Mark Sutton

you know, what they wanted to achieve.

And so it was only post Good Friday that a lot of these people began to experience serious trauma from what they'd been through.

So it was an amazing book to read.

It is and it's that great thing, you know, some people say when you write a screenplay or a novel, sometimes you should cut off the first little bit you write so that you start the action as late in the story as you possibly can.

Exactly.

And this is the perfect example of that, really, because we don't get and we don't need at this point really any backstory.

It begins with, as you say, the most stressful, the most horrific moment.

And it sets a breathless pace that...

essentially does not let up for the 400-odd pages of this novel.

The cartel members come in.

Every member of the family, which is over a dozen people, are murdered.

Only Lydia and her eight-year-old son, Luca, survive.

And from then on, they're on the run.

Right, of course, yeah.

It's a thing that a lot of those similar scenes, I think, in fiction have in common when, especially if there's a child who is witnessing or, in this case, not specifically witnessing except hearing something traumatic, something horrific, writers often do that thing where they focus on...

extraneous details, the colour of the tiles, the mould in the shower and in this case one drop of blood from the boy's lip because he split his lip when his mother grabbed him and sort of launched them both into the shower cubicle.

It's a way I think that as a reader you can, not that I've ever been through anything terribly traumatic, but you can imagine how these kind of images would be the things that would be imprinted into your own mind.

Flashback.

It's one of the things that makes the book so stressful throughout is that very inability to know if you can trust anyone.

Anyone they meet, a police officer, a worker at a hospital, a nun who is working at a migrant relief centre, obviously migration authorities, border patrol, anything, they just don't know who's on their side and who isn't.