THE WILD CARD
Rowan Sharp
AGE
35 AT BOOK 1
HERITAGE
BRITISH
Rowan is the person who makes the inappropriate joke at the crime scene — and is right about something essential that nobody else saw. She processes the world through social dynamics: who’s performing for whom, who’s deferring, who’s pretending not to notice that someone else is lying.
“Twelve suspects on an island. Very Christie. I approve.”
“Nobody signals. Signalling implies you care about the other person’s plans.”
“Let me stand here and feel like a person who has been invited somewhere beautiful.”
Working-class. Margate. Put herself through university studying media and communications, which she describes as “learning how to watch people lie on camera for three years.” Her humour is armour, and she knows it’s armour, and she deploys it anyway because the alternative is letting people see how much she cares about everything. She has an encyclopaedic knowledge of celebrity gossip and reality TV, all of which she frames as “research” and all of which has proved useful in cases more often than anyone wants to admit. She lives in Peckham. She has a cat named Suspect. She doesn’t cook but has opinions about restaurants.