To celebrate our charity collaboration with The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, we're sitting down with Clare Mackintosh, author of A Game Of Lies, to talk about the inspirations behind her latest novel and what she reads for pleasure!

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Hi Clare! We love having you on the Joanie Blog. What have you been up to since we last spoke?

Life’s been pretty busy! We last chatted when I was touring with my aeroplane-based locked room thriller Hostage, and since then, I’ve released two more books. They’re part of a detective series based in north Wales, where I live, so I’ve been spending a lot of time visiting Welsh bookshops and meeting readers. Away from work, it’s been a year of GCSEs, choosing sixth-form colleges and helping teens navigate life with varying degrees of success! I’ve also been training for my first ever half-marathon and discovering a new-found love of running.

Your book A Game of Lies has just launched – please can you tell us a bit about it?

A Game of Lies is the second book in the DC Ffion Morgan series, although readers can enjoy it as a standalone book if they haven’t read The Last Party (the first in the series). A reality TV show is being filmed in the Welsh mountains, and when one of the contestants goes missing, DC Morgan is called to investigate. Things go from bad to worse when there’s a murder… If you enjoyed BBC’s The Traitors, you’ll love this!

You spent many years working in the police force - how did your career in the police influence this book?

My biggest takeaway from my time in the police was that good people sometimes do bad things, and bad people sometimes do good things. What interests me most is what makes people cross the line between the two, so my books tend to explore the grey area of morality. In A Game of Lies, the reality TV contestants are manipulated to appear a certain way to viewers, and this idea of perception versus reality is definitely something that fascinated me in the police. I could take a dozen witness statements from the same incident, and they’d all be different. Does that make some of them liars, or do they simply see things differently? 

The Protagonist in A Game of Lies is Welsh detective Ffion Morgan. If you had to describe her in three words, what would they be?

Loyal, funny, fierce.

Looking back over the years, what’s been your personal career highlight?

My debut novel, I Let You Go, won the UK’s biggest crime novel award in 2016, beating Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling), who was also shortlisted. It’s quite hard to top that, but I continue to have incredible moments that remind me how lucky I am to do this for a living. Something that always blows my mind is walking into a bookshop overseas and seeing one of my translated editions. 

Can you recommend a book to our Joanie Gals that you’ve enjoyed recently?

So many books, so little time… Lisa Jewell’s latest thriller, None of This is True, is her best yet. It’s about a podcaster who meets her ‘birthday twin’ and begins interviewing her, but things take a dark turn… 

Finally, what are the top three Joanie pieces you’re currently loving?

The Short Sleeve Boilersuit is hard to beat for wearability, but I also love my Andi Book Print Dress. I’m a new convert to shirts and am obsessed with my Fiona Book Print Blouse – the collars are SO beautiful.

Clare Mackintosh is the multi-award-winning author of seven Sunday Times top ten bestselling novels. The latest, A Game of Lies, is out now. Follow Clare on Instagram @ClareMackWrites.