Hilary Davidson is one of those overnight successes you hear about -- it being years in the making.

The Canadian author, who now calls New York home, said she knew from a young age what she wanted to be.

"Writing fiction is the very first thing I could ever remember wanting to do," she said during a recent interview from Toronto.

She was introduced to the mystery genre by her grandmother, who began buying her Nancy Drew novels when she was six. Davidson joked that Nancy Drew is the "gateway drug" because so many crime writers got their first taste of the genre there, before moving on to Agatha Christie and darker works as well as detective stories like Raymond Chandler or Robert B. Parker.

But since penning fiction didn't seem to be a solid career choice, after university Davidson went into editing, a career she gave up after three years.

"I was working with lovely people," she said, "but I did not enjoy the work at all."

What followed was 12 years of writing non-fiction, travel journalism in particular. She's written for major magazines as well as writing 18 travel books, generally guides that don't even have her name on the front. It did, however, give her the chance to travel and meet people from around the world and that, oddly enough, pushed her back to her first love of fiction.

"I felt compelled to do it in part because I would find these amazing stories while I was on the road that would never work into these magazine pieces. I was always writing these very happy, shiny honeymoon stories or family travel stories or business travel stories, which are very practical, but nobody wants to hear about some cool burial ground that you found or some amazing piece of monster lore.

"It threw me back into fiction and forced me to do what I'd always dreamed of doing."

At first she started with short stories, and eventually had some published. One, included in a best-of anthology of mystery short stories, was spotted by a literary agent who tracked her down and asked if she was working on a novel.

Unlike most writers, Davidson had an eager agent awaiting her first manuscript, which is the newly published mystery The Damage Done.

It tells the story of Lily Moore, a successful travel writer who has moved to Spain, in part to gain some distance from her drug-addict sister and only living relative, Claudia. But Lily is called back to New York to identify her sister's body, who was found dead in the tub of Lily's old apartment on the anniversary of their mother's suicide years earlier.

Things get very strange very quickly because at the morgue, Lily is shown the body, but it is not Claudia. Soon they discover an impostor seems to have taken over Claudia's identity and moved into her apartment. The police, of course, are less than thrilled at the turn of events, particularly considering the real Claudia may have turned up at the apartment on the day of the impostor's death, not that anyone can find her to ask.

Lily, whose father died when she was 13, has had a lifetime of watching out for Claudia and covering up her unstable mother's problems too. She can't quite bring herself to trust the police, especially not when it begins to look a lot like Claudia might be a suspect. Lily's former fiancé, who she ditched before fleeing for Spain, suddenly shows up and insists on helping with the hunt for Claudia.

Things are complicated by both Lily and Claudia's pasts, and not made any easier when the ex-fiancé's son seems to have more than a passing interest in Claudia's whereabouts, too.

All those years Davidson spent in travel journalism have paid off in her debut novel. The characters, who hail from around the globe, are each quite real in how they act, speak and in the cultural heritage they bring with them -- an accomplishment that's no small feat. Davidson said she did a whole draft focusing on getting the dialogue and details of each character's culture just right.

It may be a crime novel, but The Damage Done is as much about family ties, relationships and the pressure of change. Hopefully it's the first of many from Davidson.

ccooke@thenownewspaper.com