Cara Hunter Books

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Cara Hunter is a British author that writes crime fiction. She is best known for the DI Fawley series. Hunter went to Oxford University from where she pursued a degree and Ph.D. in English Literature.

Her desire to write came from her love for reading. Because of her history as an English Literature student. Hunter is a fast reader. She consumes a lot of crime fiction literature. During her stay in the Caribbean with her husband, Cara Hunter was cutting her way through a stack of crime novels.

While she liked many of the stories she read, the endings always disappointed her and she would say as much to her husband. On one particular occasion, after she finished a crime novel, chucked it aside and then expressed her irritation for the ending, her husband finally asked her why she hadn’t bothered to write her own novels if only to craft the ending she wanted.

Hunter took this comment to heart. Over the course of her holiday, she worked on a synopsis. In the months that followed, she wrote the manuscript for her first novel. ‘Close to Home’ was a surprisingly successful debut, one that earned a generous quote from Ian Rankin.

In the years that followed, the author wrote and published even more stories in the Adam Fawley series, a line of novels that follow a Detective Inspector and the team that assists him in the solving of cases in Oxford.

Hunter’s books are police procedures. She strives for accuracy in the plots she crafts. In the beginning, she relied primarily on the internet and the movies and TV shows she watched to maintain the accuracy and consistency of her portrayal of police work in Oxford.

When they first met, Katy Loftus, her editor at Penguin, was shocked by the authenticity of her work. She was convinced that Hunter had spent hours talking to real police officers before writing her debut novel.

Hunter still uses the internet. But she now has real experts upon whom she relies for her information. They include a Detective Inspector, a former forensic scientist, a forensic psychiatrist, a QC, and a Doctor.

This team is charged with scrutinizing her stories to ensure that her descriptions of crime scenes and police investigations are accurate. Whenever she writes a new story, these experts read the first draft. She uses their feedback to make changes during the revision stage.

Hunter also relies on them during the development stage, when she is planning her stories. She wants to get all the legal and procedural aspects right before her story picks up steam. Not only have these experts helped the author to paint a believable picture of police work but she has learned so much from them.

Oxford features prominently in her work because Hunter is familiar with it. She was just a student when she first visited it. The writer eventually came back and settled down in Oxford years later. So it holds a special place in her heart.

People have called her books ‘gripping’ and ‘fast-paced.

Cara Hunter Awards

Hunter’s books have been shortlisted by the British Book Awards (Crime and Thriller book of the year).

Best Cara Hunter Books

The author knows that many of her readers are women; for that reason, she always endeavors to include strong female characters in the stories she tells, with some of the best novels in her bibliography including:

Close to Home: Eight-year-old Daisy is nowhere to be found. It’s like she fell off the face of the planet. There were no witnesses to her disappearance. She was last seen at her home in Oxford. In such cases, the culprit is normally someone closely associated with the victim’s home. But no one will help DI Adam Fawley, not even Daisy’s family.

It is clear that they are all hiding something, not just Daisy’s withdrawn little brother but her father who gets defensive whenever he’s questioned, and the mother who is determined to keep up appearances.

In the Dark: DI Fawley has a difficult case on his hands. A woman and a child were locked in a basement. They are barely alive when their presence is discovered. The woman can’t shed any light on her imprisonment because she can’t speak.

No one knows who she is or where she came from. The old man who owns the house has never seen the victims before, or so he claims. DI Fawley is determined to find out how the mystery is connected to a case he worked years ago.

When Does The Next Cara Hunter book come out?

Cara Hunter doesn't seem to have an upcoming book. Their newest book is Murder in the Family and was released on September, 19th 2023.

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