As you know, I love being in at the start of a new book and with today being publication day for C. R. Westbrook’s debut I’m thrilled to welcome her to the blog to chat all about it. My huge thanks to Sarah Hembrow at Vulpine Press for putting us in touch with one another.
Let’s find out more:
Staying in with C.R. Westbrook
Welcome to Linda’s Book Bag Caroline and thank you for staying in with me.
Hi Linda! Thanks for having me as a guest, it’s great to be here!
Tell me, which of your books have you brought along to share this evening and why have you chosen it?
So today I’m bringing along my debut novel Troublemaker, which is published by Vulpine Press today – and since it’s the only one I’ve had published so far, bringing this one along was an obvious choice.
Congratulations on your debut and happy publication day. How did Troublemaker start out?
I first started writing it in the summer of 2021, just as we were coming out of lockdown, after spending the enforced time behind closed doors teaching myself how to write and structure a novel, as well as researching the publishing industry and how I could possibly get my work out into the world!
Is Troublemaker your first attempt at writing?
Troublemaker is actually the second full-length novel I wrote (not counting the long-forgotten, utterly self-indulgent and completely terrible attempt I made at writing a book when I was 25!) -and I wrote this one just to confirm to myself the first one wasn’t a fluke and I could actually do it!
Ah! I have one of those ‘first’ novels too Caroline!
And then, when my beta readers starting telling me it was better than my first, I decided trying to get this one out into the world would be a better bet. Now, after lots of late nights, an awful lot of panicked overthinking, much questioning of my character’s motivations, four birthdays, three bouts of Covid and plenty of emotional support dark chocolate it’s here. And I couldn’t be prouder of what I’ve achieved. Which makes it such an honour to share it with you today.
I’m so impressed. It’s not easy getting into print so you should be very proud of yourself. So, what can we expect from an evening in with Troublemaker?
Troublemaker is (deep breath) a dark-comedy-psycho-thriller with a romcom twist.
That sounds really innovative.
Before I started writing I was struggling a lot with anxiety and depression (both thankfully now stable) and one of my coping strategies was reading, usually around a book a week or every ten days. Specifically I love psycho-thrillers but always noticed with the genre there’s very little in the way of humour (or at least that was the case before the current trend for sassy female serial killer stories, of which I wholeheartedly approve).
I think many of us can empathise with those feelings.
Obviously it’s a tough one because thrillers often deal with very sensitive subjects which are no laughing matter. But I noticed when I did read something which had any funny moments in it at all it really stood out to me.
As someone who has always had a darkly comic sense of humour (my favourite films include Heathers and Grosse Pointe Blank, and I love TV shows like Inside No 9 and What We Do In The Shadows) I did wonder if it was possible to apply the same to a thriller. And when I started writing that very first night, around 1am in January 2021 I realised very quickly that doing a serious drama wasn’t me. Hence I dropped right into this genre-straddling hole and didn’t look back!
That’s brilliant – and we do need light and shade in all genres I think – and even Shakespeare agreed! So what is Troublemaker about?
Troublemaker tells the story of star showbiz reporter Elena Robins, who works at a news website in Canary Wharf called Spark. She’s feisty, witty, popular, has a millionaire boyfriend, an ill-advised crush on her cynical deskmate Nathan, and fabulous fashion sense. Oh, and she might have murdered a colleague seven years earlier.
You can’t just leave me hanging there. Tell me more…
When a mysterious newcomer, Katja Lake, shows up in the office, it sparks off a chain of events which threaten to ruin both Elena’s career, and her life. Which leaves her fearing that her murky past is back to haunt her – until things spin wildly out of control with an unexpected moment of violence, and she realises she’s in real danger from the new girl. But will anyone believe her? Or will she wind up as dead as her ex-colleague?
Is this Elena’s single person perspective then?
The story is told from the points of view of several different characters – Elena, Katja and Nathan in the present, and we also have a dual timeline woven in from the past featuring the victim, Laura Lucas, and the events which lead up to her death.
It sounds as if Troublemaker is very much more than just a comedic thriller.
Troublemaker might be a comedy but it’s got serious underlying themes, mainly around my fascination with how we treat each other (which isn’t always as we should – all of us have at some point in our lives behaved in an ill-advised way towards someone else!) But equally it asks the question of whether you can make that one huge, enormous mistake and still be redeemable – or if you deserve to be forgiven.
Most of the characters are pretty morally grey – perfectly likeable on the surface, the sort of people you’d probably get on well with if you met them down the pub. But underneath they’re concealing secrets and lies and a whole lot of eyebrow-raising behaviour, the sort of things many of us have done but would never actually admit to.
You’ve just captured humanity in a sentence I think! Where did you get your ideas?
