With her third psychological thriller with Hera Books – The Final Party – recently released and set against a glamorous southern Italian backdrop, A.A. Chaudhuri tells Crime Time of her love of writing from multiple perspectives.
It was a joy to set my latest psychological thriller – The Final Party – in Sorrento, Italy, not only because it’s an area I’m very familiar with, but also because a heavenly backdrop can really ramp up the spine-tinging suspense and feeling of dread we crave from our thrillers on the basis that that which our characters believe to be a safe and idyllic environment turns out to be anything but, thereby adding to that ‘shock’ factor which ultimately makes the genre so compulsive.
There is no hard and fast rule as to how psychological thrillers should be written, but I love nothing more than telling a story from multiple characters’ perspectives, immersing myself in their own separate skins and mindsets, all with their own complex backstories, secrets and lies that hopefully add to that ‘thrill’ factor and keep the reader engrossed and guessing right up to the end.
The Final Party centres on three couples gathering in a luxury villa high in the hills above Sorrento for the perfect 40th birthday celebration. Before the week is out one of them in dead, their perfect reunion quickly becoming the holiday from hell when one of the group starts receiving anonymous messages, threatening to expose a dark secret from their university days.
But it is not just the fear of one secret being exposed that plagues my characters. Each of them is haunted by their own individual secrets inducing the mind games and sense of mutual mistrust and unease which typifies the psychological thriller genre and which for me can only be achieved effectively using multiple narratives.
I chose to tell the story through all six characters’ voices. For me, this has the advantage of widening the scope of the story through various sub-plots connected with the main storyline, thereby heightening the suspense and providing overlapping areas of intrigue, the reader never quite sure who to believe as they switch to different voices all with their own conflicting perspectives and agendas. I enjoy keeping my readers on their toes and in the dark, unsure as to whether they are getting the full picture or a biased version of the truth from whoever is speaking at the time.
Of course, it’s essential that each character is well crafted, as opposed to being one-dimensional players who a reader fails to connect with in the way they might with a single well-rounded narrator who they get to spend the whole book with. Each character needs a proper voice and purpose in propelling the plot forward, which is what I have tried to do with each of my characters in The Final Party by using flashbacks and present-day narrative which together allow the pieces of the jigsaw to finally come together.
Writing from different perspectives is challenging, but also highly rewarding. It forces me to hone my characterisation in order to make each character stand out from the other and provides an extra layer of intrigue and tension to the narrative. This is so important when secrets and lies take centre stage, the reader waiting on tenterhooks as to when the beans will be spilled, especially in the case of friendship groups where the potential impact of this can be both explosive and deadly.
The Final Party is published by Hera Books in e-book and paperback on 25th May 2023
