Jay MacDonald

Interview by

Woe be unto the free-range American reader who casually picks up any of Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache mysteries, set in the French-Canadian village of Three Pines, expecting a “Murder, She Wrote”-style cozy. The author erupts at the mere suggestion. 

“To call them cozies is to completely misread!” she protests by phone from her home in Sutton, a French-speaking village in Québec, east of Montreal. “I get very annoyed at anyone who calls them cozies, or even traditional. I think it’s facile for people to think that anything set in a village must, per force, be superficial and simplistic.”

Far, far from either, Penny’s addictive series may be the quintessential anti-cozy, centered as it is on a village that bears more resemblance to Twin Peaks than Cabot Cove and an erudite chief inspector of the Sûreté du Québec whose demons are never far behind him.

Publisher Minotaur Books says more than three million copies of the Inspector Gamache books have been sold worldwide since the series debuted in 2006, with growing sales and buzz for each new release. Penny’s 11th Gamache mystery, The Nature of the Beast, marks her largest first printing ever.

As series devotees know, the brooding, wounded Armand Gamache left the Sûreté and retired to Three Pines after tearing the lid off of internal corruption in 2013’s How the Light Gets In, only to resurface last year, shaken but not deterred, in The Long Way Home. Penny focuses as much on whether Gamache will overcome his demons as on whether his next demon will be his last. 

In The Nature of the Beast, 9-year-old Laurent Lepage goes missing after annoying the townspeople yet again with another of his signature far-fetched stories, this one about a monster and an enormous gun hidden deep in the surrounding woods. When the boy’s body is found, the search for his killer leads authorities to the unthinkable: an enormous rocket launcher, expertly concealed, provenance unknown. 

Who built it? How? And most importantly, why? It’s just the knotty puzzler to lure Gamache and his ever-inquisitive wife, Reine-Marie, out of early retirement.

A similar unfathomable horror—the terrorist attacks of 9/11—proved to be a game-changer for Penny as well. Back in 1996, after jettisoning an 18-year on-air career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and winning a 14-year battle with alcoholism, she’d retreated with her physician husband Michael to the Eastern Townships to try her hand at historical fiction. But five years in, she was getting nowhere.

“I realized I was writing for the wrong reason; I was trying to impress my family, my former colleagues—trying to write the best book ever written. The judgment of others has played a terrible role in my life for much of my life, and I became frozen,” she recalls.

Shortly after 9/11, a desultory glance at her bedside table helped dispel her ennui.

“Like most people, I read catholically; I read just about anything. But among my pile of books were crime novels. I remember sitting on my bed looking at them and thinking, that’s it! I will simply write a book I would want to read,” she says.

Those tenuous, post-traumatic days even inspired where she would set her mysteries.

“I was feeling, like the rest of the world, fairly vulnerable and thinking that the world might be a dangerous place, and I wanted to create a place where there was a sense of belonging and community,” she recalls. “The books aren’t about murder; they’re about life and the choices that we make, and what happens to good people when such a harrowing event comes into their lives. It’s an exploration of human nature, I hope.”

Re-inspired by her new direction, Penny tripped out of the gate by shooting for a perfect first draft.

“The danger, at least for the first couple of books, was that I had to get it right the first time. As a result, it paralyzed me because it didn’t allow for creativity, for flights of fancy, for inspiration,” she says.

That’s when her years of journalism with the CBC crashed the party, lending offbeat spontaneity and quirky humor to the otherwise serious task at hand.

“My first drafts are piles of something very soft and smelly. They’re huge, almost double the size of the final book,” she chuckles. “I throw everything in—I have to—and then I edit, because I know I’m good at editing. That’s part of the beauty of having a big, messy first draft, because then I feel like I’m in a warehouse full of ideas and words and thoughts and stories. Then I can just pick and choose.”

Her unique creative process produces that rarest of wonders in fiction: verisimilitude. In Three Pines, clues to the mystery are often dropped casually over café au lait at the bistro, and so subtly that we talk ourselves to sleep wondering whether to trust them, and if they’ll ultimately form a whole. Only a writer with Penny’s instincts could wait until an author’s note at the end of The Nature of the Beast to reveal a walloping fact that’s as shocking as the book’s climax (don’t peek; it’s worth the wait!).

While it’s not a spoiler to note that a serial killer haunts this latest installment, Penny admits she’s not about the body count, and never will be.

“I’ve been on a number of writer panels where people say, ‘Well, when it gets slow or boring, I just throw in another body!’ And I think, that can’t be right,” she says. “I’m not interested in body counts or serial killers; I’m really interested in the why. What would make a real-life human being do something like that? The murder is just a conceit to allow me to look at all sorts of other issues.”

Which explains why the village setting not only appeals to Penny, but may well have been inevitable.

