Angela Marsons: On Shocking Readers With a Surprise New Book

Angela Marsons is the USA Today bestselling author of the Detective Kim Stone series, and her books have sold more than four million copies and have been translated into 27 languages. She lives in the Black Country, in the West Midlands of England, with her partner and their two Golden Retrievers.

She first discovered her love of writing at junior school when actual lessons came second to watching other people and quietly making up her own stories about them. Her report card invariably read “Angela would do well if she minded her own business as well as she minds other people’s.”

After writing women’s fiction, Angela turned to crime—fictionally speaking, of course—and developed a character that refused to go away. Find her on Twitter and Facebook.

In this post, Angela discusses the surprise publication of her new novel, First Blood, the difference in writing a prequel from the series it inspired, and more!

Name: Angela Marsons
Book title: First Blood
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Release date: August 23, 2022
Genre/category: General Fiction
Previous titles: Detective Kim Stone series (Evil Games, Lost Girls, Play Dead)
Elevator pitch for the book: A twisted serial killer on the loose and a brand-new team on the same day. Can life get any more complicated for maverick detective D.I. Stone in the prequel episode to the Kim Stone crime series?

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As I was writing the Kim Stone books it became clear that readers were becoming more and more invested in the characters. The series began at the point where the team had been working together already for a couple of years. I began to think more about the forces that had brought them together and how they had adapted in the early days. That was when the idea to write the prequel to the series came to me.

It took approximately two years from idea to publication as I was already committed to writing two Kim Stone books per year. My publisher worked with me to adapt the existing schedule so that this book could be written while still working on the rest of the series. The idea didn’t change as once I decided to write it the storylines came to me immediately.

My publishers decided to publish this book completely differently to the books in the series. Normally a book is on pre-order for approximately three months and then ARCs are placed on Netgalley one month prior to publication. We released First Blood as a surprise book with no prior warning or marketing exposure, which caused quite the stir on social media.

Because I was going backwards it was interesting to see how much they had become a team so in some ways it was difficult to go back to the beginning and rip them apart again. I felt as though I was breaking them up, but it was good to explore their first case working together.

I hope this book helps readers understand each of the team’s individual stories prior to becoming a member of the solid team they are now.

I would say to use the first draft process as your sandpit. Write what you want. Explore every idea and simply splurge it onto the page. The second and third drafts are the business end of the process, and this is where irrelevant things can be removed or edited. For the first draft don’t focus on writing it perfect, just write it.

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