Deadly Reprisal comes after a period of high drama in the Zoe Finch series. In book 4, Deadly Terror, Zoe finds herself investigating a terror attack and an organised crime gang, not to mention the possibility of corruption very close to her. And her poor old boss Lesley finds herself injured and about to embark on the mental fallout of what she saw and experienced during the attack.

So in book 5, I wanted to pull the focus inwards. Instead of opening with a crime that affects the whole city and the whole of West Midlands Police, the book opens with something on a much smaller scale: one student finding another student dead.

The book was inspired by a newspaper report I'd read while I was pondering ideas for the later books in the series, at around the time I was writing book 3, Deadly Desires.

In the local paper (or to be more accurate, on its website) I read a report of a student being attacked by other students after he was suspected of rape. I can't remember the details of the case: I deliberately didn't save the link or take a screenshot as I didn't want my story to be a carbon copy of real life. But it did get me thinking.

Universities can be very intense environments. They're a community of their own, but one in which people are going through some important and sometimes difficult experiences. For students it might be their first time away from home, and certainly the first time living with people who aren't their family.

When I was at university, I spent all three years in a hall of residence. There were just 150 students in my building, along with perhaps a dozen staff, and we all got to know each other - sometimes more intimately than we'd like to. If you made solid friendships, then it was wonderful. But if you were bullied, or you had a bust-up with someone, then it could be hell.

All these ideas were swimming around in my head. A student being ostracised and maybe attacked by fellow students because of rape accusations. The intensity of living cheek by jowl with your fellow students in the claustrophobic environment of a hall of residence. And on top of that, I kept going back to memories of student parties and the way they could act as a flashpoint. Everybody's in one place, a lot of people are drunk, and emotions are running high.

It's the kind of environment in which a situation could reach boiling point. And the crowds, noise and drunkenness means it's the perfect environment in which to commit a crime undetected... a crime like murder.

So I decided to open the book with a party. It's dark, it's late, and there's confusion. Is the body really a body, or just someone who's drunk too much? And the young woman who finds the body... did she do so by coincidence, or is she hiding something? And what about her friend?

Once all the confusion dies down and it becomes clear what has happened, it's time for Zoe to get involved. I loved having the opportunity to embed Zoe further into the community of Birmingham University. She's already pretty close to it: she lives in Selly Oak, the area of Birmingham just south-east of their university that's long been a popular place for students to live. Hers is one of the few family homes on a street mainly populated by students. And Zoe loves it that way.

Because Zoe loves students. She loves living surrounded by them. She loves drinking in the pubs they frequent (pubs I drank in too when I was younger). And she loves being a proxy mum to some of them.

But in Deadly Reprisal, Zoe comes up against some students who very definitely don't want any proxy mothering. And they're potential suspects, so she has to detach herself from her emotions and view them dispassionately. Any sympathy she might have with the students mixed up in the case could seriously hinder her chances of solving it.

Can she solve the case before the killer strikes again? You’ll have to read the book to find out…