AND THEN THERE WAS ONE: A NOVEL
by MARTHA WATERS
(Atria Books, 14 October 2025)
Authorlink Interview by Anna Roins
MARTHA WATERS, the author of the charming Regency Vows series, has a new historical romance set in 1930s England with a murder mystery twist!
In a quaint village in the Cotswolds, Georgiana Radcliffe accidentally becomes an amateur detective after helping solve four murders in a year. When the chairman of the village council turns up dead, everyone agrees with the official ruling of a heart attack, but Georgie can’t help but suspect that the council chairman is a fifth victim. Now, murder tourists are flocking from around the country, in hopes of becoming sleuths themselves.
Along with her reporter friend, she reaches out to a famous London detective for assistance in ascertaining why they have become a magnet for murder. But the fancy detective is simply too busy—or can’t be bothered—to help, and instead dispatches his secretary, Sebastian Fletcher-Ford—a posh womanizer who, truthfully, is just trying to get out of his hair, much to practical, no-nonsense Georgie’s dismay. But as they investigate in the charming Buncombe-upon-Woolly—with plentiful scones, sheep on the village green, and murder tourists at every turn—Georgie finds that her previous assessment of Sebastian may have been wrong, and rather than solving a murder, she may be solving for love instead.
AUTHORLINK: Hello Martha, and welcome to AUTHORLINK! We are so happy to discuss your wonderful books with you!
WATERS: Thank you so much for having me!
AUTHORLINK: Of course! You have been publishing at least one book a year since 2020. Amazing. Your latest work, AND THEN THERE WAS ONE, is an enchanting historical romance set not in Regency England this time, but in the 1930s! What a great era. What inspired you to write AND THEN THERE WAS ONE? Clearly, you’re an Anglophile.
WATERS: Years ago, I had a conversation with a friend in which we were joking about all the “murder villages” in mystery novels where a seemingly never-ending series of gruesome murders happen in small towns, which is obviously pretty improbable. It gave me the idea to write a novel about why a village would turn into a “murder village” – but since my interest as an author is romance, I wanted to make this both a mystery and a romance novel. And, as you correctly note, I’m definitely an Anglophile (and currently live in England!) and I thought that a 1930s English village would be the perfect setting for my take on a cozy mystery, since it would also allow me to nod at the Golden Age mysteries of that era.
AUTHORLINK: How lucky you are! We can just imagine your travel schedule for background research We love how AND THEN THERE WAS ONE has been set in the fictional village of “Buncombe-upon-Woolly” in the Cotswolds, and that this time, yes, as you say above, your romance story also includes a murder mystery. What prompted this change in themes?
WATERS: I think the throughline with all of my work is that I’m really interested in the idea of genre. My Regency series was a response to the hundreds of Regency romances I’ve read and loved, which turned me into a romance reader; I wanted to put my own spin on the genre’s tropes and expectations. And Then There Was The One is my attempt to engage with the tropes of classic and cozy mysteries, and poke (loving!) fun at them—it’s very meta and self-aware, and there are a lot of jokes about the mystery genre itself. It’s also definitely poking a bit of fun at the rise of true crime podcasts and all the people on the internet who are obsessed with solving cold cases themselves. I read pretty widely—including a lot of mysteries!—and love to blend romance with other genres that I love.
AUTHORLINK: Clearly a winning combination. Do you obtain inspiration for romance from your real life? Are any of your characters based on people you have met? For instance, who or what inspired you to create Georgiana Radcliffe, our heroine in AND THEN THERE WAS ONE and an amateur sleuth? Are your characters ever based a little, in part, on yourself? What about Sebastian Fletcher-Ford, the detective’s assistant, and Georgiana’s love interest?
WATERS: In general, I don’t use much from my actual life when I’m writing. None of my characters are based on anyone I know, and I don’t use any of my real-life relationships as the basis for anything I write. However, little pieces of me work their way into each book I write, which I think is inevitable. Some characters are more like me than others—I’m definitely more like Georgie than Sebastian in this book, for example—and sometimes I’ll use extremely specific details about myself or a small experience I’ve had to add a bit of color to my characters. But for the most part, I try to firmly separate my fiction from reality. In this instance, I knew that I wanted the romance in this book to be very opposites-attract; it made sense to me that a heroine who had been roped into solving mysteries in her village might be very smart and no-nonsense, which then gave me the idea to pair her with someone totally different from her, like Sebastian, who is super sunny and flirtatious and, at first glance, doesn’t seem that bright. It’s a great dynamic for a romance, and it was a lot of fun to write.
