In my experience the writer’s name in big, chunky letters is all I really need to pick up a book. If it’s a writer I don’t recognize, I’ll impulse buy on a title or a blurb or, if I’m being especially reckless, a beautifully painted cover. But if you’re still unsure whether or not to immerse yourself in the story ahead and need a further thousand words to completely convince you, then let me reassure even the most cautious buyer …

This is the best decision you’ve made lately and you’re in for an absolute treat.

Let’s go back in time ten years to when I first met Muriel Gray. No, scratch that. Turn the dial a further ninety degrees, crank up the handle and send your George Pal-era time machine back a full three decades and she’s starting her career as the coolest thing on the coolest show on television. She’s a presenter on the legendary music programme, The Tube, interviewing pretty much everyone you’ve ever heard of; fast-forward and she’s a kind of a famous TV producer and Britain’s most well-known mountain-climber and a member of the board at Glasgow School of Art (where she’s DOCTOR Muriel Gray) and an award-winning newspaper columnist and former rector of Edinburgh University. Oh, she’s also the patron of several Scottish charities, a respected art historian, an architecture buff, a professional illustrator, a marathon runner, a wife, a mother and a hugely successful business-woman too, in case you didn’t get the memo.

So when I first met Muriel ten years back and discovered she had a double life as a hugely successful horror novelist with three bestselling books to her name and deified by no less than Mister Stephen Edwin King of Portland, Maine, it really didn’t come as too much of a surprise.