Book excerpt: This story is true. This book is about my novel Nadia. I published this novel in the spring of 2015. By this time, I had written three other crime thrillers. Nadia is my fourth and final one. Nadia was first conceived when I was seventeen. The year was 1982 and I had just begun art school. Thirty-three years later, I would write it. The story seemed to bear no relevance to my life at all. A playboy billionaire is involved in a horrific car crash, propelling his mystery passenger into a nightmare. During the writing, I felt geared, prompted by a force. I had believed this to be routine writer’s itch. What I didn’t realise was that an undercurrent existed in this novel. This undercurrent was rendered invisible to the novel I believed I was writing. The same thing has happened to all my novels. A scene in Nadia would open my eyes. It was autumn 2016 and the life I had believed in would be destroyed. Five years after beginning Nadia I am ready to analyse it. I have been through this process three times already with my previous novels. All have been harrowing and all have given up hard truths. As this is a true story, I have included relevant diary entries. These inform upon the force that drives this novel as well as tell its own story.