Background to the story

Savage Moon

I’ve always had a love for wild and windswept places – probably thanks to childhood holidays spent tramping around Exmoor. (The promise of a half of Coke and a packet of crisps luring me along.)

Of course, the west country – and especially Bodmin – is well known for sightings of mysterious black cats, generally assumed to be panthers. And it was a report about someone who claimed to have been attacked by such an animal that got my imagination going with Savage Moon.

The person’s claims were soon dismissed, the feeble scratches on his face deemed far too superficial to have been caused by a fifteen stone cat capable of dragging prey twice its size up vertical tree trunks. But, I thought, what would the consequences be if someone was devoured by a beast living up on the moors?

My DI Spicer series is set in Manchester, which is overlooked by the bleak and brooding moors of Saddleworth. So that was my setting for the first killing sorted. Along with the rest of the country, DI Spicer has been reading the lurid newspaper reports about the attack but, at the start of the story, he’s working on a different case. Not for long. His main suspect is soon savaged to death in exactly the same way. Hairs from a black panther are also discovered on his corpse, and fear levels across Britain creep another step towards the hysterical.

As I wrote the book the way we, as a society, react to perceived threats became ever more relevant. At the time of writing, the UK was helping the US to invade and occupy Iraq. Soon the population of Britain was being told it faced a bloodthirsty new enemy – savage and merciless terrorists.