There's something rather calculating about the way thriller writer Jeffery Deaver created his latest character, Kathryn Dance, an expert in interrogation and kinesics, the interpretation of
body language.
He first introduced her in The Cold Moon, the seventh novel in the Lincoln Rhyme series that has made his name internationally, before giving Dance her own book, The Sleeping Doll.
'It had been my intent for the last couple of years to create a new character, not to replace Lincoln but to supplement him. Lincoln is a forensic scientist and every book he's involved with must have by definition forensic science, like DNA, clues, hair. Which is fine, but it's just one type of crime. I have dozens of ideas for stories that involve more the psychology of crime,' he says.
'Being rather calculating about it I decided to introduce the character in a Lincoln novel; it was very deliberate, to try it out and see the reader's reaction. I knew the book would have five million readers or so around the world,' he says.
The author of several international best-sellers and winner of the W.H. Smith Thumping Good Read Award for The Empty Chair in 2001 and the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain's Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for Garden of Beasts in 2004, Deaver admits he's always writing with his readers in mind.
'I'm methodically geared towards what the audience wants to read. I'm diametrically opposed to a writer writing for themselves. When you do commercial work, it's not acceptable,' he says.