It’s the middle of January and Jo Spain has just overseen the publication of the first of three books she has coming out this year. The crime writer says she has always been a nerd, but growing up on Dublin’s north side, she was “smart enough not to let people know how smart I was.” Spain talks to Róisín Ingle about happily leaving behind her decade-long career working with Sinn Féin at Leinster House to take up writing fulltime, after finding success with her Detective Tom Reynolds series of novels. She also talks about growing up poor in Belcamp, a part of Dublin that the Celtic Tiger missed, being one of the only people with a north side accent at Trinity College and her writing technique, which enables her to “bang out” the first draft of a novel in four weeks.