About

I tend to debate everything. Character names, the means, method and opportunity for murder, whether a crime is in fact murder at all. In real life, I ponder which wooden spoon to buy. Switching cars took me close to a year. You get the picture. So, of course, I debated this little infomercial that you’re reading right now. Do I write in 3rd person, or is that too impersonal, too Trumpian? What to include? Eventually, I just had to make a decision. So here we go. I studied languages and marketing at The University of Strathclyde. After graduating, I had a pretty varied career in marketing working for an events company, an airline, one of the first newspaper dotcoms back when dotcoms were as rare as rotary telephones are today. Then I became the retail marketing director of a football club and, finally, that was enough. When life gets tough, turn to fiction they say. And if they don’t already say that, you heard it here first, folks. I’m claiming it. Fiction called me up.

My first novel, Donor #149, is a crime thriller set in New York City. It was inspired by an article I read in The New York Times about a special division of the NYPD colloquially referred to as “The Jumper Squad.” After years thinking I would write a novel someday, when the time was right, I suddenly had a vivid, determined character in Alison Fraser, my Scottish police negotiator whose job is it to talk people down off bridges and ledges when they’re at the end of their mental tether. Alison moves from Edinburgh to New York City on an international transfer to join the “Jumper Squad,” where she finds herself working out of the same Manhattan precinct house as homicide detective Nathan Heller and his partner, Detective Jenny Moritz. Heller and Moritz are investigating the discovery of a dead baby found dumped on the High Line. A DNA hit from the crime scene brings Special Agent Nina Ponte and her FBI team crashing right into the middle of the NYPD’s investigation, the missing person cases of five sets of fraternal twins in tow. From the outset, the stakes for the missing men and women are high. But no one could have predicted how intimately intertwined the lives of Fraser, Heller, and Moritz would become by the dramatic climax to this complex, unorthodox case.

Donor #149 was a finalist in the Penguin Random House Daily Mail First Crime Novel Award 2017. It is the first in a series of crime novels to feature Alison Fraser, Nathan Heller and Jenny Moritz.

Donor #149 is currently out on submission. You can read the prologue in the Novel Extract page on this website. To request further sample chapters, or the full manuscript and a synopsis please use the Contact form.

Info

Email: gillian@gillianwebster.com for further information.