Killer Instinct

Foreword

by Lee Child

I was on tour in the UK in the spring of 2002, for my sixth novel, and at the end of one of the events a woman came up to me and told me she loved my books, which is always a wonderful thing to hear. I responded happily – believe me, no forced politeness is ever required on such occasions – and then she said, “But Zoë Sharp is better.”

Naturally I asked, “Are you Zoë’s mom?”

She denied any family connection, and I filed the name away, because at heart I’m a reader, not a writer, and if a well-read fan offers a recommendation, I take it seriously. I write only one book a year, after all, but I read hundreds, and life is too short for bad books. Rushing from place to place on tour didn’t give me time to go shopping, but fortunately free books are a currency in the publishing trade, so I had my publicist call Zoë’s publicist, and within a day a copy of KILLER INSTINCT was biked over to my next stop, and I read it in short order.

And was very impressed.

Triply impressed, actually. Firstly, because apart from anything else, this was a debut novel, and there was nothing shy or tentative about it, and it waded straight in and tackled – secondly and thirdly – two huge challenges. Some things are just very, very difficult to do, because of the weight of cultural heritage and tradition and the limits set by others’ prior failures – but Zoë had gone right ahead and done them very successfully. (Full disclosure: Obviously I had never met Zoë at that point; knowing her as I now do, if I see her tackling a challenge, I get the body bag ready – for the challenge.)

The first challenge she beat was the difficulty of creating a truly convincing tough-girl protagonist. It shouldn’t be difficult, but it is. (Don’t get me – or Zoë – started on the legacy left by two centuries of sexism in our culture.) But Charlie Fox came across as real, true, and authentic. She wasn’t like anyone I knew – which to me is the point of thrillers: I don’t want to read about people like the ones I know – but she was someone I would want to know, and she felt like she could show up around the next corner. She wasn’t over-explained; her backstory was sketchy . . . above all, she didn’t seem invented. She just was.

The second challenge Zoë beat was to make an obscure and provincial place – in this case Lancaster, in North West England – seem convincingly dangerous. None of us has a problem believing New York City or Chicago or LA are jungles, but almost no writers can make a smaller location tough without a few winces and a lot of suspension of disbelief along the way. But Zoë did. As it happened, I knew Lancaster fairly well – I lived near it for seven years – and she wrote it like I felt it.

So, two big challenges easily defeated in a debut novel. Triply impressive. The next day I asked my publicist to call for Zoë’s second book, which was just out. I read it – and it was just as good. I have been a big fan ever since.