From daydreaming about bank heists to TV adaptations: Andrea Mara on her writing career

She left her job in finance to be a freelance writer. Today, Andrea Mara has eight books under her belt — and a TV adaptation with Sarah Snook and Dakota Fanning in the works, writes Deirdre McArdle

This week, Andrea Mara released her eighth novel, It Should Have Been You. Picture: Gareth Chaney

When she worked in financial services, Andrea Mara would often find herself daydreaming in conference calls.

She wasn’t daydreaming about lying in a hammock on a beach. Mara was more likely to be thinking about what would happen if masked gunmen entered her bank’s Luxembourg office while the video call was going on.

“I would start to think, imagine if we were just watching this video conference on screen, and masked gunmen came into the Luxembourg office right in front of our eyes,” she says. 

“So it’s only a few feet away on the video screen, but actually hundreds of miles away in real life. And that weird thing where we would be seeing it unfolding, but there’s nothing we can do. And, you know, what should we do — should we call the Irish police or the Luxembourg police. How would we call them?”

With daydreams like that, it’s no surprise that Mara has gone on to become a bestselling thriller author, writing in the domestic noir or suburban thriller genre. And with books, All Her Fault, Hide and Seek, No One Saw a Thing and Someone in the Attic all featuring in the Irish top 10 bestseller lists, she appears to have hit a sweet spot.

This week, Mara released her eighth novel, It Should Have Been You. The plot centres around new mom Susan who mistakenly sends a message intended for her sisters to an entire WhatsApp Group. The message, which exposes some truths about a neighbour and her family, kickstarts a series of events starting with the murder of a woman — which Susan suspects should have been her. 

The book touches on the aforementioned WhatsApp Groups, cyber bullying, cheating spouses, dealing with teenage children, and linking it all together are the familial relationships. Within these themes lies an intricate, twisty plot.

Andrea Mara: A bestselling thriller author writing in the domestic noir or suburban thriller genre. Picture: Gareth Chaney

For Mara, her books are about taking what might seem innocuous — a text sent in error, a playdate, a game of hide and seek — and asking “what if?”. She’s famed for her twists; a review of her latest book calls her book “so twisty, even the twists have twists”.

“That’s really my favourite part, the plotting and the twists are what I enjoy the most,” she says. 

“When I start out, I’ll have an outline so I know the premise and I know the ending, and I know a very rough path of how we’re going to get there. So, I‘m thinking great, I’ve got this four-page outline, and then I get to chapter five, and I’m like, I don’t know what happens next. But then I think okay, well, what if the next thing that happens is not what it looks like to the reader, maybe posting the reader in one direction, but really, in the background, we’re going in a different direction, and that’s the part that’s really, really fun.

“And dropping little clues along the way that might be real clues that will point you towards the answer, because in crime writing, you have to give the reader a good chance to guess the answer. Otherwise, it’s not fair. You have to give them clues, but then there are other clues that are pointing in the wrong direction altogether, and that’s also really, really good fun.”

Mara has always loved crime books. She’s read every Agatha Christie book, and loves Jeffrey Deaver and Patricia Cornwell. But when she started reading Barbara Vine books (who is Ruth Rendall writing as Vine), which were crime thrillers without a detective, she could see a niche.

She says: “The Barbara Vine books were very much domestic noir style stories, psychological suspense without detectives and police and I think it was maybe the Barbara Vine books that steered me in the direction I went, the more domestic noir psychological suspense side, where it’s regular people living in regular houses, and then something extraordinary happens and turns their lives upside down.”

Andrea Mara has always loved crime books. Picture: Gareth Chaney

Mara began her writing career later in life; she was 42 when she wrote her first book. In the years of working in financial services, despite regularly daydreaming about high-octane thriller plots, writing a book wasn’t on her radar: “Writing a book sounded like something other people might be able to do. I didn’t think I could make a whole book out of just one idea. But I enjoyed writing, so I got into blogging.”

In Mara’s blog, ‘Office Mom’, she wrote about the trials and challenges of parenting while working full time. She recalls getting a message from Kildare author Margaret Scott who read her blog and suggested she should write a book.

“Literally, the next morning, I started writing the first chapter of what became my first book,” she says. “I think I needed to be pushed. When [Margaret] said, ‘you should write a book’, I was happy to just go ahead and give it a go. Maybe being a rules and procedure-driven person, I’m also a permission-driven person.”

Shortly afterwards, after taking redundancy from her financial services job, Mara began writing features for newspapers and magazines. 

“I loved doing that, and decided I would give it a go for six months, and then if it didn’t work out, I would go back and try and find another job in financial services. But after six months, I was busy with loads of work all the time, so I just kept going with that, and then the same author, Margaret Scott, contacted me and said her publisher was looking for a novel in the domestic suspense genre, and I should send her my draft. And that was the start.”

Now, 10 years later, Mara has eight books under her belt, and her book All Her Fault is currently being made into a TV series by US streamer Peacock. Mara remembers getting the call from her agent telling her about the deal.

Andrea Mara has eight books under her belt, and her book All Her Fault is currently being made into a TV series. Picture: Gareth Chaney

“It was 10 o’clock at night. My agent told me to check my email, and there was a link to an article announcing that Peacock had given the green light to All Her Fault to go straight to series,” she says. 

“I didn’t even know what that meant at the time, but normally, the streamers and commissioners would ask for a pilot episode first, and then once they’ve seen the pilot episode, that’s when they would decide whether or not to go ahead. So my gosh, even the idea that there are just thousands of pilot episodes out there that never go anywhere. We were really, really lucky. I was on cloud nine for months and months with that excitement.”

Then came the news about the casting, which Mara remembers as another pinch-me moment.

“When you write a book, most authors are not really writing a book with TV in mind,” she says. 

“It’s hard enough to write a book in its own right without thinking about TV, but if you’re lucky enough to sell an option and then have the green light for it to go into production, it’s, it’s huge, and it’s rare, and it’s fabulous. And then to have actors like Sarah Snook, Dakota Fanning, and Abby Elliott, it’s just incredible. 

“I went over to see the filming in Melbourne, and I went to visit the set, so I’ve seen some of the filming. Knowing how good it looks from just that one week there, I can absolutely relax and just wait with excitement to see it.”

But first, it’s her new novel. Mara says she always feels excitement mixed with nerves when she’s releasing a new book. 

“There’s always that excitement, but absolutely tinged with anxiety, because you just don’t know until the book comes out, you don’t know if it’s going to go well or not. Of course I trust my editor and all the people who are involved in the editing and production process that they’ll always get the book to be the best it can be before it goes out, but you still don’t know. Any book can take off or just fly under the radar. And there’s no way to know in advance how that’s going to go.

“You’ve no control over how many people buy your books or what other big books are going to come out at the same time. And as each book achieves a new milestone, there is a self imposed pressure to improve on that the next time around so it never ends.”

• ‘It Should Have Been You’ by Andrea Mara, published by Bantam, is out now.

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