BOOKCASE – The Unravelling by Thorne Moore

In this series, we invite our Crime Cymru authors to showcase an excerpt from one of their books. This week, Thorne Moore talks about researching the recent past and resurrecting childhood memories when writing The Unravelling.

My crime books are psychological mysteries, exploring the causes and consequences of a traumatic event, and I wouldn’t generally class them as thrillers, but maybe The Unravelling comes close. Writing it, I dredged up my memories of life as a ten-year-old in the mid-1960s, setting it in a slightly fictionalised version of the housing estate in Luton where I grew up; new developments on lost fields, post-war prefabs being torn down, streams and gullies disappearing into culverts, muddy farm tracks winding between new cul-de-sacs and avenues. A place that a child’s imagination could easily paint with mysterious secrets and lurking monsters. It was a time when children played freely in the streets, even…