maria, bound and ultimately destroyed by loyalty.
I hope you find the books as entertaining, transportive and, dare I say, as exciting to read as I found them to write.