Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Missing Hours
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: South Wales
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2015001875
Descriptive conventions:
rda
LC classification: PR9619.4.K285
Personal name heading:
Kavanagh, Emma
Associated country:
Great Britain Wales
Birth date: 1978
Field of activity: Fiction Psychology
Profession or occupation:
Novelists Psychologists
Found in: After we fall, 2015: ECIP t.p. (Emma Kavanagh) data view
(1st novel; born and raised in South Wales and currently
resides there; holds a PhD, Cardiff University; she
spent many years working as a police and military
psychologist, training firearms officers, command staff
and military personnel throughout the UK and Europe; has
her own business as a psychology consultant,
specializing in human performance in extreme situations)
Darley Anderson Literary, TV and Film Agency website, 23
July 2015: authors (Emma was born in Wales in 1978 and
currently lives in South Wales; she trained as a
psychologist and after leaving university, started her
own business as a psychology consultant, specialising in
human performance in extreme situations; hHer first
novel "Falling" was published in March 2014; also lists
"Hidden")
Falling, 2014: t.p. (Emma Kavanagh)
Associated language:
eng
================================================================================
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Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Born 1978, in South Wales; married; children: two sons.
EDUCATION:Cardiff University, Ph.D. (psychology).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Psychologist, consultant, novelist. Consultant for police forces and NATO; trains police officers and military personnel.
WRITINGS
Also author of the e-books The Affair and Case 48: The Kidnapping of Isaiah Rae.
SIDELIGHTS
Born and raised in South Wales, Emma Kavanagh is a police and military psychologist specializing in human performance in extreme situations. She also writes psychological thriller novels. Kavanagh has consulted for police forces and NATO, and she has worked training firearms officers, command staff, and military personnel throughout the United Kingdom and Europe. She holds a Ph.D. in psychology from Cardiff University.
Kavanagh’s 2015 thriller Hidden starts with a gunman stalking the wards of a hospital. The story then works backwards with each chapter written from the point of view of a character: police officer Aden McCarthy is tracking the gunman, while police psychologist Imogen is visiting her young niece in the hospital, afraid that she might be the gunman’s next target. The gunman narrates a chapter as well. Online at Bookbag, Liz Green praised the concept saying: “Less a ‘who done it’ than a ‘who’s going to do it?’ And it works brilliantly, with Emma Kavanagh laying her bait cleverly.”
Falling is Kavanagh’s 2014 British psychological thriller that was reprinted as After We Fall in the United States. After Flight 2940 crashed in Wales, the author brings together four disparate people with secrets linked by tragedy. Flight attendant Cecilia Williams, who has decided to leave her husband, detective Tom Allison, survived the crash; Tom is investigating the murder of Libby Hanover, a retired policeman’s adult daughter; and Freya, the daughter of the dead pilot, suspects the crash was not an accident. Kavanagh writes in multiple points of view of the various characters, which heightens the suspense, according to a writer in Publishers Weekly, who also thought that Cecilia’s anguish in reevaluating her life was melodramatic. Nevertheless, the writer said the book about bad choices “reveals a born storyteller with room to grow.” Online at EuroCrime, Michelle Peckham commented that the book is “A good mix of ‘discoveries’—discoveries of past lives and how they influence the present, and of secrets and cover-ups that cannot stay hidden for ever.”
In 2018 Kavanagh published The Missing Hours, a novel that concerns a mother, Selena Cole, suddenly vanishing from her children’s playground, and lawyer Dominic Newell being found dead on a mountain road in Wales. Detective siblings Leah Mackay and Finn Hale investigate each case separately, but after Selena reappears with no memory of her missing hours, the police realize the two cases could be related. A writer in Kirkus Reviews commented: “In the end, the kidnapping back stories are more plausible, more compelling, and more shivery than the double-decker present-day mystery, whose final surprise is the feeblest of them all.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2017, review of The Missing Hours.
Publishers Weekly, April 13, 2016, review of After We Fall, p. 60.
ONLINE
Bookbag, http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/ (July 8, 2018), Liz Green, review of Hidden.
Emma Kavanagh Website, https://emmakavanagh.com/ (July 8, 2018).
Euro Crime, https://eurocrime.blogspot.com/ (March 27, 2014), Michelle Peckham, review of Falling.