“What always amazes me is, there is a tendency to dismiss crime novels set in a village or rural setting rather than in a city. As someone who lived in cities all my life, murders in Montreal are in the briefs column of the newspaper. It’s always tragic but it’s not horrific; it’s not a shock, it doesn’t set the whole community on edge,” she says. “But a murder in a tight-knit community? How big of a violation is that? Not only has a person’s life been taken, but your whole sense of security has been taken. And knowing that someone you know was murdered and someone you know did it? How horrific is that?”

Although Penny had a brief brush with cinema, serving as a consultant and executive producer on the 2013 film version of her first Gamache novel, Still Life, she’s an admittedly poor candidate to go Hollywood anytime soon.

“I don’t know about films. I was involved, but I’m not anymore, by my own choice. While they did consult me, they did not take a great deal of what I said; there was no onus on them to take anything to heart, and I found that very difficult,” she recalls.

Nor should readers expect any non-Gamache standalones. Penny readily admits she has found the perfect cast and setting to accomplish her primary goal as a mystery writer.

“I want the reader to care, and if you don’t care, why bother? I want the books and characters to follow the reader for days or weeks after,” she says. 

“I want to try to bring down the fourth wall, to where they feel they’re actually sitting in the bistro listening to the conversation; they can smell the wood smoke and taste the café au lait and feel what the characters are feeling. I think if someone just reads my book with their head, they’re missing probably two-thirds of the book. You have to absorb it through your heart.”

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Woe be unto the free-range American reader who casually picks up any of Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache mysteries, set in the French-Canadian village of Three Pines, expecting a “Murder, She Wrote”-style cozy. The author erupts at the mere suggestion.
Interview by

The premise of Dean Koontz’s mesmerizing new psychological thriller, Ashley Bell, is compelling but not complex: When doctors inform 22-year-old Southern California surfer girl and budding novelist Bibi Blair that inoperable brain cancer will shorten her life to a matter of months, she replies, “We’ll see.”

Bibi’s fate seems sealed until a mystery man with a golden retriever (Koontz and his beloved Trixie?) appears at her hospital bedside in the middle of the night and quotes a snippet of Henry David Thoreau in passing: “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

The incident sparks a miraculous recovery. Bibi’s subsequent meeting with a fortune-telling masseuse convinces her that she’s been spared specifically to save the life of someone else, someone named Ashley Bell. Strap in and hold on as this determined surfer “walks the board” to suss out the whos, hows and whys of her improbable reprieve. 

Readers will savor the most stunning experience yet from a writer who specializes in surprises.

So far, all that sounds like classic Koontz, right? But through an equally unlikely turn of events in the crafting of Ashley Bell, what readers can now savor is arguably the most stunning, flat-out crazy reading experience yet from a writer who specializes in surprises.

If you’ve ever wondered how much fun it would be to feel a book unfold in real time along with its characters, you need to read Ashley Bell right now.

Koontz’s wild ride began with a friend who had been diagnosed with gliomatosis cerebri, a rare, fatal brain cancer. After reading a letter from his pal, who had already outlived his doctor’s one-year prediction by a year, Koontz wondered, “Wouldn’t it be nice to write a story in which somebody is doomed to this but isn’t doomed to it after all?” To take his personal feelings out of play, he cast a surfer girl in the lead, while setting the story in his hometown of Newport Beach.

“The moment I heard her character say, ‘We’ll see’ in my head, Bibi became nearly complete to me,” Koontz recalls. “I realized she would be somebody who almost likes the sharp edges of life and leans into them.”

Koontz was initially stumped by the tougher task of figuring out how Bibi might escape the medically inevitable until the answer absolutely “hammered and prosecuted” him, to use surfer speak.

“The big reveal in the book came to me, and I was like a child; I was basically jumping up and down in my chair!” Koontz says. “And I thought, this is going to be a wonderful thing for people to get to, but how do you make it real? I couldn’t wait to start it.”

It’s no big reveal that there will be no big reveal here. When a writer has managed to catch this kind of lightning in a bottle, every reader should experience the full jolt.

Chapter by chapter, Koontz watched as Ashley Bell coalesced around an existential, philosophical difference between Bibi and her hippie parents, Murph and Nancy. 

“It’s the idea of free will versus fate; Bibi believes she will make her own life, and her parents believe that fate determines what happens. Then it becomes perfectly natural for her to use her free will to find her way through this,” he says. “But I also realized that it was going to be about deception, self-deception and imagination.”

Especially imagination. Along the way, Koontz salts Bibi’s journey with a sweeping assortment of characters, some of whom threaten to shoplift the narrative and take it home. They include Bibi’s fiancé, Pax, a Navy SEAL on his last covert mission; her childhood bestie Pogo, who’s something of a surfer Yoda; hospital security guard Chubb Coy, a stalking Mr. Toad menace who quotes Jack London and Thornton Wilder; and a parade of horrific Wrong People who threaten to end her journey at every turn.

