Forensics expert Laughton Rees hunts an unusually clever killer who appears to be staging murder scenes just for her in this twisty new psychological thriller by the bestselling author of the Sanctus trilogy.
We chat with author Simon Toyne about his latest novel Dark Objects, which is out this week!
Hi Simon, we’re excited to hear about your new book, DARK OBJECTS.
DARK OBJECTS is a twisty, fast-paced, psychological suspense thriller set in present-day London. It starts with a glamorous woman found brutally murdered in her sleek, architect-designed mansion. She has no formal identity so officially doesn’t exist, no alarms were tripped, no forensics were left behind, and the only clues are four strange objects arranged around the body: a unicorn toy, some old war medals, a set of keys that don’t fit any lock in the house, and a book on forensics and police procedure written by Dr. Laughton Rees.
Laughton, a brilliant but troubled and reclusive academic struggling to raise her teenage daughter alone, finds herself dragged onto the front pages by the media storm that whips up around the bizarre murder and the belief that her book helped the killer cover their tracks.
Realizing that the fastest way to return her life to normal is to solve the mystery, Laughton breaks her own golden rule to never work live cases and agrees to share her considerable expertise with the investigation. But as the objects gradually begin to reveal the identity of both killer and victim, Laughton realizes they also contain specific messages about the childhood trauma that shattered her life and eventually turned her into a recluse. Her childhood was stolen away by one killer, now she must catch another before her daughter’s is destroyed too.
You’ve mentioned you’re a fan of Charles Dickens. How has his work influenced your writing?
I don’t know a single writer who isn’t a fan or hasn’t been influenced by Dickens in some way. He’s so influential that when you think about Victorian London what you’re picturing is Dickensian London, the one he described so vividly in books as varied as Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations.
He’s also brilliant at taking complex ideas, particularly ones of social and economic problems, and dramatizing them in a way that makes them understandable and compelling and has this incredible ability to tell a story that incorporates the whole of society, from Lords to street sweepers and everybody in between. This is something I tried to emulate in DARK OBJECTS. I take the story all over London—from the Home Secretary and Chief Police Commissioner to a teenage runaway, living on the streets—guiding the reader on a journey through a darker and more unfamiliar London.
Why set DARK OBJECTS in London?
DARK OBJECTS is the first novel I’ve set in my native England. All the locations in the book are real places: the Murder Mansion, Suicide Bridge, New Scotland Yard, the Old Chelsea Nick, the offices of The Daily—all genuine parts of a very real, modern London.
The mansion where the murder takes place is called the Eldridge House which sits on the edge of Highgate Cemetery. Highgate Cemetery is a fantastically opulent and overgrown Victorian cemetery that looks like an enchanted wood filled with lop-sided tombs and gravestones and has quite a few famous people buried there—Karl Marx, author George Eliot, George Michael, the actress Jean Simmons.
I used to live in Archway, which is at the bottom of Highgate Hill. I know the area well and had always been intrigued by this striking, modern, steel and glass house overlooking the graveyard. I was inspired to set the murder there.
Many writers spend much of their writing time in isolation. How did Covid affect you and your work life?
Covid and lockdown meant having to share the house with my wife and three kids instead of being on my own between the hours of 8 and 4. Being a writer means you have no real structure so you either need to create some or cleave to a pre-existing one. Lockdown shattered my structure entirely. I had to create a new one in order to keep working, which mostly involved getting up a few hours earlier than the rest of our household.
I wrote a lot of DARK OBJECTS sitting up in bed, which was not ideal for my back and may have partly inspired the scene in the middle of the book where someone else is trapped in a bedroom against their will.
How do true crime stories fit into your work? Is DARK OBJECTS based on a particular case?
I think true crimes fascinate all of us, and crime writers are no exception. As I was prepping DARK OBJECTS, I was filming a true crime TV show called Written in Blood where I interviewed various bestselling crime writers such as Tess Gerritsen and Karin Slaughter about the real crimes that had inspired their work. One of the stories involved a double murder in Glasgow in the early eighties, where two women were killed in separate attacks. In each case the killer emptied the contents of their handbags and laid them out in a neat line. There was something very macabre and disturbing about that detail and it stuck with me and ended up being one of the hallmarks of my killer in DARK OBJECTS. I was reminded of the adage, “Truth is stranger than fiction.” It’s another reason why people love true crime I think; an editor would probably make me take out half the things I encountered when making this show because they would say it was implausible or unbelievable. Alas….
DARK OBJECTS is your seventh novel. Do you view this novel as an evolution? What can we expect next?
My first three novels were compared to Dan Brown and my next two to Stephen King and Lee Child. DARK OBJECTS has been compared by early readers to Thomas Harris. I think the stories I’m telling have shifted in tone and subject over the years. Having said that, I think all of my books are fundamentally still the same at their core. All of them have a big mystery at their heart, which complex characters attempt to solve through the course of the story. All of them have multiple twists and are carefully put together in a way that hopefully makes the reader get to the end of one page and turn another, get to the end of one chapter and say “just one more” until they close the book at three in the morning still wondering what’s going to happen to the characters next. And so, as to what’s next, I’ve already written a first draft of a follow up to DARK OBJECTS.
