[6] She quit this job for a time to focus solely on her writing career,[7] before returning to the field part-time.

[8] FitzGerald began as a screenwriter, writing scripts for a series of educational children's dramas for BBC Scotland.

[9] Her books are mostly thrillers, though she herself has described her genre as "Domestic Noir", a term coined by her fellow author Julia Crouch.

They argued that it belonged to a different, more psychologically complex tradition, characterised by the dark humour and flawed anti-heroines of writers such as Tama Janowitz and Fay Weldon.

It plays on the deepest, darkest fears of all parents about their children, and embeds that everyday terror in a plot so up-to-the-minute that you'll swear it's been lifted from the pages of a newspaper ...