Rebecca Hannigan: I Hate When a Twist Is Unearned
In this interview, author Rebecca Hannigan discusses the real-life small-town murder that helped inspire her new thriller, Darkrooms.
Rebecca Hannigan has an MA in Creative Writing Crime Fiction from University of East Anglia, graduating in 2023. She won the UEA/Little Brown Crime Prize for her dissertation. She has also been shortlisted for Virago/The Pool’s Best New Crime Writer. Born in England to Irish parents, she now resides in Essex with her husband, cat, and a variety of increasingly cat-battered houseplants. Follow her on Instagram.
In this interview, Rebecca discusses the real-life small-town murder that helped inspire her new thriller, Darkrooms, her advice for other writers, and more.
Name: Rebecca Hannigan
Literary agent: Cathryn Summerhayes / Grainne Fox
Book title: Darkrooms
Publisher: William Morrow
Release date: January 13, 2026
Genre/category: Thriller/Mystery
What prompted you to write this book?
A few things came together. In the 90s, there was a murder in my mother’s small Irish hometown, which had always been a very idyllic place of freedom and safety to me as a child spending my summers there. The crime was horrific and no one was ever sentenced for it, but the community had a strong idea of who the perpetrator was and he just continued living freely (albeit as something of an outcast) in that community. That miscarriage of justice and the loss of trust in the community was a huge shellshock for me growing up.
Then, more recently, I began to feel that that incident was a microcosm of the ways in which so many communities are vulnerable to exploitation by powerful figures. In my book, I wanted to deliver a sense of justice and catharsis that we don’t always see in real life.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
The idea was simmering in the back of my head for years, but I wrote most of this book over the two years of my MA course at the University of East Anglia from 2021 to 2023 and then the book sold in early 2024, so it’ll have been two years from acquisition of the manuscript to it hitting shelves in January 2026. The original idea was much crazier: My protagonist would have survived a housefire, lost an eye, and joined a cult. Absolutely none of that made it into the actual draft! What stayed the same was the location and the character of Caitlin, a difficult woman who resists definition within the binary of victim or survivor. That’s really the heart of the finished novel; an interest in living on after experiencing crime and the question: Why do those who have suffered have to be defined by their worst experiences while the perpetrators shrug it off?
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
The whole process is surprising! I really loved working with my editors more than I thought that I would. Having other people just as invested in the plot and characters as I am has been such a delight—and made things so much easier! It was really a joy to be able to talk through my plot problems and get second opinions on them. I also generally enjoy having colleagues and working with others, which is not something you get a lot of when you’re sitting alone with your manuscript.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I write in the crime genre, and I take that very seriously; I’m very concerned with meeting reader expectations and “playing fair” because I hate when a twist is unearned or a narrator lies to me! About halfway through the draft, I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to scaffold all the aspects of the mystery properly because I had written in close third person from the perspective of someone who really didn’t know what was going on all of the time. I also wanted my protagonist to be responsible for the death of a character but for that to be hidden from the audience, and it just didn’t work within my own rules for playing fair. I created a second POV character who was also investigating the case in order to give the reader more of the procedural stuff and background; who was where when, and all of that.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I wanted to create characters who were unsympathetic but to whom the reader would eventually feel closer to by understanding them. So often we see characters who have been the victims of crime as black and white, good and undeserving of their treatment or bad and therefore receiving some kind of comeuppance. I wanted to create characters who were arguably “bad” (i.e. petty or mean, sinners in the way lots of us can be on our worst day) and show that they still didn’t deserve their treatment. I really hope that readers feel like my characters have been vividly and realistically drawn enough that they could be continuing to live on outside of the pages of the book.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
I think you have to really care about your work on a level beyond considering commerciality or how palatable it will be for readers. You have to bleed just a tiny bit by tapping into something that you’re furious or sad or hopeful about and putting that in your draft as early as you can. You’ll redraft and refine, but if you’ve screamed in an early manuscript, it will echo into the finished book. The reader will feel it, and that emotional truth creates a compelling connection between you and them, which is the ideal, in my opinion.