Emma Kavanagh was born and raised in South Wales. After graduating with a PhD in psychology from Cardiff University, she spent many years working as a police and military psychologist, training firearms officers, command staff and military personnel throughout the UK and Europe. She lives in South Wales with her husband and young sons.
Author Emma Kavanagh: How discovering my birth family led me to overturn my ideas about nature and nurture
As a happy adopted child, Emma Kavanagh previously had little curiosity about where she had come from
Emma Kavanagh
Sunday 6 September 2015 15:25
Click to follow
Indy/Life
“When you are under stress, the way your brain operates can change. An increase in blood flow to those portions of the brain that deal with instinct and muscle memory can lead us to behave in ways that, were we in a rational frame of mind, we would not consider. In order to understand ourselves, we need to understand what our brain is doing.”
As a psychologist specialising in firearms training, I don’t know how many times I’d said these words, but often enough that they had become muscle memory to me. I looked out over the rows of uniformed Nato forces, men and women weeks away from deployment to Afghanistan, knowing that not all would return. I had taught this course so many times before, and what I wanted to do was to give these men and women some advance warning, some insider knowledge into how their brains would operate when their very lives were in danger.
“So,” said one of my fellow trainers, as I wrapped up my session, “what is it about your brain that makes you do what you do?” Having taught specialist police teams and military forces across the UK and Europe, I had become pretty good at thinking on my feet. But this question… I had no answer.
I was adopted at the age of 10 weeks, was placed with wonderful, loving parents. Where I came from was, in truth, a mystery. I had the names of my birth family. I had the fact that my birth father was American. I had little else.
And for a long time, that didn’t really matter to me. I was who I was. Entirely, intrinsically different from the world in which I grew up. The only one with curly hair, with green eyes. My parents allowed me the freedom to be myself. Although, in truth, I think that who myself turned out to be surprised them a little. I decided at the age of 14 that I would be a psychologist, eventually went on to get a PhD, and then set up my own consultancy firm, providing training to specialist police teams (firearms, hostage rescue, public order etc) and military personnel on the effects of stress on thought processes and behaviour.
People would ask me why. My mum was a housewife, my dad a telephone engineer. The career I had made for myself came out of the pure blue sky. And I had no answer for them. I did it because it felt right. But that question, that day, on a Norwegian Nato base, it pushed me to wonder: was my brain formed in such a way that this career path was inevitable?
I have always been a seeker of knowledge. “I don’t know” has never been a response I’m comfortable resting with. If I don’t know, I need to find out. And yet this, this most fundamental of questions, I could not answer for myself.
When you are adopted, you are told that you are special, that your parents wanted you so much that they chose you. Yet buried beneath that remains the awareness that, in order to be chosen, first you had to be given away. And so, for a long time, I chose ignorance about who I was, where I came from, because it was safer. But the question now sat heavy on my mind.
I found my birth family, living in the US. I knew where they were now, how to reach out to them. And yet that reaching out would be fraught with danger. I cradled the information, for a long time. In the end, it was my mum who gave me the final push. “I know you. You won’t be happy until you know it all. So do it.” I emailed my birth father.
I wrote the email so many times, each time deleting it, only to begin again. What do you say to someone who created you and yet has no idea who you are? How do you prevent them from rejecting you out of hand?
The email received an instant reply. “I’m out of the office for the next two weeks…” I’m pretty sure I attempted to throw the computer at that point. But it was good, I told myself. I had two weeks to brace myself for the fall.
Then, three days later, I had a reply, a real one this time. My birth family were on holiday from their home in the States. They were here, in my home town, for the first time in 16 years. They had begun the process of applying to social services in an attempt to track me down. They were desperate to meet me. Would I be willing to meet them? It was time to jump.
Emma Kavanagh pictured with her adoptive parents during Chrismas 1979 (© Aled Llywelyn/UNP)
The walk to the pub where we arranged to meet will stay with me forever. I remember my feet stopping, seemingly unwilling to take me the final steps. Telling myself to suck it up. To move. Because the answers I had spent my entire life waiting for were right in front of me.
My birth father recognised me as soon as I walked in, even though he had never seen me before. I had a brother and sister, a big extended family. My brother and I shared the same curls. I am, physically, a true amalgamation of both of my birth parents’ features.
And there was more. I discovered that both my birth father and my sister had also studied psychology. And, perhaps most significantly for me, I discovered that my birth father was a police officer in the US, and that, while I was working in the UK training firearms tactical teams about the importance of brain function in behaviour in high-stress situations, my birth father was doing exactly the same with Swat teams in the US.