Most importantly, the book is inspired by my own experiences working in entertainment and lifestyle journalism for the past 35 years, at places like Empire Magazine, the BBC and, currently metro.co.uk where I worked on the entertainment desk for several years before moving departments (I currently work on what’s called Audience, which I’m not going to explain here but it involves curating our content for other platforms on the internet, writing fun quirky original content across a range of topics, playing around with analytics and spreadsheets, etc etc).
I’ve read books before about showbiz reporters and it’s always along the lines of them meeting some hot film star on the red carpet and falling in love, having the whole Cinderella dream come true etc, but in reality that almost never happens. It’s true there are some glamorous aspects to entertainment journalism, and I’ve met some incredibly famous people others can only dream of meeting. But those red carpet encounters are generally fleeting – and I certainly don’t know anybody who’s run off with a celebrity they met on one!
How would you describe showbiz journalism as a career then?
For the most part at least –working in showbiz journalism is much like any other office job, with meetings and deadlines and squabbles over who gets to take leave when, and complaints about people heating up last night’s fish in the microwave. And yes, everyone works very hard, with people on those desks often putting in very anti-social hours including evenings and weekends. Not all swanning off to parties and events and premieres then – and even when I did work on that desk they were few and far between.
So my aim with this was to reflect that by writing about the relationships between the actual people in the office, rather than going all in for the more glamorous aspect. Which a lot of the time can be overrated – just because you get invited to showbiz parties doesn’t always mean they’re good! Laura discovers this in one scene where after doing an interview with an up-and-coming pop star she gets invited to his launch party, and it ends in disaster. As she tells us:
‘The party was not what I expected. The entrance was bold and flashy and covered in thousands of lights, twinkling shards of glass in the night sky. Inside, though, it was far from glitzy. Instead it was hot, noisy and thronged with people drowning out the DJ with their chatter. Everybody seemed to know somebody and have something to say to them. The floor was so sticky I had to prise my boots off it like Velcro, and while there may have been a bar somewhere, it was so murky and crowded it was impossible to find it. My colleagues had done, however, as about ten minutes later, a dark brown beer bottle, dripping with condensation, was handed to me. And just like that, they disappeared.
Leaving me to fend for myself.’
That sounds highly relatable!
One final thing to say here is that obviously, a lot of what happens in this book is inspired by things which I have experienced in my time as a journalist – for example Gleam, the website where Elena and Laura both work is very similar to the long forgotten teen magazine where I began my career all those years ago. The party which ends so badly for Laura also actually happened, given the turn events take it might seem embarrassing to admit this. But at the same time I was also 19 when it happened. And if you can’t make mistakes when you’re 19 then when can you? We’ve all been there.
Other parts, however, are complete fiction. And I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what’s the truth and what isn’t.
I think Troublemaker sounds fabulous.
What else have you brought along and why have you brought it?
There’s a lot of elements in Troublemaker which you can adapt for a great evening in with your book, and it’s those I’m going to focus on.
Firstly some pink décor as it’s the signature colour of the book, right down to the cover! It’s Elena’s favourite colour and she wears it a lot, in some pretty significant scenes. There’s a lot of clothing descriptions in the book, which is reflective of my own love of dressing up for work (rather than rolling in to the office in whatever’s clean). So that was reflected here. As for pink, well it’s a pretty wholesome colour, and Elena likes to give off this air of being cutesy and innocent when the reality is she is anything but.
So if I’m having a night in with Troublemaker I’ll wear something to match the book cover, maybe wrap up in a pink blanket. Elena also loves her cuddly toys, specifically her plush bunnies. So those would be my reading companions.
Secondly, snacks. Troublemaker has quite a few scenes of people in restaurants enjoying sushi and steak dinners, eating takeaways on the sofa on a Friday night, eating toast in bed, so you have a lot to choose from. However to accompany reading time and discussion of the book I’d have to pour myself a glass of Shiraz – it’s Elena’s favourite, as we find out, and as a red wine drinker myself it works perfectly for this!
To that I’m adding some salted caramel ice-cream, to reflect a scene in which Elena, having done something seriously ill-advised, eats an entire tub of it in bed. It happens to be a favourite flavour of mine, but I also chose it because at the time I was listening a lot to a song called Salted Caramel Ice-Cream by the band Metronomy. It’s a cute electro-pop tune with lyrics in which the singer is expressing how he feels about a mystery woman. It seemed to fit the mood of the romcom subplot, so I had to fit an oblique reference in somewhere!
Now you’re talking! I can’t drink wine as it makes me ill, but I can certainly help you with that ice-cream… And is music important to you?
