The Daughter by Liz Webb: crime thriller set in Highgate Wood

Hannah's life in a frozen-in-time house backing on to Highgate Wood is hardly enviable. She drinks too much, cares for her dying dad, and has never dealt with the childhood trauma of her mum's death.

Former comic and radio drama producer Liz Webb's debut novel is a hard to put down "psychological" mystery which sees Hannah finally facing some dark family truths, such as whether her beloved Dad killed his wife as the papers claimed at the time.

When her estranged brother publishes a memoir alleging suicide, she exploits her newfound resemblance to her glamorous mother to force some closure.The Daughter is set in and around Highgate Wood (Image: Michael Hammerson)

The Alexandra Palace author has set her thriller among familiar North London locations - Hannah's mother's body is found in the woods where she took her son as a child.

"I had a friend whose house backed on to Highgate Wood but she moved so I found a house that was on sale for £2million and arranged to have a viewing, pretending I had enough money to buy it," confesses Webb.

"I took photographs. It was a perfect house along Muswell Hill Road which backs on to the woods and anyone walking past can be seen."

After taking various writing courses she found lockdown the "perfect" moment" to finally complete a book.

"For certain people Covid was a good thing. I am such a magpie and get bored easily, but then I couldn't do anything else. There were no radio productions, and it made me sit down and finally write the book."In The Daughter the victim is found in Highgate Wood (Image: Polly Hancock)

Webb drew on parallels from her own life and "heightened them".

She used a fallout with a friend to describe the loss of trust between Hannah and brother Reece, and like Hannah says she "looks good on the outside but is a seething mess of insecurity on the inside."

"People always said when I was a producer 'you are so confident and capable,' I wanted to say how hard I worked to give that impresssion. 'I'm a mess inside'."

She also experienced a parent with dementia.

"My mum had dementia, it was such a weird time being with someone who is in a different reality to you. Either they are literally in the past, or think they are in a present that repeats as if the last five minutes never happened. It's both distressing and fascinating. I became interested in the whole concept of memory, such as how siblings will remember the past in different ways."

The book's distinctive voice of an unpredictable narrator with a "dark element of sarcastic humour" is also hers - a first person narration that sprang from her "endless drivel of inner voice," and a decade on the comedy circuit. But although the hardback garnered five star reviews, some gave it one because they found Hannah "dislikable."

"This is the nice version you should have seen the first version I wrote!" she laughs.

"Gone Girl isn't likeable at all, or Girl on a Train, or Madame Bovary who is terribly selfish. I don't have to like people to enjoy a book, but I do have to find them interesting."

Accepting that not everyone likes that stripe of "sarky humour" she adds: "I think she's three dimensional - but then I would, she's me. People who are stressed and insecure use humour as a coping mechanism to make fun of things that are difficult. You have to see her in context as someone using sarcastic humour to cope with her life because she's a mess.

"As a child she's watched her mother's death, and has always felt wrong in some way. She has to work it out. In life you have that sense that something has happened that you can't put your finger on."

Now working on her second book - working title The Saved - Webb says she wrote the kind of voice and book that she would want to read.

"I don't like well observed books that go nowhere, or don't have an ending, or it's a ghost. I wanted a book with tonnes of plot, a quirky voice and observations, but that's grounded in reality.

"My second book has an OTT hook about someone coming back from the dead because of a particular medical thing that I read about and became totally fascinated by. At one point you think it's supernatural, but it turns out to be something real."The Daughter is published by Allison and Busby (Image: Courtesy of Allison and Busby)

Liz Webb's The Daughter is out now in paperback published by Allison and Busby.