AUTHORLINK: We can imagine. We note you published your first book in 2020, To Have and to Hoax: A Novel, the first book in a series of Regency romances. We love how the characters slide between the books. You have described them yourself as, ‘…silly, hijinks-filled rom-coms featuring a big cast of meddling friends, lots of banter, and — of course — plenty of kissing.” (Angel Reads, 10 December 2020). What or who inspired you to write about Regency romances? You once said, “I love the structure of romance – there’s a format that most romance novels loosely follow, and the fun of writing in this genre is playing around with that format and making it your own. I also love how heavily the genre relies on tropes, and subverting tropes is one of the biggest joys that I get from writing romance.” (Nerd Daily, 5 April 2021). Do these thoughts still resonate with you today?
WATERS: Absolutely. I love writing—and reading—genre fiction because there are expected beats and tropes, but every author gets to put their own spin on it. It was a bit different with this book, since I was trying to blend the formats of both romance novels and mystery novels, so there was some back-and-forth between my editor and myself about where certain scenes belonged to ensure we were hitting the right notes at the right times with both the mystery and the romance, but overall the big joy of this book for me was getting to play around with the expected tropes of a mystery in ways that felt fun. It’s the same reason I got into writing Regency romances: I absolutely love historical romance, have read hundreds of them, and wanted to play around a bit with the genre by writing my own version of a Regency that is maybe a bit more modern. At the end of the day, I write to have fun, and I think that sense of fun and playfulness is a throughline in my work, no matter the genre.
AUTHORLINK: And your sense of fun comes through! You graduated from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; can we assume creative writing? We understand you tried to have a YA book published soon after, but were not successful, so you decided to try romance and drafted To Have and to Hoax. Is that correct? Can you describe the challenges you experienced in writing a YA novel compared to regency romance? Would you consider trying to publish your YA novel now?
WATERS: I actually deliberately decided not to pursue creative writing (which UNC only offers as a minor, rather than a major) while I was in undergrad. I knew I wanted to write, but I also didn’t want to mix writing with academic work; I had a suspicion (which I think was correct, though I suppose I’ll never know) that if creative writing was something I was doing for a class, it would take the joy of it away from me. So I majored in history and international studies, and initially thought I was going to work in the foreign service or for a nonprofit abroad, but in my senior year took a children’s literature class that inspired me to go to graduate school for library science to become a children’s librarian. At that time, I thought I wanted to write for children and teens, so it felt like a natural dovetailing of my interests. During my gap year before grad school, and during grad school, I attempted a couple of YA manuscripts that, in retrospect, just weren’t quite there yet, but which were good practice. Late in grad school, I took a class on genre fiction which is what introduced me to romance, and I became so obsessed with the genre that it felt like a natural thing to try my hand at writing—I realized almost immediately that all of my favorite parts of writing my other books (the relationships between characters, both romantic and platonic, and lots of conversation and banter) got to play a much bigger role in romance than they did in YA fantasy, so it was immediately obvious that this was a better fit for me. I doubt I’ll ever write a YA book at this point, but I do still harbor hopes of writing a middle grade novel someday…
AUTHORLINK: That’s so interesting, thank you. How many drafts had you written of your first published book, To Have and to Hoax before you were ready to show it to someone? Who was your first reader?
WATERS: Oh, gosh, I’m not even certain—maybe four or five? It took a couple of years, and I basically rewrote the book multiple times. I didn’t show it to anyone before querying agents, which sounds absolutely nuts, and in retrospect I would do it differently, but I found it sort of reassuring that if I landed an agent, they’d have an extremely clear sense of my voice and my abilities, since they’d be reading a manuscript that no one but me had offered any feedback on. These days, my agent is often still the first person to see a peek of what I’m working on, but I also have a very close author friend I can send things to when I need a second opinion, before something’s ready to go to my editor.
AUTHORLINK: This makes perfect sense! How did you find your literary agent? Had you experienced any challenges in landing the right one for you? Are they still with you today?
