Follow You Home (32 page)

THE END

Letter from the Author

Dear Reader

Thank you for reading
Follow You Home
. I love hearing from readers and can be contacted in a variety of ways:

Email me at
[email protected]
;

Find me on
Facebook.com/vossandedwards
;

Follow me on Twitter with the username @mredwards.

Please note, the rest of this letter may contain spoilers, so please don’t read it until you’ve finished the book.

Like my previous novels,
The Magpies
and
Because She Loves Me,
this novel was inspired by something that happened to me when I was younger, an experience that I took and turned into something much scarier in order to entertain my readers.

When I was nineteen, my then-girlfriend and I scraped together our pennies so we could go Interrailing around Europe. We spent months planning our itinerary, intending to enjoy a whistle-stop tour of the Continent that would last the entire summer. The
budget
was tight but we were going to have the time of our lives.

Three days into the trip we took a night train south to Avignon. We went into a private compartment and shut the door. Exhausted after a day trudging around Paris and a sleepless night on a noisy campsite, we fell asleep. When we woke up, the pouches we wore around our necks, which contained our Interrail tickets, passports and money, had been stolen. We ran up and down the train but, of course, the thieves were long gone. The reality of the situation sank in as we arrived in Avignon at dawn. Interrail tickets are not replaceable. Our Grand Tour was over before it had begun.

We hitch-hiked to Marseille to obtain documents that would allow us to travel back to the UK, arriving late in the evening. We spent the night lying on the floor of the train station, drinking water f
rom th
e taps in the public toilets, with no food . . . (I hope you have your violins out.) At one point, a shifty man approached and asked us if we would like him to buy us a hot meal . . . We refused and hid.

Deciding to make the best of the situation, we hitch-hiked home, Marseilles to Calais, 663 miles. It took two weeks. And apart from the nights spent lying beside the autoroute, the rides with men who fortunately didn’t turn out to be serial killers, and an unfortunate incident with a packet of laxatives on a campsite near Dijon, we had a great time.

When we got home, the English papers were full of stories about French bandits gassing tourists on night trains, sending them to sleep so they could steal the passengers’ possessions at their
leisure
. Though this may have been typical British paranoia about the French.

I do hope that this book does not put anyone off visiting the beautiful, historic country where it is partly set. The bad guys in this novel are as fictional as the vampires of legend. Or to put it another way, monsters don’t only live in faraway forests. They are just as likely to live next door.

But please, if you find yourself in a train carriage far from home, whatever you do, don’t fall asleep. And if you ever happen upon a creepy house in a dark forest, take my advice.

Run.

Thanks again for reading.

Best wishes,

Mark Edwards

Acknowledgements

I am extremely lucky to be surrounded by a small but perfectly formed support team who help me write and edit my books and get them into the world.

Chief among these is my beautiful wife, Sara, who yet again did all the really hard work (taking care of our three kids) so I could hide away and write this book, allowing me to get away with saying ‘I can’t help—my brain is in a forest in Romania’ when she called me with news of the mayhem at home. Sara also read this novel before anyone else and made numerous astute suggestions as always.

This is my fourth solo book with Amazon Publishing in the UK and I am grateful as always to the tireless and enthusiastic team there, including Emilie, Sana and Neil. Thanks too to David Downing, my editor, for his insight, honesty and wit.

Thanks to my agent, Sam Copeland. Somebody should buy him the PlayStation 4 he craves. He’s worth it.

To Louise Voss for patiently waiting for me to finish working on this book while we were meant to be writing our new one together.

To the author Helen Fitzgerald for her extremely helpful advice that rang in my ears as I was writing this book.

Two characters in this book were named after readers who won this dubious privilege in competitions on Facebook: Sophie Carpenter and Alina Ghinescu. Alina also helped me by reading the manuscript and checking the Romanian sections for accuracy.

Thank you to Jonathan Hill who answered my pharmaceutical questions.

Thanks to everyone at Latuske’s café in Wolverhampton for providing me with fuel for my writing: the best scrambled eggs and coffee in the West Midlands (and possibly the world).

Last, but most importantly, thank you to the many readers who have contacted me over the last couple of years, via email,
Twitter
and Facebook. Your kind words kept me going when I thought I would never get myself or my characters out of that dark forest . . .

About the Author

Photo © 2014 Mark Earthy

Mark writes psychological thrillers. He loves stories in which scary things happen to ordinary people and is inspired by writers such as Stephen King, Ira Levin, Ruth Rendell, Ian McEwan, Val McDermid and Donna Tartt.

Mark is now a full-time writer. Before that, he once picked broad beans, answered complaint calls for a rail company, taught English in Japan and worked as a marketing director.

Mark co-published a series of crime novels with Louise Voss.
The Magpies
was his first solo venture and topped the UK Kindle charts for three months when it was first released. Since its success, the novel has been re-edited and published by Thomas & Mercer on 26
November
2013.
Because She Loves Me
is his second spine-tingling thriller.

He lives in England with his wife, their three children and a gin
ger cat.

He can be contacted at:
[email protected]

Twitter:
@mredwards

Facebook:
www.facebook.com/vossandedwards

Download a Free Story by Mark
Edwards

Consenting Adults

A new short story featuring private detective Edward Rooney from
Follow You Home
.

Set shortly before the events of
Follow You Home
, Edward Rooney is hired to find a missing Belarusian woman who was working illegally at a hotel in London.

Has she run away with her boyfriend—or has something far more sinister happened to her?

Download now at
www.markedwardsauthor.com/free