Behind the scenes
Author's note
I lived on the Costa del Sol for six winters, when the population drops by two thirds and the whole coast turns inward. The phrase that became the title is one I heard, almost word for word, from a man explaining why a missing-person poster had been taken down. That is the whole novel: not evil, just the small, reasonable decisions people make to protect a season.
Research
Alex's readings of immersion artefacts — the wrinkling, the diatom testing, the way salt water lies about the time of death — came from two years of reading Spanish forensic case literature and a very patient pathologist in Málaga who asked not to be named and corrected my first three drafts anyway.
Research
There is a real closed file that started this. I will not name it, and none of these characters are the people involved. What I kept was the shape of it: a competent investigation that stopped, cleanly, on a Tuesday, and nobody could ever say who had made the call.
Behind the scenes
For eleven months this was Alex's book alone, and it did not work. Carmen arrived in a rewrite as a two-scene detective, took over chapter five, and by the end had earned her own series. Cold Ground is hers entirely.