Meet Amanda Cassidy — the Irish crime writer about to take off internationally

Snapped up by the publishing house behind global smash hit ‘Big Little Lies’, Amanda Cassidy has landed one of the biggest international book deals in recent years for an Irish author. She chats to Gemma Fullam

Amanda Cassidy at her home in Foxrock, Dublin. Photo: Gareth Chaney

Bestselling novelist Amanda Cassidy is a dreamer. She’s always been a dreamer — but a dreamer with a streak of pragmatism. “I don’t wait to be hit by inspiration. I sit down and do the work. Because it is work,” she says of her writing.

“But what’s really driven me is that I want my children to see what’s possible. I want them to know that expression matters, and that you can dream, but you can also deliver and you can also get paid for it all at once.”

Dreaming, delivering, and getting paid for it is a philosophy that’s clearly working for the Dublin-based 40-something as not only is her fourth novel, The Stranger Inside, about to hit bookshop shelves but her already completed fifth book, Beautiful Liars, due in spring of 2027, has landed her one of the biggest international publishing deals in recent years for an Irish author, with Century in Britain and Putnam, the publishing house behind global smash Big Little Lies, in the US. It’s big-league stuff that’s likely to turbo-charge her career.

“It’s a modern-day retelling of Little Red Riding Hood,” is Cassidy’s pithy synopsis of Beautiful Liars. “It’s been so much fun to write. This is the book I’ll dedicate to myself.”

When I later ask what makes a best-seller, she answers: “Craft, timing, marketing, and just a little lightning-in-a-bottle type of magic.”

Cassidy writes crime, with plots often inspired by events from her own life — a house fire ( The Returned) and a summer in a French chateau ( The Perfect Place).

The Stranger Inside, a thrillingly tense page-turner, has its protagonist, midwife Ciara Duffy — “a woman who’s been framed, hunted, worn down, and fearless in equal measures, and she’s trying to escape the trap of who she’s been told that she is” — driving the gripping narrative.

It is, Cassidy says, “slightly based” on work she previously did in the Irish prison service, in that her experiences in that environment provided the spark of an idea and got the wheels of her brain whirring with “what it might be like to be there and to be completely innocent of something that you’ve done, and the stakes are so high that you have to get out no matter what, in order to save your child”.

Women are well-known lovers of crime fiction, both as readers and writers of the genre. Cassidy has a credible theory on why that is: “I think it gives us the power to explore justice, vengeance, vulnerability as a really powerful narrative playground when you’re coming to telling stories.

“In real life, women are often the victims of crime, especially domestic abuse, stalking, or sexual violence. I think writing crime flips the script a little bit and women become a solver or the avenger or even a criminal. I think it’s a way to process fear and trauma and rage.”

Amanda Cassidy at her home in Foxrock, Dublin: “In real life, women are often the victims of crime, especially domestic abuse, stalking, or sexual violence. I think writing crime flips the script a little bit and women become a solver or the avenger or even a criminal. I think it’s a way to process fear and trauma and rage.” Photo: Gareth Chaney

Cassidy — a fan of the trailblazing ‘queen of crime’ Agatha Christie — has always loved words, and throughout her life writing has been a kind of therapy, almost. For her, writing isn’t about being productive or clever, she says, “it’s just needing to find this place to go and the world feels a bit too tight, maybe — I’d say writing saved me hundreds of times”.

Her background is in journalism (she continues to write for print publications and also works in corporate storytelling, “helping leaders tell their brand story”). She worked as a reporter for Sky News, Newstalk, and this newspaper, covering crime, politics, and human interest stories.

That career “gave her structure” in her writing and taught her how to edit, script-write, and push for clarity from a story. Lockdown gave her the space to try her hand at fiction, and a friend — award-winning crime fiction author Andrea Mara — gave Cassidy permission to “write a bad book”, advice that “unshackled” her and allowed her to write more freely. “What emerged wasn’t bad in the end. It was raw and real.”

Breaking went on to be shortlisted for a prestigious crime-writing award and was, she says, “the start of me trusting myself”.

Her writing process involves lots of scribbling in notebooks, and walks to mull over characters and potential story arcs. When she begins a new novel, though, she never knows the ending, feeling “if I tell myself the story, I won’t want to keep going”.

She does do some plotting but “for the most part, I want to see what happens”. She says: “Sometimes I get really excited, thinking, ‘Oh God, what’s going to happen next?’ and my fingers are just typing and I genuinely don’t know. So that’s fun. And it has to be fun because so much of it is sitting at a computer, writing.”

The Stranger Inside was particularly intense to write “because I was scaring myself writing it — I tend to do that when I’m writing on my own; I’m looking over my shoulder as I’m writing because you get the chills”.

The most terrifying moments in the book spring from the humdrum: a momentary lapse, a few seconds’ inattention, a bad decision. Who hasn’t left their kid in the car for a few minutes to pop to the shop, or indulged in one too many glasses of wine when we’re meant to be the responsible adult, or read a text or email we shouldn’t?

Such everyday slip-ups often have horrifying consequences in the worlds Cassidy creates.

Her genius is in showing her readers their own lives in those fictional worlds, tapping into their worst fears and laying bare the potential devastation that can come from a careless choice. Cassidy’s fiction holds a mirror up to the reader, scaring them just as much as she has scared herself.

She’s currently producing a book a year, and it’s a schedule that suits her; it helps establish a predictable kind of creative rhythm, “and it turns writing into a habit”.

Amanda Cassidy at her home in Foxrock, Dublin. Photo: Gareth Chaney

Cassidy is at her desk from nine to five, with a break for lunch, although she can, she says, write anywhere — on the Luas, in the car, on holidays — and always has her laptop with her. “It’s like my third arm or something.”

Nonetheless, she has a work-life balance sussed, partly because she finds writing to be “really cathartic and therapeutic and relaxing”. It’s work but, at the same time, it’s not.

“I handed in a manuscript recently and the next day I was like, ‘I think I’ll write a piece for LinkedIn now.’ I was writing because I just love writing. So that part feels to me like relaxing. And then I get out with my dogs and I bring the kids out and go to the beach and that type of thing as much as I can.

“When I first started writing, I was nearly embarrassed to say I’m writing a book because it sounded so indulgent and so fancy.

“But now I get up and I write because this is what pays for my family, my children.”

And, for Cassidy, crime really does pay. When I ask if it’s possible to make money from novel writing, her response is succinct: “Yes, it is.”

Elaborating, she says: “If you’re dogged and if you’re determined and if you’re able for rejections, it absolutely is possible to make money writing full-time.”

You have to be shrewd, she says, and give the reader what they want. If they’re not buying your books, you need to ask yourself why and fix it. You have to make it work.

She adds: “I think, like any job, you’re going to get out of it what you put into it. It’s very much a long-term career for me and it’s a lucrative career for me and it’s something that I’m really lucky that I get to do every day — to be able to make things up and get paid for it." 

Quite literally, living the dream.

‘The Stranger Inside’, by Amanda Cassidy, published by Canelo, is out now.