‘Vulnerable and isolated’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Sanjida Kay

My guest this week has been here before. Not in a reincarnation sense; she’s guested on the series, but under a different name. For her latest novel she’s using a pseudonym for a change of direction. She’s written a gritty psychological thriller about a woman who discovers her young daughter is being bullied at school. Her attempts to intervene spark a series of sinister events, played out in the gritty, graffiti-scrawled areas of Bristol. Her soundtrack is full of brooding menace (and includes some of my own favourites, Massive Attack and Tricky). Anyway, come and meet Sanjida Kay on the Red Blog, when she’s sharing her Undercover Soundtrack.

‘Shadows of the past’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Meg Carter

My guest this week has written a psychological thriller in which two former school friends confront a life-changing event from their past. To create their teenage years in the 1980s, the author delved into her own archives, discovering old mixtapes and an Elvis Costello LP whose sleeve contained a lyric sheet written out by a close friend. She was struck by the way music became less significant over the years. What had once been such a fierce marker of personal identity was now an emblem of a simpler time – though not necessarily for the characters in her novel. She is Women In Journalism advocate Meg Carter and she’s on the Red Blog with the Undercover Soundtrack for The Lies We Tell.

‘A sequence of notes to transport you to a time and place’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Debbie Bennett

My guest this week says she was always secretly a rock chick, and has provided pictorial evidence to prove it. When she turned her creative impulses to writing, music helped create the mood and tone. She writes gritty crime with a heavy dose of psychological thriller, and drew on a aural landscape of Alice Cooper, Soul Asylum, Bon Jovi and Skid Row. She is Debbie Bennett and she’s on the Red Blog with her Undercover Soundtrack.