About fifteen years ago I made a documentary for a TV series called ‘I Shouldn’t be Alive’. It was a fascinating format which recorded extended interviews with ordinary people who had survived life threatening situations and intercut them with graphic re-enactments of their stories. The episode I produced and directed was called ‘Crashed in the Desert’. It told the story of a group of businesspeople who had charted a light plane to take them from South Africa to a meeting in Botswana. The plane crashed in the Kalahari Desert and when the pilot informed them that they had strayed miles off course before the crash and the transponder wasn’t working they realised that no search party would ever find them. The CEO of the company and the pilot set off in the burning heat without a map, compass or water, to find help, leaving the most badly injured passengers behind. It was a horrendous journey. They became so dehydrated they resorted to drinking from puddles of elephant urine, which a doctor who consulted on the series informed me is surprisingly healthy. In fact, she said it contained fewer bacteria than the average supermarket packaged salad! I’m glad to say that after five nightmare days they did find help and that all the passengers were finally rescued and survived to tell their terrible tale.

Thinking it would be difficult to source the wreckage of a light aircraft for the reconstructions I asked the designer weeks in advance of filming to put out some feelers. When I arrived in Botswana he offered me a choice of at least a dozen crashed planes emphasising how dangerous travelling across this remote region could be. We filmed the bulk of the story in and around a nature conservancy in Botswana. The landscape was startlingly beautiful and scarily vast; great swathes of rust coloured earth sprigged with clumps of dry spindly foliage that stretched on for hundreds of miles. This was long before the days of drones and the cameraman and I spent a thrilling afternoon in a helicopter filming footage of the route the pilot and CEO took across the Kalahari. I remember looking down from the cockpit watching the herds of elephant and thinking that if I ever wanted to hide from the world this was the place I would come to. The nature conservancy itself was an untouched world of its own. Visitors were rare. It was, I realised the perfect place to hide a stolen child and a magical place for a sensitive little girl to grow up, a thought which many years later became the germ of my thriller ‘Gone Before.’ Having stayed on the conservancy it was easy to imagine a tough, solitary conservationist with secrets to hide living in such a place, which is how the character of Roz Locklear was born.

‘Gone Before’ is the tale of five-year-old Maya Duncan who disappears one rainy morning wearing gumboots and a yellow sou’wester. According to the newspapers Maya’s disappearance is one of the most famous missing persons cases in British history. Clearly there are parallels with real life child disappearances, including that of Madeleine McCann. What shocked me when I began to research these stories was how quickly public sympathy towards the parents of a missing child could sour to suspicion and outright accusation, adding a whole new level of torment to their already unbearable pain. How much worse then, if the mother were no angel who didn’t notice her child was missing until seven hours after she was last spotted on CCTV wandering the streets near her home. This is what happened to my character, Kay Duncan. Now married to a wealthy music mogul she got pregnant at fifteen, ran away from an abusive home and resorted to drugs and alcohol to try to forget the traumas of her early childhood. The fact that she is now married to a wealthy man stokes the venom spewed at her by internet trolls who have no idea what she has been through. As far as they are concerned she is a ‘Rich Bitch Junkie’, a bad mother who deserves nothing but vitriol. In a world of instant twitter and tabloid headlines there is no escape from the abuse and she retreats to a deserted villa in the South of France. Of course, this setting demanded some in depth research and I spent a wonderful few days in Cassis accompanied by a dear friend who lives in France who is both bi-ligual and a former TV producer herself, who knew exactly how to find me the locations I needed for my story. These two spectacular settings form the backdrop to a plot which pivots on whether the girl from Botswana calling herself Phoebe Locklear who arrives on Kay’s doorstep claiming to be Maya, is in fact an imposter, and whether the truth about her identity lies in a dark connection between damaged abuse victim Kay Duncan and reclusive conservationist Roz Locklear. 

Sam’s Sudanese father and English mother met at art school in London in the 1950s, married soon afterwards and set up home in Khartoum. They separated when Sam was three and she and her mother returned to live in England. Sam began to revisit her Sudanese family in her twenties and since then has worked and travelled widely in Africa and the Middle East.

She read modern languages at Cambridge University and, after a brief spell in advertising, she joined the BBC as a General Trainee. She worked as a documentary maker for twenty years and was one of the commissioners for the launch of BBC Four.

Quicksilver, her first novel for children, was published in 2010. Since then she has published a sequel to Quicksilver, two crime thrillers for teenagers and her debut psychological thriller for adults ‘Her Perfect Life’ (Harper Collins 2017). She has been shortlisted for several prestigious prizes and nominated for the Cilip Carnegie Medal for her YA thrillers.