The air in the cutting room was heating up and it wasn’t just the faulty aircon. We were making a film on The Big Bang and Cold Dark Matter for BBC’s Horizon. In our programme, scientists said they needed to find more matter in the universe to confirm their Big Bang theory. They couldn’t see or feel this matter so they called it cold and dark. My editor and I thought we had a great title for the programme – ‘What Can the Matter Be?’ but the head of BBC2 had a different opinion. ‘People won’t know what it’s about,’ she said, ‘and it’s got to be sexy.’ So the title ‘Of Big Bangs, Stick Men and Galactic Holes ‘ was published in the Radio Times the very next day.
I had less trouble with my latest book ‘Out Of Sight’. My publishers loved the title. The book, as with all my novels, is based around one of my documentaries. You’ve guessed it, ‘Of Big Bangs …’ There is a cosmologist in it and he’s looking for Cold Dark Matter. To do this he uses telescopes and satellites. But here lies the seeds of the crime. Satellites seem to be falling out of the skies.
Above our heads there are half a million pieces of space junk flying at 18,000 miles an hour. There are also nearly 3000 satellites, providing essential communications, navigation and military roles. An accident, or worse, waiting to happen. My cosmologist wants to make an investigative documentary about the subject but there is a drawback, he is blind. With television journalist Nathalie Thompson’s help he travels the world to discover who is taking these satellites down. At first it appears to be about media or astronomy wars, but later an even more sinister possibility is revealed. What can the matter be?
‘An up-to-the-minute, globe-spanning roller-coaster of a thriller’
Abir Mukherjee, author of Death in the East
‘A terrific pitch-perfect thriller laden with contemporary insight’
Adam Brookes, author of Spy Games
OUT OF SIGHT is published on 29th April by RedDoor Press
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