TO KEEP YOU SAFE

What if the only way you can reconnect with your daughter means revealing the secrets that might get you killed?

Josie Petrakis, if not exactly happy, accepts her small, quiet life on Crete. So it’s doubly unnerving when her daughter, Anna — from whom she’s been estranged for fourteen years — makes contact, asking for details for a podcast she’s producing on the cold case murder of Laura Taylor in Athens in 1973.

What Anna doesn’t know is that she’s uncovered a story that goes deep into the heart of her family’s history, while exposing them to scandal and danger. Something she never expected, and something Josie never wanted Anna to know about. She’s always wanted to protect Anna from the past: can this really be the time to open up, in every sense?

Set in present day Crete, Athens and London, and 1970s Greece under its cruel military junta, TO KEEP YOU SAFE reinvents espionage fiction, shining a light on the emotional toll that spying can take and the way it plays out in family relationships.

Adult child estrangement of parents has reached epidemic proportions. Recent statistics suggest 25% of adult children are estranged from one or both parents. Having struggled with my relationship with my mother, and seeing the harrowing effects of a close friend’s brutal estrangement by her daughter, I wanted to write a story that could show both sides of the story, but which also had the twist of an objective reason for the distancing. 

Why Greece? Why the 1970s? It’s personal. I’ve loved Crete since I first visited in 1973, just after the Junta’s rule was over, and where I now live half the year. That first visit, I met my Greek host’s parents and learnt their story: Mercy Money-Coutts, a WWII spy under the cover of her job as an archeologist, who met her Greek Resistance husband, Ioannis Seiridakis in those violent, brave times. I updated the spy story to the 70s — the heyday of the cruel Greek Junta — and brought the family element in because the way a spy behaves with their family has always intrigued me. 

The murder mystery is based on a true story: cub radio reporter Ann Chapman’s brutally beaten body was found on waste ground outside Athens in 1972, and nobody has ever worked out what really happened, despite her father’s ceaseless efforts to discover the truth, and the state’s wrongful imprisonment of a local taxi driver, clumsily blamed for the murder. Richard Cottrell’s 1987 book, ‘Blood on their Hands’ was a key source.

To Keep You Safe entwines these elements into a unique story full of spiky, complex characters in a twisty, intriguing tale.