Goodreads asked Fiona Barton:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Fiona Barton Exactly the same place that my fictional journalist Kate finds it. As a journalist, always looking for stories, I tore interesting items out of newspapers as I spotted them and shoved them in my handbag for later. They were often just a few lines – the basic facts - but it was the unanswered questions that drew me in. The Who? or the Why?
A paragraph about an infant’s skeleton found in a garden was squirreled away by me many years ago. Like Kate, I wanted to know who the baby was and why someone had secretly buried it. I was drawn by the desperation of the act and the human tragedy behind it.
I never got to write the story – the police solved it immediately, I seem to remember, arresting the mother and finding more tiny corpses - and the newspaper cutting is long gone, discarded in one of my ritual handbag clear-outs.
But the image of the nameless child, just beneath the surface of someone’s life, has stayed, waiting for its moment to be unearthed. And for its story to be told.

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