WATERS: My experience with getting an agent is sort of a weird one—I had queried unsuccessfully with two YA manuscripts in the past, and gotten lots and lots and lots of rejections, but when I landed my agent for To Have and to Hoax, it was a pretty painless process, which is not at all the norm, and I do think my previous failure at querying helped me with this successful attempt. My agent is Taylor Haggerty at Root Literary—we have been together for seven years now and have the most wonderful working relationship, I cannot imagine ever working with anyone else. I had her at the top of my list because she’d been the agent for The Hating Game, a book I had really adored a couple of years before I was querying, so I sent my first batch of queries to maybe five or six agents and then paused before sending any more while I waited to hear back, and Taylor read To Have and to Hoax and loved it emailed me to set up a call, and we clicked immediately. I want to emphasize to any authors currently querying that getting an offer of rep from one of the first five agents you query is not the norm, and please don’t be discouraged if this doesn’t happen for you—I just got incredibly lucky. It’s so important to have an agent who shares the same vision for your work that you do, which is why that initial call with them is so important—no agent at all is better than a bad agent, or an agent who just isn’t right for you. I feel so grateful to have someone so great in my corner.
AUTHORLINK: That’s wonderful. Did you have any rejections along the way to finding your agent and thereafter a publisher? Does your publishing house editor propose many edits on your manuscripts, especially for the Regency series? When were you given the green light to write five books?
WATERS: I definitely had a lot of rejections from agents for my first two unpublished YA books, and then when my agent sent To Have and to Hoax to publishers, we had a number of rejections from editors. The rejections sting, but ultimately you want an editor who truly loves your work and will work hard to champion it; this is a thing I didn’t fully understand at the time, when I was just feeling sad about the rejections, but I have come to really appreciate it now. The rejections that felt worst were from a couple of editors who absolutely loved the book but faced resistance from others at their publisher who weren’t sure that the sort of rom-com-meets-a-historical-romance vibe of the book would sell; those ones hurt, because it felt like we were so close only to fall at the last hurdle. But then my editor bought To Have and to Hoax in a pre-empt, and I knew from our first call that she loved the book like I did, and was the perfect editor for me. She does have a fair number of edits, because that’s her job, and I appreciate it. We both have the same goal: to make my books as good as possible, and I really appreciate the keen eye she brings to my work. We usually do a big round of big-picture developmental edits, which she lays out in a lengthy letter to me, and then a couple of rounds of smaller line edits before it goes to the copyeditor. And Then There Was The One is the seventh book my editor and I have worked on together, and we work incredibly well together, and I know that she really believes in my work and does all that she can to champion me in-house as well. In terms of the Regency series: I wrote the first three books on one-book deals, never sure if I’d get to write more in the series, which was a bit nerve-wracking. But we sold the fourth and fifth book together, which was a relief, as I was able to write the fourth book knowing for certain that the fifth one would follow it, and there was a tiny bit of groundwork laid for the fifth book within the fourth as a result.
AUTHORLIINK: That is so interesting. Thank you for sharing your experience about the whole process. Tell us a bit about your writing day. How many hours do you dedicate to writing and how many to research? Do you have any writing rituals?
WATERS: I’m not super consistent in terms of how my days look, to be honest. I quit my full-time job after my second book came out, and have worked a couple of part-time jobs since then, so I often get up around 5:30 and write for a couple of hours before work, but sometimes, since I have free afternoons with my job’s hours, I’ll just wait and write after I’m done with work at 1—sometimes with other writer friends in a café, sometimes at the library, sometimes at home. I do work best in the mornings, so that’s my preference, but sometimes I’m lazy and am not out of bed in time. Writing and research aren’t usually happening at the same time for me; I’ll do research before starting writing (for example, for And Then There Was The One, I read an absolutely enormous 700 page book about Britain in the 1930s; almost none of the information is in the final book, I just wanted to get a sense of what the country was like at that time; I also read a couple of books about the history of female gardeners in Britain, since the heroine loves gardening) but while I’m writing I’m usually just making notes of things I need to look up later, rather than pausing the writing to do any further research. I almost never write at night, unless I’m getting down to the wire with deadlines.
AUTHORLINK: What made you decide to write a stand-alone Christmas book with Christmas is All Around (2024), and was that fun to write given it was set in a whole different era?
