Editor’s Note: We’re revisiting this 2020 Q&A with Peter because now you can buy all three of his thrillers in one convenient bundle! The Dark Web Trilogy bundle is out on May 16, and pre-orders are available now.
Peter Church’s Dark Web Trilogy takes readers to the dark side of our digital lives. Starting with Crackerjack, these interconnected techno-thrillers explore the dangers lurking in a shadowy, underground world where the virtual and the physical collide in dangerous ways. The final installment in the series, Bitter Pill, comes to US readers on June 15. We caught up with Peter to chat about the series, his process for writing these connected stories, and if we might see more from the characters his created.
In the early idea stages, did you always envision these characters as existing in more than one story?
I wrote Dark Video in 2008. At the time I didn’t have any thoughts of a trilogy. I started to think of a follow up in the wake of the reaction to it. The difficult decision was which characters to take forward. Most crime writers like to work with a central detective character. I decided to lead with the evil antagonist and make the global organization— Dark Video— the central theme that binds the three novels.
How do you work on plotting so that all of the threads connect across multiple books?
I wrote them as standalone novels. Pretty much like different seasons of a series, the new one starts with a whole new premise while you bring back familiarities — certain characters or events — from the previous one. Dark Video was about illicit video sharing, in Bitter Pill barmen spike drinks of innocent young woman for the pleasure of wealthy businessmen, Crackerjack was about greed and corporate malfeasance.
The threads that links is a seeping evil in which wealthy businessmen exploit human behavior for profit. I did write scenes, lots of them actually, for each novel that I never used, but I can’t recall carrying any of them forward.
We released these in one particular order, and in South Africa, they were released in a different one. It’s interesting to read them in several ways to see how the stories overlap and build on one another. Now that all three are out (or coming soon), and readers could start anywhere, is there an ideal order would you suggest to a new reader?
Probably the original South African order: Dark Video, Bitter Pill, Crackerjack is best, but it is intriguing to hear from readers who discovered them in a different order. Any order is fine, so long as it entices the reader to seek out the others.
Without giving away too much from the existing books, are there plans for any of these characters to show up again in your future work?
I am considering a sequel to Crackerjack which would then take up with the surviving characters who have unfinished business.
