The Interview - the new offering from crime and mystery writer, and former island resident, Chris Ewan, will hit the shelves in two weeks’ time.

Chris is the author of several books to date, with some of them, most notably Safe House, Long Time Lost and Dark Tides, and his published short story Scarlett Point, being set on the island.

Writing as C.M. Ewan, his latest books are nerve-shredding thrillers about ordinary situations gone wrong.

The Interview tells the story of a seemingly normal job interview that turns out to be something very different and unexpected. Its synopsis leaves much to be discovered and a mystery to be unravelled.

To set the scene: ’It’s 5pm on a Friday. You have been called to an interview for your dream job. In a stunning office 13 floors above the city below, you are all alone with the man interviewing you. Everyone else has gone home for the weekend. The interview gets more and more disturbing. You’re feeling scared. Your only way out is to answer a seemingly impossible question. If you can’t... what happens next?’

Quite the premise- and one designed to pray on our most primal fears.

’It’s quite succinct and creepy I think, the premise’, says Chris. ’It’s a contained thriller, and I wanted to write something that was relatable to an experience we all share - a job interview, which is one of those high pressure, high stress situations we’ve all experienced and probably all have bad memories about.

’Psychological thrillers really tie into moments of tension and anxiety, and so it seemed to me that this would be a key experience to tap into and spring off of.

’And so I just started to develop it logically, sort of thinking, well what would happen if your very life depended on a job interview, and worse than that - a question in a job interview that you had no idea how to answer.’

The office setting certainly has gained a heightened ability to make many people’s skin crawl after the last couple years in which ’work from home’ became the new normal at times.

’That was probably one of the things that led to this book in a way because it’s obviously set in an office environment and suddenly everyone was working from home,’ says Chris. ’And suddenly that became to some extent a kind of alien environment that people weren’t as used to anymore.’

If you’ve ever been alone in an office late at night you know how unnerving the silence can become - that is something Chris was hoping to tap into.

’It wouldn’t quite as well if it was a work-from-home Zoom interview thriller, that wouldn’t quite have the same creep factor I don’t think.’

And can we expect more books from him set in the island? It’s likely.

’It will always have a special place in my heart. I just think it’s full of stories, the Isle of Man.’

The Interview (Hardback, priced £14.99, published by Pan Macmillan) will be released on February 17.

By Siobhan Fletcher