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I don’t really know what I was looking for on that first day, when I typed in that first search. I wasn’t looking for parents. I had those. I wasn’t even looking for family. All I knew was that I was driven to do things – my career, my studies – that didn’t make sense to me. And that there I stood, preaching to others the importance of understanding the way in which your brain works, all the while having a tremendously limited understanding of my own. It was not easy. It is not easy. A lifetime and an ocean divide us. And yet we soldier on, coming together, moving apart, learning about one another as we go.
It has been seven years. Much has changed for me since then. Within six months of finally meeting my birth family, I met my husband – a fact that I’m pretty sure is no coincidence at all. That I had to know who I was before I was able to find someone to share my life with. We have two children now, and I can tell them that they have my family’s eyes, the same birthmark that I share with my birth father and my brother. Now I am an author, a love of writing which I share with my maternal grandfather. This search, its conclusion, has not altered who I am. Rather it has grounded it, allowed me to understand my place in the world and what it is that has made me who I am.
‘Hidden’, a novel by Emma Kavanagh is out now in hardback and soon in paperback
Emma Kavanagh was born and raised in South Wales. After graduating with a PhD in Psychology from Cardiff University, she spent many years working as a police and military psychologist, training firearms officers, command staff and military personnel throughout the UK and Europe. She lives in South Wales with her husband and young sons.
Emma Kavanagh
UK flag
Emma Kavanagh was born and raised in South Wales. After graduating with a PhD in Psychology from Cardiff University, she spent many years working as a police and military psychologist, training firearms officers, command staff and military personnel throughout the UK and Europe. Now she is lucky enough to be able to write for a living. She lives in South Wales with her husband and young son.
Novels
Falling (2014)
aka After We Fall
Hidden (2015)
The Missing Hours (2016)
The Killer On The Wall (2017)
To Catch a Killer (2019)
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Novellas
The Affair (2015)
Case 48: The Kidnapping of Isaiah Rae (2016)
Emma Kavanagh
Emma was born in Wales in 1978 and currently lives in South Wales with her husband and their one year old son. She trained as a psychologist and after leaving university, started her own business as a psychology consultant, specialising in human performance in extreme situations. For seven years she provided training and consultation for police forces and NATO and military personnel throughout the UK and Europe.
Her third novel, The Killer on the Wall, was published in April 2017.
Emma Kavanagh is the acclaimed UK bestselling author of Falling and Hidden. Born and raised in South Wales, she is a former police and military psychologist. After completing her PhD, Emma began her own consultancy business, providing training to police and military across the UK and Europe. She taught police officers and NATO personnel about the psychology of critical incidents, terrorism, body recovery and hostage negotiation. She has run around muddy fields taking part in tactical exercises, has designed live fire training events, has been a VIP under bodyguard protection and has fired more than her fair share of weapons. She is married with two small sons and considers herself incredibly privileged to get to make up stories for a living.
The Missing Hours
LynnDee Wathen
Booklist. 114.12 (Feb. 15, 2018): p32+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Missing Hours.
By Emma Kavanagh.
Mar. 2018. 320p. Kensington, $26 (9781496713711); e-book (9781496713735).
