Page Turners: ‘Burn After Reading’ author Catherine Ryan Howard

Catherine Ryan Howard is an award-winning, number one bestselling thriller writer from Cork whose novels have been included in the New York Times Best Thrillers of the Year, the Washington Post’s Best Mysteries and Thrillers of the Year and the Sunday Times Best Thrillers of the Year.

Catherine’s fifth novel, 56 Days, a thriller about a couple locked down together in Dublin that Catherine wrote in spring 2020, won the An Post Irish Crime Fiction Book of the Year and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. A screen adaptation starring Dove Cameron and Avan Jogia will debut exclusively on Amazon Prime Video in early 2026.

Burn After Reading has just hit the shelves.

The night Jack Smyth ran into flames in a desperate attempt to save his wife from their burning home, he was, tragically, too late – but hailed a hero. Until it emerged that Kate was dead long before the fire began. Suspicion has stalked him ever since. After all, there’s no smoke without fire.

A year on, he’s signed a book deal. He wants to tell his side of the story, to prove his own innocence in print. He just needs someone to help him write it. Emily has never ghostwritten anything before, but she knows what it’s like to live with a guilty secret. And she’s about to learn that there are some stories that should never be told…

Did you always want to be a writer?

I’ve wanted to be a writer since before I could really read or write. I remember how, in Junior Infants (age five), the teacher would sit up on her desk and read to us from a picture book, holding it up so we could see the pictures. I would come home, line up all my Barbies on the bed, climb up onto my dressing table and ‘read’ to them in the exact same way – but of course, I had to make up the story! As soon as I understood that books didn’t just appear, that people actually wrote them and that was their job, I wanted it to be mine.

Tell us about your journey to becoming a published author.

I was obsessed with getting published – I read all the books, went to the workshops, took notes from every author I saw interviewed on stage – but I never actually did any writing, which turned out to be a crucial part of the process! That changed when I happened to read an article by Jon Ronson, ‘Lost at Sea’ in an edition of the Guardian’s weekend magazine from November 2011. I did a bit of research into maritime law and was shocked at what I found. I thought to myself, if I were a serial killer, cruise ships are where I’d hunt. I started writing a thriller called Distress Signals. When it was done, I made a list of agents and submitted to them through their websites until one of them took me on. That was seven books and ten years ago. I remember feeling so relieved – I thought the hard part was over, but the hard work hadn’t even begun.

Tell us about your new book, Burn After Reading. Where did the idea come from?

I was thinking about the crazy book deal O.J. Simpson did back in 2004 – for a so-called hypothetical confession – and what it must have been like to be the ghostwriter tasked with helping write a book that he was claiming was fiction but which he knew wasn’t at all. I started tracking down interviews with the ghostwriter and a copy of the resulting book, and became obsessed with the idea of a ghostwriter stuck in a room with a man who maybe committed a murder. I just thought that was such a fascinating premise for a thriller. But my guy has a far bigger question mark over his guilt and my ghostwriter is inexperienced at it and hiding a secret of her own. I also took an opportunity to set a book in a place I’m fascinated by: the area around Seaside, Florida, which most people recognise as the town where The Truman Show was filmed.

Tell us about your daily writing process.

It changes all the time but at the moment, I start my day by bringing a cup of coffee back to bed and staring into space/doomscrolling for half an hour. Usually, I’m at my desk by 9am. I’ll open Pacemaker which tells me how many new words I need to write today in order to stay on track, and then my plotting spreadsheet, which tells me what I need to write. Then it’s write, get distracted, coffee, repeat as required until lunchtime-ish. I go out for a walk then to wake myself up enough to be able to do the same all afternoon. I’m an amazing procrastinator who really needs pressure to get going, so I’ll start by writing a very small amount each day, increasing it as my deadline gets closer and closer.