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The idea for THE LAST TEN SECONDS came from a screenplay I wrote ten years back, at a time before I was a published author. The screenplay was called ONE BY ONE, and it was about a group of men brought together to kidnap a suspected serial killer from police custody, supposedly on behalf of one of his victim's relatives. But when they take him back to their isolated rendezvous, things go wrong very quickly indeed. A night of carnage and double-dealing ensues as it becomes clear that nothing is what it seems; no one is who they claim to be; and no one is supposed to be getting out of the rendezvous alive.

Two years ago I completely rehashed ONE BY ONE, and it was optioned for film by Dan Films. I always wanted to turn it into a book, though, because I thought it had all the pieces in place to turn it into a thriller with a breakneck pace. However, as is often the case, it turned out to be hell of a lot harder than I thought to turn less than ten thousand words of screenplay into a hundred thousand words of book, and at one point I even thought about abandoning the whole project. Then I had the idea of introducing a longstanding character of mine, Tina Boyd, into the mix as the cop hunting the missing serial killer. Her addition, along with that of Sean Egan, an undercover cop who's infiltrated the kidnap gang, suddenly made the whole thing flow.

What follows is a 36-hour rollercoaster ride that I'm hoping will keep the reader guessing right up until the very last page.

The Last Ten Seconds is published by Transworld