Not Safe Here did not begin with a plot. It began with a detail that refused to leave me alone: a single disputed parking space.
The idea came from the real case of Frank Abbott Sweeney Jr..
Sweeney’s campaign of harassment began with an argument over a disabled parking space.
There was no prior relationship. There was no shared history. There was only a brief moment of everyday friction.
From that moment, he fixated on a woman and her family.
He stalked them for years. He sent letters. He made false reports. He inserted himself into every corner of their lives.
The escalation was relentless and deliberate.
What unsettled me most was not the scale of his actions, but the banality of the trigger.
Most thrillers begin with secrets, affairs, or buried crimes.
This one began with something almost insulting in its smallness.
A parking space is neutral ground. It is something everyone recognises. It is something people argue over without ever imagining consequences.
That ordinariness made the story frightening.
It suggested that danger does not require intimacy. It only requires access and entitlement.
The concept stayed with me for years.
I knew I did not want to retell Sweeney’s story.
I wanted to understand how something so minor could metastasise into terror.
That question finally found its shape in Jenny.
Jenny’s life is not extreme or dramatic.She is not reckless or naïve. She is simply visible.
When the stalking begins, there is no obvious line she has crossed.
That uncertainty is the engine of the book.
Ordinary Conflict, Extraordinary Threat
In Not Safe Here, the disputed parking space is not about vehicles.
It is about ownership.
It is about who feels entitled to space, attention, and control.
Jenny’s fear grows because there is nothing she can undo.
There is no apology that fixes it. There is no explanation that satisfies the person watching her. That imbalance mirrors the real horror of cases like Sweeney’s.
I wanted to write a domestic thriller where the threat does not come from the past.
It comes from the present.
It comes from a moment that could happen to anyone on any street.
The idea that safety can fracture over something so trivial felt true.
Once that clicked, Jenny’s story followed naturally.
Not Safe Here is the result of that question finally refusing to stay theoretical.
