Despite being a keen reader, I had never contemplated creative writing until the summer of 2016. A week before the Brexit referendum, a member of parliament, Jo Cox, was murdered. Various aspects of the tragedy resonated with me. The murder of a beautiful person who attempted to make the world a better place, the dignity shown by her husband, then, I began to think about the individual who carried out the murder. What happened in his childhood? What happened in his life to get to this stage? When the answers to these questions became public, I began to write about a character, Connor Boyd, the protagonist of my novel, and how he allows a childhood incident to dictate his life.