Recommendation: Did You See Melody? by Sophie Hannah

“Outstandingly brilliant,” — Clare Mackintosh, author of After The End.

Sophie Hannah is a crime-thriller fiction writer whose books have sold millions worldwide. You’ll know her from her continuation of the works of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, of which Hannah has currently written four, or her exceptionally well written, mind-bending, plots for her modern crime fiction including Haven’t They Grown and Did You See Melody?

Having recently read Haven’t They Grown — another premise that I knew I simply had to read — I asked Sophie what she thought, from her backlist, that I should read next. Sophie kindly took the time out and recommended Did You See Melody?

“Pushed to breaking point, Cara Burrows abandons her home and family and escapes to a five-star spa resort she can’t afford. Late at night, exhausted and desperate, she lets herself into her hotel room and is shocked to find it already occupied — by a man and a teenage girl.

A simple mistake on the part of the hotel receptionist — but Cara’s fear intensifies when she works out that the girl she saw alive and well in the hotel room is someone she can’t possibly have seen: the most famous murder victim in the country, Melody Chapa, whose parents are serving life sentences for her murder.

Cara doesn’t know what to trust: everything she’s read and heard about the case, or the evidence of her own eyes. Did she really see Melody? And is she prepared to ask herself that question and answer it honestly if it means risking her own life?”

As the book opens, we meet Cara — our protagonist and we join her at the Swallowtail Resort, in the foothills of Camelback Mountains in Arizona, USA. Readers follow Cara through a journey she never thought she’d be taking. At the resort, Cara see’s a child she knows she can’t have seen.

She’s seen Melody.

In Hannah’s novel Melody Chapa is the biggest case of a missing child in recent US history; the fingers are pointed at Melody’s parents. As a British reader I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to what I would say is the biggest case of a missing child in UK history — Madeleine McCann. Sophie was nice enough to answer some questions for me, I wondered if the case of Madeleine McCann had played into her research, or inspiration for the novel.

Sophie: “No, not at all! Though Did You See Melody? was inspired partly by a real-life case. On a book tour in America some years ago, I watched a huge amount of TV in my various hotel rooms — some of these rooms were in amazing spa hotels, which inspired the setting of the novel. Anyway, I discovered a justice/true crime show called the Nancy Grace show, which was covering an ongoing case: the disappearance of a toddler called Caylee Marie Anthony. I quickly became intrigued and disturbed by this story. I also noticed something that made no sense to me. Despite the fact that Caylee’s whereabouts were unknown at that time, and therefore no one knew if she was dead or alive, the Nancy Grace show’s angle was that she was bound to be dead and that her mother, (who was portrayed as sub-optimal in every possible way) had almost definitely killed her.

‘This is so weird!’ I thought to myself. ‘If Caylee is dead, and there’s any kind of trial, surely every prospective juror will have to be disqualified for bias, because by that point surely the whole of America will have heard what I’ve heard: that Caylee’s mother, Casey Anthony, must have killed her.’ Then the following year I did another US tour for my next book. By now, Caylee’s body had been found and Casey — whose Nancy-Grace-show nickname was ‘Tot Mom’ — was charged with her murder. And then Casey Anthony was acquitted, and that felt to me like a huge miscarriage of justice because, although I hadn’t been in court to hear any of the proceedings, I had watched an awful lot of American television! Like a lot of people who didn’t actually know all that much in terms of solid facts, I was convinced that Tot Mom was guilty. So all of this made me want to write a book about a British woman having a very British experience of an American murder mystery! Because another thing that fascinated me was that this case was all over the US media, but in the UK no one had heard of Casey or Caylee Anthony. How could something so famous over here be so completely unknown over there? So I thought: what if an English woman were in America, because for some reason she needs to escape from her home and family… What if she checks into a hotel and sees a girl — just an ordinary girl, nothing special or suspicious about her… And then, what if the next day she discovers that the girl she saw is none other than America’s most famous murder victim, whose face is all over every TV channel and whose parents have been convicted of her murder…and yet this English woman, the novel’s protagonist who knows nothing about the way justice works in America, knows she saw this girl alive?”

There are large sections of the book written in transcripts of conversations, TV Reports from the Nancy Grace inspired show and police reports — which I found so interesting and creative. This meant that Cara, and by extension the readers, has to discover this bit without guidance from Sophie. Personally, I loved this element, it made me feel like I was discovering the information for the first time, along with Cara.

(It also made me feel like I was a a detective, which I clearly loved.)

Sophie: “I used this approach for *precisely* this reason! I wanted the reader, along with Cara, to have the experience of seeing all the various bits of evidence and all the documents and theories and reports…and then form their own opinion about the Melody Chapa case. I’m so glad you think it worked well!”

I did take the opportunity to ask Sophie a couple more questions but they’re completely full of spoilers, so I’ll be keeping my lips zipped here.

I recommend this to you if you’re a fan of any kind of crime-thriller writing, and specifically plot driven books that make you go “What the f…”
It’s pacy and it’s thrilling — it was the perfect relief from Lockdown.

For the full experience, you can pick up Did You See Melody, online here.

If you’d like to read the first chapter of the book, Sophie’s hosting it online here.