Koontz takes particular delight in skewering literary academia with the character of Solange St. Croix, a spiteful doyenne whose utter disdain for Bibi’s writing gifts makes her the meanest witch in the faculty lounge. For Koontz, who wrote his own way out of a career as a Pennsylvania English teacher decades ago, it’s not academia per se that’s troubling; it’s the limiting perspective.

“I’m not sure it’s a good thing that so many writers are going to school to become writers. When I became a writer, people like John D. MacDonald and a lot of writers I admired never went to school to be writers; it was just something they wanted to do because they loved books. I’ve often wondered if, over time, the writing programs will lead to a homogenous kind of fiction that isn’t very healthy,” he explains.

His own love of wordplay is apparent in Koontz’s clever twist on the fortune-teller trope. His muddled medium, a loopy New Age masseuse named Calida Butterfly, uses a divination technique called Scrabblemancy, in which Bibi draws Scrabble tiles from a silver bowl. Naturally, one of the phrases they spell out is “Ashley Bell.”

“I didn’t want Calida to have a Ouija board or a crystal ball or anything we’ve seen before. Then it occurred to me that all magic and all forms of belief are based on words—the idea that words have power and were at the root of everything that came to be,” he recalls. “Scrabblemancy makes more sense than having a little pointer on a board full of letters.”

To ground firmly in the here-and-now what might otherwise seem an ethereal journey, Koontz conjured one Birkenau Terezin, a neo-Nazi cult leader whose corporate minions terrorize Bibi.

“In my lifetime, I’m watching anti-Semitism return to the world stage in a major, very spooky way. I think it’s a bigger issue now in many places in the world than it was in the 1930s or ’40s,” Koontz says. “So it seemed logical, if you were going to reach for a villain in a book like this, Terezin would be the guy who is very suitable to our time. And the book wants to be very contemporary. I made every effort to keep everything in it very much of this period we’re living through without beating a lot of drums about it.”

Once Koontz caught a whiff of the uncharted magical reality he was creating in Ashley Bell, the question of the big twist began to weigh on him. Was he concerned that some readers wouldn’t make the leap to the third act?

“In any story where there are big surprises, I always feel the reader has to be able to go back and say, my God, it was right in front of me all the time! But in this case, I realized that’s not going to be enough.”

“In any story where there are big surprises, I always feel the reader has to be able to go back and say, my God, it was right in front of me all the time! That makes it fair. But in this case, I realized that’s not going to be enough,” he says. “With this book, the reveal is not just an intellectual thing; it’s an emotional thing. That way, when the reader starts reading it and is trying to get their head around it, they have a feeling that it makes sense. The two together make this thing go down in a way I don’t know that it would have otherwise.”

For once, Koontz, as the author, is sharing a surprise usually reserved for his readers.

“This book is about imagination; I think that’s what allows it to feel like it’s almost unfolding in real time as you’re reading it,” he says. “Bringing those many threads together gradually came easier than I would have ever imagined. The characters allowed me to do it. They showed me the way and it was exhilarating.”

 

This article was originally published in the December 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The premise of Dean Koontz’s mesmerizing new psychological thriller, Ashley Bell, is compelling but not complex: When doctors inform 22-year-old Southern California surfer girl and budding novelist Bibi Blair that inoperable brain cancer will shorten her life to a matter of months, she replies, “We’ll see.”

Interview by

Debut thrillers tend to fall into two categories: the perfectly plotted handshake that introduces us to the promise of a series to follow and, very rarely, the unexpected high dive that turns convention on its head, dazzling us with its sheer audacity.

Count Gina Wohlsdorf’s Security among the high-board thrillers, both for its narrative daring and successful weaving of horror, humor and Fifty Shades of Grey hotness into one unforgettable reading experience.

We enter the luxurious 20-story Manderley Resort in Santa Barbara less than 24 hours before its grand opening. Tessa, the general manager, rides roughshod over housekeeping, front desk and food & bev on the lower 19. The 20th floor remains off-limits to all but the resort’s elite security team, which monitors a state-of-the-art security system specifically designed to protect the world’s one-percenters.

But behind this behind-the-scenes, pre-grand opening frenzy lurks a masked killer who is systematically retiring the help, one by one, in gruesome ways.

Why the carnage? And who’s narrating this grim tale? Wohlsdorf offers clues in the chapter headings, which simply consist of security camera numbers. Then, less than 20 pages in, she doubles the intrigue by splitting the descriptive narrative briefly into two columns. Then three. Then four.

Wohlsdorf breaks into laughter when I admit my first reaction was, “Oh God, no!”

