New author Tina Orr Munro is no stranger to brave change. After university, she started working life as a Scene of Crime Officer (Soco), before later becoming a teacher of history and English and finally a journalist.
But it’s only now, at 55, that the former Policing Insights magazine editor is following her true calling as a novelist – having at 14 written her first fiction for a school summer project contest. The mum of three laughs as she tells P.S: “My teenage novel was hugely plagiarised from the one I had just read and I didn’t win.”
It took a lifetime of experience, a supportive family (her husband Richard Place, 56, runs Chestnut Media), and a six-month online course in creative writing with publishing giant Curtis Brown to get there. But her gripping serial-killer debut, Breakneck Point, set in the Devon seaside town of Bidecombe, meant she had to revisit feelings evoked by the suspicious deaths she dealt with in the past.
Orr Munro tells P.S: “I saw numerous bodies. We were exposed to the most horrific sights imaginable and we accepted that it was part of the job. For me, it wasn’t always the dead that I found upsetting. It was those left behind.
“I remember a job where I had to find fingerprints in a boy’s bedroom to match with the fingers of a badly decomposed body. As I dusted his room for fingerprints I came across photos of him, happy and smiling. It was such a tragic waste. Downstairs, I could hear his mother sobbing. Afterwards I drove round the corner, pulled up and burst into tears.”
She’s hunting a killer. He’s watching her every move – from her side of the crime tape…
Introducing #BreakneckPoint, a tense and suspenseful new crime novel from @TinaOrrMunro featuring the feisty and formidable CSI Ally Dymond!#FollowTheEvidence: https://t.co/vccw8dKfb1 🔎 pic.twitter.com/OiItZKAQ03
— HQ Stories (@HQstories) November 18, 2021
She adds: “I knew that if I was serious about giving my character fictional veracity, I would have to revisit long buried and even deliberately suppressed feelings about the crimes I attended as a Soco. The question was, could I go there?”
Thanks to the support of her agent and editor, she did. And the result surprised her: “I’d forgotten how angry the job had made me. You have a victim of crime and you just can’t fix it. I would come away thinking they didn’t deserve it, their life has been devastated and whatever I am going to do is going to be a fraction of what they need, which is that the crime didn’t happen in the first place.”
Cue her lead character, crime scene investigator Ally Dymond, who is dispatched to the backwaters of Devon for exposing corruption in the ranks. Her caseload now comprises only the pettiest of cases until the body of Janie Warren turns up in the seaside town. Ally spots a clue that contradicts the lead detective’s cosy theory, but no one wants to listen to the woman who landed colleagues in prison. Meanwhile, a killer is lurking in plain sight.
The writer – mum to Frank, 25, Rose, 23, Joseph, 18, and Alice 15 – based Dymond, who she was determined would not be a victim, on her sister Dianne Cooper 59, a nurse with a “fierce sense of right and wrong”. It is dedicated to her and to oldest sister Nicky Parnell, 60, a family support worker, mum Jan Munro, 82, and her late dad Eddie who would have been 87.
She says: “I grew up in Devon and I have a Greek Armenian father and that is reflected in Ally. She’s on the outside but has made her home there. I wanted to show that Devon is beautiful but it has this undertow.”
Orr Munro’s second Dymond offering is due out in March next year and she already has the plot for a third. The novelist says: “I have some tantalising ideas for it.”
Clearly, this could turn into a gem of a series.
Tina Orr Munro – Breakneck Point, HQ, £14.99
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