Goodreads asked Toni Grant:

How do you get inspired to write?

Toni Grant I had a nightmare. The type of which was so tragic to me and so real, I woke thinking it had actually happened. Cold sweats and shaking in a dark Rapallo hotel room with my kids sleeping in bunk beds across from me and my husband beside me. I was frozen in fear and sobbing. I couldn't move and listened to any noise that sounded different from sleep. We were on a family holiday in Italy, (amazing) and the only way for me to process it was to convert it to a story. As you might suspect, I didn't get back to sleep. I started thinking what kind of person would consider doing that? What life circumstances would bring about that kind of action? By the time I met everyone for breakfast I knew I had the bones of a story, in fact I said to them during breakfast "I just had a really bad dream and it would make an awesome ending to a book". I'd never written a book before but I'd always been fascinated by organised crime in terms of the structure and the family dynamics and decided that was the only way to reconcile such a shocking nightmare. So as we travelled through Italy I wrote the story. First in my head, and when I couldn't sleep because my head was too full, I wrote notes and comments on any piece of paper I could find. I saw my lead character on a train from Rapallo to Rome - he was as sexy as hell and had an aloft air about him. Once I started I couldn't stop writing and developing my characters and the story flowed.

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