A missing woman. A dead body. But who is the victim and who is the killer is anybody's guess. Detective Constable Leah Mackay and her brother, Detective Sergeant Finn Hale, serve on the police force in a sleepy English town that rarely sees any serious crime. So when Selena Cole goes missing and a man is found murdered, there is more than enough cause for alarm. Twenty hours later, Selena returns to her two children, seemingly unharmed. When Leah asks Selena about those missing hours, she claims not to remember. And after noticing what appears to be blood on Selena's sweater, Leah is uncertain whether Selena is a victim--or a murderer. Alternating between the perspectives of Leah and Finn allows readers to follow along with both detectives as they try to solve their respective cases. When it is revealed that Selena works as a consultant on kidnap and ransom cases, both wonder if something more sinister is at work. Fans of Gilly Macmillan's What She Knew (2016) will enjoy Kavanagh's (After We Fall, 2015) latest.--LynnDee Wathen
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wathen, LynnDee. "The Missing Hours." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2018, p. 32+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531171559/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=25910129. Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A531171559
The Missing Hours
Publishers Weekly. 265.4 (Jan. 22, 2018): p62+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Missing Hours
Emma Kavanagh. Kensington, $26 (336p)
ISBN 978-1-4967-1371-1
The remote borderland between England and Wales provides the atmospheric setting for this intricately plotted crime novel from British author Kavanagh (Falling). Det. Constable Leah Mackay investigates when Selena Cole goes missing from a playground, leaving her children behind. Hours later, Selena reappears with no memory of what happened to her and blood on her sweater. Meanwhile, Det. Sgt. Finn Hale, Leah's brother, looks into the murder of defense lawyer Dominic Lowell, whose body was found alongside a mountain road. As Lean and Finn pursue their respective cases, the officers begin to wonder if they're linked. Selena and her late husband, Ed, owned the Cole Group--a company specializing in kidnap prevention, ransom negotiations, and rescues throughout the world--until Ed's death in a bombing. Dominic may have been closer to members of the Cole Group than anyone has let on. Frustrated by the half-truths and omissions of Selena and those around her, Leah and Finn must examine all the Cole employees and their past missions to find a murderer. Readers will hope these sibling cops return in a sequel. Agent: Camilla Wray, Darley Anderson Literary (U.K.). (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Missing Hours." Publishers Weekly, 22 Jan. 2018, p. 62+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525839774/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=582b2752. Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525839774
Kavanagh, Emma: THE MISSING HOURS
Kirkus Reviews. (Dec. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Kavanagh, Emma THE MISSING HOURS Kensington (Adult Fiction) $26.00 2, 27 ISBN: 978-1-4967-1371-1
The generally quiet borderland between England and Wales plays host to two mysteries that are clearly connected, though it's impossible to say how.
Twenty hours after psychologist Selena Cole vanishes from her daughters' sides at a local playground, she reappears just as abruptly and mysteriously with unidentified blood on her sweater and no memory of her time away. Her disappearance is particularly ironic because the Cole Group, the company founded by her and her late husband, Ed, had specialized in kidnap and ransom cases, some of them involving corporate employees and tourists who'd been abducted by experienced groups like Escorpion Rojo that used scopolamine, "devil's breath," to reduce their victims to zombies with neither the will to fight their kidnappers nor any memory of their ordeal. But the disappearance and reappearance of the woman newspapers call The Rescuer, DC Leah Mackay soon realizes, is only half the story. Leah's brother, newly minted DS Finn Hale, is heading the team investigating the fatal stabbing of defense solicitor Dominic Newell. The obvious suspect in Newell's murder, his troublesome client Beck Chambers, has a disappointingly solid alibi for the killing but turns out to be connected to the Coles, who rescued him when he was taken hostage five years ago and then offered him a job. As Finn pursues one false lead after another, Kavanagh (The Killer on the Wall, 2017, etc.) intersperses her account of Leah's inquiries with flashbacks recounting some of the Cole Group's earlier cases, any one of which would be enough to make you think twice before booking your next trip to Latin America. Which of them provides the most revealing analogue to Selena's own case?
In the end, the kidnapping back stories are more plausible, more compelling, and more shivery than the double-decker present-day mystery, whose final surprise is the feeblest of them all.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kavanagh, Emma: THE MISSING HOURS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A518491500/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=85a28f36. Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A518491500
After We Fall
Publishers Weekly. 262.15 (Apr. 13, 2015): p60.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
After We Fall
Emma Kavanagh. Sourcebooks Landmark, $14.99 trade paper (320p) ISBN 978-1-4926-0919-3
Flight attendant Cecilia Williams, one of four troubled people whose lives intersect in Kavanagh's solid debut, has just abandoned her police detective husband, Tom Allison, and their two-year-old son, Ben, when bad weather causes the plane she's on to crash soon after takeoff from Cardiff, Wales, into a mountain village. Cecilia is one of the few survivors. Meanwhile, Tom investigates the murder of Libby Hanover, retired police superintendent Jim Hanover's grown daughter, and Freya, the young daughter of the pilot who died in the crash, tries to assuage the grief of her mother and grandparents. Kavanagh heightens the suspense by shifting among multiple points of view, though the anguish Cecilia goes through in reevaluating her life will strike some readers as melodramatic. Packed with high emotion, this novel about bad choices and vexed relationships reveals a born storyteller with room to grow. Agent-. Camilla Wray, Darley Anderson Literary Agency (U.K.). (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"After We Fall." Publishers Weekly, 13 Apr. 2015, p. 60. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A411471222/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1d6a4cab. Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A411471222
Hidden by Emma Kavanagh
0099588536.jpg
Buy Hidden by Emma Kavanagh at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Thrillers
Rating: 4.5/5
Reviewer: Liz Green
Reviewed by Liz Green
Summary: Exciting page turner about events leading up to a shooting in a hospital.
