Well, why not here? All along something like this had been threatened. Why not in the place she had seen as ultimate safety?

Bound and gagged in her family’s home Miranda – young and till now clever and courageous – knows only terror at what might come next.

It had started so small: just some anonymous jokes. A horse-drawn hearse bearing a viciously worded wreath at the party celebrating her recently widowed father’s imminent marriage. Then a dissecting-room severed hand left in her flat. Soon the threats get worse and turn fatal, as a seeming sex game ends in a hanging.

And always the unknown killer’s ‘calling card’ while Miranda, unwittingly aided by her family, comes ever closer to her own destruction.

As an in-house editor (Penguin, Thames & Hudson, Secker & Warburg, Macdonald Educational) Sue Webb’s job largely featured rewriting, from putting art histories more distinctly into the author’s’ voice to rewording an uberdude Russian poet from scratch. Subsequently she continued as a ghostwriter, and as the author of two sagas, a social comedy and a psychological thriller.

Sue explains: “No way had I in mind a mere whodunnit. What did impel me was the desire to write a ‘whydunnit’.

Only in this way could ‘You Said She’s Where?’ achieve a needful scope, above all in its characterisations.

Murders vary infinitely. Some can befall anyone: a random hostage, say. Elsewhere someone might strive to live their best life and still be a born victim: an obvious mark. A murder can be personal and intricately plotted; alternatively the most grand-guignol extinction can spring from the smallest incitement, cascading to its climax via some banal accident.

From such complexities I wanted to create a drama whose characters cannot but respond, for better or worse, to every turn of events; no matter what hammer-blows or enticements befall them.”

RELEASE DATE: 28/05/2025 ISBN: 9781836282679 Price: £10.99