Writing a book about a terror attack in my home city of Birmingham felt like a big risk.

I've written about similar topics before - the first book in my Division Bell trilogy, A House Divided, includes a terror attack on spaghetti junction and another on New Street Station. Other events in that series (which I wrote way before I started writing crime) had a nasty habit of coming true, and it got so bad that my writer friends started telling me to stop writing nearfuture dystopia.

So when I returned to the subject in the fourth Zoe Finch book, it was with some trepidation.

Of course, I don't believe for a moment that imagining something in the pages of novel will make it come true. And I'd already been writing about sufficiently gruesome topics that Google was advising me to call the Samaritans.

But the terror attack in Deadly Terror is a bit different. It isn't a random attack by some external force. In fact, it's inextricably linked with other stories, characters and plotlines that are woven throughout the DI Zoe Finch books. (I'll say no more for fear of spoilers.) And it involves Zoe and her colleagues as professionals, rather than victims - mainly.

The book sees Zoe plunged into an entirely unfamiliar working environment, and given a degree of responsibility she's never had before. It sees her witnessing crimes more severe than anything she's investigated so far. And it sees her boss, DCI Lesley Clarke...

Well, it sees Lesley being Lesley. Which she may come to regret. But as well as forcing Zoe to adapt to new situations, the investigation at the heart of Deadly Terror requires her to use her strengths, too. Because mixed up in all these events are two young women, Sofia and Andreea Pichler.

We meet Sofia early in the book, as she's involved in a people trafficking operation run by her boyfriend, Trevor Hamm (who we first met in Deadly Wishes). The people trafficking and the terror attacks turn out to be closely linked... but again, spoilers. Sofia has a sister, Andreea, who has gone missing. Will Sofia be able to locate her sister? Will Zoe's compassion for the two women and mistrust of Hamm's lies about Sofia lead her to make the right connections? And will Andreea turn up alive, or dead?

Here is the blurb:

Despite the huge and daunting backdrop of not one but two terror attacks, the human stories of the women and children who are Hamm's victims will play to Zoe's strengths. Because Zoe doesn't just want to solve the case because it'll boost her career. She wants to solve it because she cares. But will that be enough? You'll have to read the book to find out...