KATE Mosse's thrillers deal with 'time slips', where the narrative moves between the past and the present, with events in both linked supernaturally. In her own life, the British author has made a huge shift, from writing literary fiction - the highbrow kind that people always mean to read but few ever do - to creating hugely popular works that hit best-seller lists worldwide.

Mosse's 2006 book Labyrinth made the New York Times list, was number one in UK paperbacks for six months, and has been translated into 37 languages. The same appears to be happening to her latest work, Sepulchre. At the same time, the writer has an immaculate pedigree in 'serious' fiction - she is the co-founder of the Orange Prize, writes book reviews for the UK's Times and the Guardian, and appears on BBC's book-related programmes.

Prior to Sepulchre and Labyrinth, Mosse wrote two works of a more literary bent, Eskimo Kissing and Crucifix Lane. But it's clear her heart lies with her most recent works.

'I can see the faults in my previous two novels,' says the petite author, who visited Singapore recently. 'They're not comfortable under their skin. Because the nature of my other work tended to be literary, I expected the books I would write to be literary. As it turns out, that wasn't my skill.'

Mosse's skill lies in excellent plotting, an unerring way of identifying topics that will intrigue readers - in Labyrinth it's the Cathars, in Sepulchre it's the Tarot - and likeable characters presented in uncluttered prose.

'You have to learn what your writing voice is,' Mosse advises. 'Your writing voice might not be your reading voice. You might love crime fiction, but you maybe can't do that. You might hate literary fiction, but you might have that exquisite touch for it.

'I didn't listen to my writing voice in my first books. They should have been straightforward detective stories. But all the time I was sitting on my own shoulder saying: 'Oh no, don't do it that way'. I was editing it before it was written, and that's no way to write a novel.'

Still, while Mosse clearly felt more comfortable delivering her first thriller, nothing prepared her for the success of Labyrinth.

'A friend rang up and said: 'Do you know you are number one on Amazon?' I remember that conversation so clearly because it was so shocking. It's extraordinary to go into bookshops and see your book. My experience before was to go into a bookshop, find the one copy of your book, move it to the front, and leave.'

Sepulchre, set in the Carcassone, involves both the adventures of young Parisienne Leonie Vernier in 1891 and those of music scholar Meredith Martin in 2007. Martin is given a pack of Tarot that, along with other objects such as a sepulchre, open a gateway to the past. Such delving into mysticism, also to be found in Labyrinth where the plot involves the Holy Grail, has brought inevitable comparisons with Dan Brown. (In fact, in Sepulchre, Mosse rather cheekily refers to tourists doing The Da Vince Code trail.)

'I did enormously benefit from being published after Dan Brown. I think that the success of The Da Vince Code opened up an appetite, particularly among male readers, for my work,' Mosse says.

She feels that in many ways, the author is the person least qualified to identify the reasons for a book's success, but she does have some theories.

'As things in the world became more uneasy, people wanted to read fiction that dealt with emotional issues such as honour, love, war and betrayal. But they didn't want to read them in the context of contemporary life. I think it's not a coincidence that spy fiction and terrorism fiction - people blowing up planes and stuff - started to dip, and what you could call religious-conspiracy-theory or epic fiction started going on the rise.'

But there are marked differences between her work and Dan Brown's. The Da Vince Code tries to link everything empirically, claiming its theories as fact. Mosse's thrillers have a strong dose of the supernatural, and hints at the presence of ghosts or beings from other dimensions.

Mosse reveals she's never had any mystical experiences although, while working on Sepulchre, she had a Tarot reading done and it was 'alarmingly accurate'.

'I've always identified spirituality with people who have shrines, or go to church, or do lots of cleansing things, or yoga, or whatever it is. But now I realise that yes, I am spiritual. I think about these things a lot, though I don't engage with them in an active way. I don't go to faith healers. I don't have any sort of ritual. I don't even go to the gym on a regular basis.

'I like the time-slip device because I like the historical and the contemporary to happen 'live' in front of the reader, neither one having prominence. That underlines what I believe, that the past casts its shadow every day on the present, and we are products of the stories that have gone before us.'

Sepulchre By Kate Mosse
Publisher: Orion Pages: 732
Price: $15.95 (without GST)
Rating: B

This article was first published in The Business Times on Sep 5, 2008.