First look: 13 Minutes by Sarah Pinborough

“I was dead for 13 minutes. Now I want to know why,” says the cover of the uncorrected proof of Sarah Pinborough’s latest novel, which has just arrived here at Crime Fiction Lover HQ. Frankly, I’d want to know why too.

13 Minutes is a novel that stands on the border between young adult and adult crime fiction. It’s one of those psychological thrillers that questions how well we really know the people around us, and opens with a dog walker – yes that staple body discoverer – finding a young woman, nearly dead, in a river early one morning. And then we dive into the world of teenaged girls in a story that mixes together narratives from the point of view of both victims and suspects.

A quick flick through, and you can see that Sarah Pinborough weaves it together with text messages, social media, psych report transcripts, newspaper articles and more. The image of the back cover below will give you a good idea – a panicked text conversation presented a bit like an iPhone screen. “They say you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer, but when you’re a teenage girl, it’s hard to tell them apart,” says one quote in the press release.

Sarah Pinborough writes across a variety of genres. Her historical crime novels include Mayhem and the rest of the Thomas Bond series, and in fantasy she’s produced The Nowhere Chronicles and The Death House, while her horror contribution is contained in The Dog-Faced Dog books. 13 Minutes will be another new direction for her and will be released 18 February as a hardback at £16.99, or £8.99 on Kindle. You can pre-order it on Amazon now.