Buy? Yes Borrow? Yes
Pages: 352 Date: November 2015
Publisher: Arrow
ISBN: 978-0099588535
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Hidden is written backwards. Chapters One and Two open with a shooting in a hospital and the rest of the book tracks back in time, following various characters as events lead to the day of the shooting. Every chapter is told from the point of view of a different character, including a first person account by the murderer (whose identity is concealed until the end). This structure would be rather confusing were it not for the fact that each chapter is very short, and conveniently starts with the date, time and character's name, making it all very easy to follow.
In addition to the build-up to the shooting, there are a few side stories, too, that may or may not be relevant to the main plot. There are crumbling relationships, a child with a mystery illness, an investigation into a shooting by the police, a victim in a persistent vegetative state, a love affair that never quite gets off the ground... All of this is grist to the mill in Emma Kavanagh's more than capable hands, allowing her to produce a compelling and richly woven tale with a varied and interesting cast.
This book is a refreshing take on your traditional thriller. There is no lengthy police investigation after the event - instead, the entire book is devoted to events prior to the shooting. Less a 'who done it' than a 'who's going to do it?' And it works brilliantly, with Emma Kavanagh laying her bait cleverly. Just when you think you've worked everything out, she throws in a bit more information and you realise you're barking up quite the wrong tree. When you do find out the identity of the shooter, certain puzzling pieces fall into place quite satisfyingly. This is not to say that there are no loose ends. I felt there were several aspects of the plot that were either conveniently neat, implausibly coincidental or simply not tied up neatly enough. That said, the main plot works very well indeed.
Hidden is a very well-written book, packed with detail yet remaining a book so easy to read that you could devour it in just a few greedy gulps. Dialogue is relevant and characterisation is excellent, making for a most enjoyable, and layered, read.
The slight failings in certain aspects of the plot are minor but enough to make the book fall just short of the coveted five-star ranking so I'm giving it a 4½ plus plus plus.
For another slightly different take on the standard thriller, with multiple narrators, try You Belong To Me by Samantha Hayes. And if you like books that break the mould of their genre, have a look at the wonderful kidnapping story, The Good Girl by Mary Kubica.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Review: Falling by Emma Kavanagh
Falling by Emma Kavanagh, March 2014, 336 pages, Century, ISBN: 1780892020
Reviewed by Michelle Peckham.
(Read more of Michelle's reviews for Euro Crime here.)
An experienced pilot, Oliver Blake, takes to the skies on a snowy night in dangerous but manageable conditions. Shortly after take-off, something goes wrong and the plane crashes. Many die, but there are a few survivors and one of these is the air steward Cecilia. Just before the flight Cecilia had decided to leave her husband Tom and two-year-old son Ben, and had already packed her belongings. Lying in hospital, recuperating, Tom comes to visit, and the crash appears to be the start of Cecilia re-assessing their relationship.
Tom is a detective constable, and just after the crash, he is asked to look into the whereabouts of Libby, a police community support officer and the daughter of Jim, a retired detective superintendent. Jim has discovered that Libby is missing from her house, and there is a trail of blood in the kitchen.
In the third strand of the story, Freya, the daughter of Oliver Blake, becomes obsessed with finding out why the plane crashed. She forms an uneasy alliance with Ian, a local reporter, who tells her that the crash may have been deliberate. Is that true? Why would her father want to crash the plane?
Slowly but inevitably, the connections between the three apparently separate stories begin to show themselves. There is some nice character development that helps to explain why and how the events unfold as they do. A good mix of 'discoveries' - discoveries of past lives and how they influence the present, and of secrets and cover-ups that cannot stay hidden for ever. A little rough around the edges, but FALLING is a confident first book with an interesting set of intertwined plot lines. Hopefully a new author that is off the starting blocks, and has more to come.
Michelle Peckham, March 2014
Posted by Karen (Euro Crime) at 9:00 am