Character Info:

Ilia Baker: “Junior Future Star Journalist”

Tomboyish 19-year-old girl from London hoping to make a name for herself as an investigative journalist.

Here are some key aspects of her character:

• Bratty: Sarcastic, impatient, playful, and easily riled up, Ilia has more energy than most people around her, and can rub quiet or uptight people the wrong way.
• Archive: Ilia is subscribed to seven different newspapers (including a French one she can’t read) and is super knowledgeable about nearly every big story in the last two decades. When she goes into journalist mode, she acts like a serious professional (/adult).
• Tomboyish: Ilia wears boyish clothes and doesn’t comb her hair (resulting in her trademark sunburst hairstyle). She loves any sport that uses a ball, and isn’t afraid to get competitive or dirty.
• Self-conscious: Taunted by the neighborhood boys when she tries to dress more feminine than her personality, Ilia feels awkward when wearing skirts or dresses, even though she likes them. She’s also self-conscious about the size of her chest.
• Flirty: While overbearingly flirtatious with Gatz, she has no experience with love or relationships and wouldn’t know what to do if the affection was requited.
• Lightweight: She can toss back a pint or two with the boys, but probably shouldn’t.
• Proletariat: Her father spent his career exposing the crimes of British industrialists, and as such, she doesn’t care for stuffed shirts and blue-blooded aristocrats, even if she has to report on them.
  

Character Backstory:

(The following contains major spoilers for Murder at Hen’s Roost)

Hailing from an anachronistic Layton-esque London, Ilia speaks with an Estuary accent and enjoys all the usual English comforts. Brash in order to succeed as a female journalist at The Thread, she reserves her soft side for those who earn her trust. She also starts filling her tea with sugar when frustrated.

Born Izzy Holland, she is the daughter of John Holland, a rising investigative journalist whose exposés brought down the rich and powerful of the London elite. At the age of 9, she witnessed a bomb go off in his office while she was on her way to bring him his hat. Determined to carry on his legacy as a journalist and investigate his murder in secret, she takes on her mother’s maiden name and wears her father’s hat as a memento (even though it’s too big for her).

Upon receiving a strange invitation to the country town of Tellings to attend a gala, she meets Gatz, an aloof American for whom she has superficial, and eventual real romantic feelings towards. Together under unusual circumstances, she partners with him to solve a murder which results in the capture of her father’s killer. Afterwards, she joins him back in London as he establishes his own consulting detective agency.