WATERS: That book was a lot of fun—well, writing the initial draft was very stressful, but the editing process was really fun, and I’m so, so glad I did it. The way it came about was kind of curious: my agent was in talks with my editor for the book deal for And Then There Was The One, and my editor asked if I would, perchance, be interested in writing a contemporary Christmas rom-com, to come out the year before And Then There Was The One; my publisher was looking for a Christmas book for fall 2024, and at this time—December 2023—I had just moved to the UK and my editor knew I didn’t have a day job at the moment and presumably had more free time. So I said yes, because I wanted to see how I would handle writing a contemporary romance, since I’d never tried it before, and this felt like a somewhat low-stakes way to attempt it. It was an absolutely bonkers timeline—it was so, so tight—so I was working flat-out for that entire winter and spring, but I’m really pleased with the result, and it was yet another opportunity for me to play with genre—since that book is poking loving fun at the Christmas romance genre as a whole—which was very fun.
AUTHORLINK: Oh, brilliant! Do you like to plan out the plot of your novels first? If you plot, how close is the final manuscript to the original plan? Or do you like to write by the ‘seat of your pants’?
WATERS: I’m definitely a pantser; whenever I try to plot, I end up abandoning the outline most of the time. My fourth Regency book, To Swoon and to Spar, is the only one I’ve had a detailed outline for that I was able to stick to; with the fifth book, To Woo and to Wed, I tried the flashlight method, where I would outline the next chapter or two as I went, and that actually worked pretty well for me, so I may try that again in the future. Generally, the first draft is a process of me discovering the story and telling it to myself and it’s incredibly messy as a result; I’ve come to accept that this is my process and I’m never going to be someone who writes clean first drafts based on detailed outlines. I do have to write up synopses for my books that my editor approves, but these are usually only two or three pages long, so that loose summary is usually all I’m working with as I write.
AUTHORLINK: Does it get harder or easier to write each new book? Or both?
WATERS: Harder, I think. Whatever knowledge, skills, and experience you gain are more than balanced out by your increasing expectations for your own work—for me, at least! No books are easy to write, in my experience, but some are easier than others, and my past few have all felt quite hard, and I am beginning to suspect that this is how it’s going to feel for me, going forward. Fortunately, I still love writing more than anything else, so even when it’s difficult, I’m so glad to be doing it, but I do miss the days when it felt more effortless (because I didn’t know what I was doing!).
AUTHORLINK: How do you take constructive criticism from readers or editors alike? Do you feel crushed, or can you take it on the chin?
WATERS: I don’t look at reader feedback at all—I wholeheartedly support readers’ rights to whatever opinion they have on a book, and they should be able to share that opinion wherever they want, but I, personally, don’t need to look at it. The problem is that even positive reader feedback can work its way into my head and make me feel bad somehow; I realized years ago that the only way I can function as a creative person creating work that I care about is if I don’t look at reader reviews at all, I just need to keep my head clear. I want feedback from a small group of people whose opinions I trust, who can help me craft the best book possible—my agent, my editor, a trusted writer friend—and in those instances, I’ve learned to not take their critiques personally, because I know we all have the same goal, of creating the best book possible, but also a book that is a Martha Waters book, not a book written by someone else with a different voice or tone. Critique is an incredibly important part of the creative process, but that doesn’t mean that you need to read all of the critiques that may exist.
AUTHORLINK: We think this is very wise and helpful advice for budding writers out there! And finally, do you believe romance is alive and well in the real world today? What, in your opinion, is the most romantic book you have ever read?
WATERS: I do! I think it’s easy to be cynical about romance, especially in the era of dating apps—a lot of people I know definitely feel that way—but there are too many examples of happily-ever-afters in my real life for me to not believe in it. And not to be a cliché, but I do think, like all sensible people, that Captain Wentworth’s letter in Austen’s Persuasion is the most romantic thing ever written, so that book will have to get my vote.
AUTHORLINK: Agreed! Martha, thank you for a most illuminating chat about AND THEN THERE WAS ONE, and your writing process in general. We look forward to reading more of your work! All best!
WATERS: Thank you so much!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Martha Waters is the author of And Then There Was the One, Christmas Is All Around, and the Regency Vows series, which includes To Have and to Hoax, To Love and to Loathe, To Marry and to Meddle, To Swoon and to Spar, and To Woo and to Wed. Originally from South Florida, she is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently lives in London. You can find out more about Martha at https://www.marthawaters.com/, and https://www.instagram.com/marthabwaters/?hl=en
