If you are looking for the thrills and chills of a good mystery novel, look no further than Scottish author Lexie Elliott! With eerie cold cases, getaway vacations turned deadly, family drama and sinister secrets, Elliott churns out suspense and surprises with each of her novels. While a longtime fan of books and mysteries, Lexie Elliott graduated with a Masters in theoretical physics from Oxford University and then found herself working in banking. But after losing her job in the 2008 financial collapse, she turned back to her love of books and began writing a novel. That novel, The French Girl, would start a wonderful career of spine-tingling thrillers that are sure to keep you turning pages late into the night.
Following her debut of buried secrets and bodies, Elliott released a creepy thriller where two half-sisters who hardly know each other move into a childhood home owned by their father who vanished decades ago in The Missing Years. Their suspicions the house is watching them grows into terror as nighttime intruders threaten to upend their lives. Though her biggest success came with her third novel, How to Kill your Best Friend, where secrets brewing between a group of friends turns to terror when one of them mysteriously vanishes while swimming. The sport of swimming is actually a passion of Elliott’s, and when she isn’t writing successful novels she is successfully competing in triathlons. She has even swam the English Channel twice!
For those looking for a more traditional mystery, Elliott’s 2023 novel Bright and Deadly Things features a closed-room mystery set at a mountaintop chalet that has its own share of dark secrets buried in the past. This style of mystery has always appealed to her and in an interview with The Big Thrill she discussed the joys of reading a story “where the characters can’t easily escape the location and the reader is aware that the antagonist must lie within the cast of characters they’ve already met.” She says in makes for a fun writing experience just as much as a reading experience. “I love the claustrophobic atmosphere that you can create with it, which is so helpful for building tension in psychological thrillers particularly,” she says.
Having jumped from theoretical physics to banking to full-time writer, Lexie Elliott has plenty of great advice for aspiring novelists. “I always wanted to be a writer; as soon as I understood that books had authors, that’s what I wanted to be,” she says and in an interview following her debut release she advised aspiring writers that the biggest key is to read widely. “Reading helped me become a better writer,” she explains. But it is also about persistence.
“I would say that’s down to a combination of opportunity and stubbornness! I lost my investment banking job in the Global Financial Crisis, which was somewhat fortunate timing: I had recently achieved some success in short story competitions, which gave me the confidence to use my unexpected free time to have a stab at writing a novel. (Though in truth, I believe I would have started a novel sooner or later even if I hadn’t lost my job—it just would have taken me a lot longer to write it—and the time wasn’t exactly ‘free’ as I had two young children at home!) But having started, I was stubborn enough to keep ploughing on with it, even when I got another job. The stubbornness is invaluable: you have to possess a kind of stubborn self-belief to both finish a novel and keep on pursuing a writing career in the face of rejection.”
It is no mystery what book you should read next: grab one of Scottish author Lexie Elliott’s novels. You can find them on our shelves at Herrick District Library or on our Libby app.
