Dangerous obsession

For her follow-up to best-selling debut The Perfect Girlfriend Kings Worthy writer Karen Hamilton has taken inspiration from the New Forest and her own life

- Duncan Hall

As she works on her third novel, Kings Worthy writer Karen Hamilton is planning an appointment with a psychotherapist.

But this isn’t for her own mental health. Instead, it’s to explore the psychology of her main character, something she did for her previous two novels – best-selling debut The Perfect Girlfriend and its follow-up The Last Wife which is released later this month.

“My friend Nicci Cloke [who writes as Phoebe Locke] recommended it to me,” says Karen over the phone. “I didn’t think I would be able to do it in character for 50 minutes, but I got really into it! I did have to stop halfway through one session to assure the psychotherapist that I didn’t think like that!”

‘When you get what you want it throws up a whole new set of problems you hadn’t anticipated’

At the center of both of Karen’s published novels are obsessive narrators. The Perfect Girlfriend tells the story of Juliette – a flight attendant who refuses to let go of her ex-boyfriend Nate, despite breaking up with him six months before. Meanwhile, The Last Wife is told from the perspective of Marie, who after nursing her best friend Nina through a terminal disease marries her widowed husband and takes her place in the family set-up. “When I get the feeling that someone really shouldn’t do this it sparks an idea for me,” says Karen. “I try to get into their heads and make sense of their bad traits – how they justify it.”