The Killer’s Cousin was my second novel, and it (and I) went through five torturous, hideous, and painful drafts over five years before it reached its final form.
In the first two versions of what was then called Cambridge Gothic, the narrator, David Yaffe, was 26 years old and working as a high school history teacher. He was obsessing over an old girlfriend, yes, but she was very much alive. Right from the beginning, however, the story of his cousin Lily and her family was much as it is in the published book.
It took me a long time to understand that the problem in those initial drafts was David. He was a nice guy; he was concerned about his cousin—but somehow that wasn’t enough to draw the reader into the mystery. As you read, you thought: “Who cares?”
In despair, I abandoned the novel and went to work on something else. Then, months later, I had a sudden revelation. Quickly, I wrote a prologue in which I made David eight years younger, and dropped dark hints about his own past.
In short, I turned David into a sympathetic narrator—and tied the two parts of the story together—by making him a killer.
Make of that what you will.