Music plays a big part in my writing, and when I was up late finishing off drafts of Troublemaker and working on edits I’d stick my earbuds in and basically listen to whatever random cheese I could find on Spotify. So for my evening in I’d compile a playlist of songs which feature or are mentioned, kicking off with All Out Of Love (the Air Supply version not the Westlife one!). I love an 80s power ballad and this one has to be on there, given that it crops up at the worst possible moment in the action, at least for the character who hears it. And from that point of view the playlist also needs Blame It On The Boogie and the Macarena on there. Two party classics that, as you will discover, play their part in proceedings.
The Macarena has unfortunate connotations for me. I was dancing to it on a cruise on the Nile in Egypt just before I went down with horrific food poisoning!
Characters are also described as listening to songs by Taylor Swift, Beyonce and Duran Duran, so I’d add those also. For a fun twist I’d chuck in Jaja Ding Dong from the Netflix movie Eurovision – it’s Elena’s ringtone so any excuse!
Speaking of which, it’s a little known fact that all the characters in Troublemaker are named after (in some cases forgotten) Eurovision singers – given I’m such an enormous fan of the contest it’s like my little tribute to the whole thing!
You do realise that I’m now going to have to research every one of them!
The playlist would get far too long if I included every song by every artist whose name I’ve borrowed, but two in particular stand out to me. One is a song called Verona, which was Estonia’s entry at Eurovision 2017 by a duo called Koit and Laura – I listened to this one a lot when I was writing the initial draft as it somehow seemed to fit in with the romantic element of the storyline. And although nobody’s named after this one, Sweden’s 2022 entry, Hold Me Closer by the singer Cornelia Jakobs, hit me in the feels so much that it actually influenced the direction the story took towards the end of the book. I originally had a very different ending in mind for it, then around the end of March 2022 as I was coming to the end of the first draft, I caught Covid for the first time. Luckily I wasn’t seriously unwell with it, merely feeling as though I had the worst cold ever, but because I was too stuffed up to sleep I sat up for several nights into the small hours writing the final chapters of the book while listening to that song on a loop.
Ha! Finally something positive about Covid!
By the time I recovered I had this ending which I had no intention of writing but just, to me, worked so much better than what I had planned, and literally sent my emotions all over the shop. I knew I had to go with it. So, Cornelia Jakobs, if you’re reading this, it’s all your fault.
I’m sure she won’t mind…
Two other suggestions for this now epic playlist: firstly we have Habanera from Carmen – which is Elena’s custom ringtone for her boyfriend Daniel, and like the Air Supply song comes in at the worst possible time. I’d stick that on for a touch of class. And finally, you have to have a song called Troublemaker on there – Olly Murs’ hit is the obvious but I recommend the one by Green Day, purely as a reflection of my own personal taste.
So once you’ve done your reading, talked about the book, drunk your wine and eaten your ice-cream you’ve still got the living-room disco to come.
I think we definitely need to get the music on Caroline. You do that and I’ll give readers a few more details about Troublemaker. Thank you so for much staying in with me. I wish you every success with Troublemaker – it sounds fabulous.
Troublemaker
Showbiz reporter Elena Robins, the rising star of London’s biggest news website Spark, is talented, witty, popular, has fabulous dress sense, and might have murdered her biggest work rival.
Nobody knows what happened to promising young writer Laura Lucas that night, and Elena doesn’t want to talk about it. Not to her millionaire lawyer boyfriend Daniel, nor her spiky boss Paula. And especially not to moody, cynical colleague Nathan, whom she’s had a secret crush on for years.
But when mysterious newcomer Katja Lake shows up at work, nabbing Elena’s longed-for promotion, it sets off a chain of bizarre events involving poisoned colleagues, badminton mishaps, and spectacular film star tantrums.
As Elena’s career and reputation crumble, she wonders if her murky past is back to haunt her – until an unexpected, violent showdown leaves her fearing for her life.
Did she really kill Laura? And can she prove she’s in grave danger from the new girl– before her death becomes the next big Spark headline?
Published by Vulpine, today, 27th March 2025, Troublemaker is available for purchase through the publisher links here.
About C.R. Westbrook
(Photo credit: Natasha Pszenicki)
CR (Caroline) Westbrook is a journalist and author with a CV that includes Metro, Empire and BBC News Online among others, writing about showbiz, TV and film. Troublemaker is her first fiction novel, coming 25 years after her first literary endeavour, writing biographies of Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio which were translated into Japanese, Spanish, German and even English.
She lives in West London with husband Leslie Bunder and teenage daughter Emily. When she’s not writing she is a dedicated Eurovision fan who has been to the contest four times, an enthusiastic film quizzer and a distinctly average badminton player.
You can find out more about Caroline on Instagram and on Bluesky.
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