Penny Freedman found the idea for 'This is a Dreadful Sentence' when she was teaching English at a college in Kent and noticed a kitchen knife lying on one of the bookshelves in the library. This picture lodged in her mind and came out years later as a new twist on the classic 'body in the library' plot: a foreign student is found stabbed and crushed to death in a college library.

Penny says, 'Once I had my plot, I knew I wanted to create a female sleuth who wasn't a superwoman but a real woman whose life readers would recognise and sympathise with.' And so she created Gina Gray, a forty-something divorcee with two daughters, one a stroppy teenager and the other a single mother frequently looking to Gina to step in and mind the baby. 'I had a picture in my mind,' Penny says, 'of a woman who does her investigating while pushing a baby in a buggy. And however exciting or scary her investigation gets, she still has to fit in trips to the supermarket. I find that readers like Gina because she's real and because she's brave and funny and speaks her mind.'

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