“Yeah, this could go so wrong!” she admits during a call to her home in Denver. “I was aware that it was a really, really sensitive device, and I didn’t want it to come across like a device. Whenever the head of security was seeing two or three things at once, I split the page. But I was aware of it as an instrument to sometimes get something across thematically, like splitting the page between a very graphic sex scene and also a staff member’s flight—this duality of sex and death, which is classic to the slasher genre.”

And she would know. Growing up in Bismarck, North Dakota, Wohlsdorf dealt with her own preadolescent anxiety by immersing herself in the big-screen mayhem of such cinema slashers as Halloween’s Michael Myers, Friday the 13th’s Jason Voorhees and Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger. Little did she realize that life would soon nudge her into exploring horror from a whole new perspective: her own.

“When I was 13, I got hit by a car going a good 30 miles per hour; it whacked me into the gutter and broke my upper arm clean in half. I looked up from the gutter and just started screaming, and people came to help,” she recalls. “As I was lying there, I suddenly realized: This is what you’ve been afraid of your whole life. You might die here, but you’re OK; it’s a beautiful day, the sun is out, birds are singing and that’s awesome. Lying in the gutter, I realized, you know, it’s really ridiculous how much time you’ve wasted being scared when this is it—you’re here and you’re fine.”

Several years later, she took her first stab at writing a slasher novel.

“I loved Stephen King, read everything by Stephen King and loved reading horror, but there was no ‘slasher’ novel,” she says. “So I sat down and tried to write one, and I was like, ‘Well, that’s why; that’s awful!’ It didn’t work at all. It just read wretchedly, and I kind of gave up.”

“As a kid, I was always wondering what Michael Myers was doing when he wasn’t on screen. Does he snack? Does he make phone calls or do laundry?”

To her surprise, her page and screen influences—including the Daphne du Maurier classic Rebecca (set in part in the Cornish estate of Manderley) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (with its creepy deserted hotel)—combined to inspire a new horror novel idea. But where to set it?

“I’m notoriously spatially challenged; you turn me in a circle and I get lost, even in places that I’m very, very familiar with,” Wohlsdorf admits. “So when I had the initial idea for Security, I sat down and drew a very simple schematic of the hotel. I knew there were 20 floors and an external pool and a glass cover. So I had a really good grasp of the grounds.”

She knew from experience that her killer would have to be three-dimensional to carry off such a locked-room mystery. She fashioned hers after one of her screen favorites.

“As a kid, I was always wondering what Michael Myers was doing when he wasn’t on screen. Does he snack? Does he make phone calls or do laundry?” she says. “So in my book, the killer is kind of the most human character, because you see him do all of those things. He’s human; he makes mistakes and he’s funny. He drags a liver along the floor like a tin can. Come on, that’s funny! You almost like him. You almost want to hang out.”

Recent public concerns over privacy and security, including Fox Sports reporter Erin Andrews’ hotel stalking lawsuit, provide the powerful subtext that drives Security. And once again, Wohlsdorf’s personal experience helped bring the security fears to life.

“I had this boss I once worked for who was bugging her breakroom. And we tested it, as workers will, and it was very strange to know that she could be listening at any time to our conversations, which she did quite often,” Wohlsdorf recalls. “Why would she need that? I’m sure that her rationalization was, that’s when you’re safe, when you just know everything that goes on. But that’s also when you’re so vulnerable, because that’s when your megalomania can really hobble your relationships. You see that in Security as well.”

For Wohlsdorf, whose works-in-progress include a father-daughter thriller and a “zombie romance,” facing some of life’s darkest fears has opened up more than just literary possibilities. “It’s life possibilities, too,” she says. “Writing’s scary, and trying to make a living is akin to suicide! Being fearless helps a lot.”

 

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.


It’s Private Eye July at BookPage! All month long, we’re celebrating the sinister side of fiction with the year’s best mysteries and thrillers. Look for the Private Eye July magnifying glass for a daily dose of murder, espionage and all those creepy neighbors with even creepier secrets.

Debut thrillers tend to fall into two categories: the perfectly plotted handshake that introduces us to the promise of a series to follow and, very rarely, the unexpected high dive that turns convention on its head, dazzling us with its sheer audacity.
Interview by

It’s been 30 years since homegrown Florida farceur Carl Hiaasen sucker-punched us with Tourist Season, his cockeyed beach-read salute to a state far weirder and funnier than we were led to believe by the works of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings or John D. MacDonald.

In the years since, the Miami Herald columnist has turned out a dozen equally deranged satires, establishing his own sunbaked, bestselling subgenre with truth-in-publishing titles like Strip Tease, Sick Puppy, Basket Case and Skinny Dip. He also managed to share his skewed view of the world with kids, launching Hoot in 2002 (the Jimmy Buffett-produced film version followed in 2006). That series continued with Flush, Scat, Chomp and Skink—No Surrender.

Off-page, he played guitar—badly—with fellow authors Stephen King and Dave Barry in the Rock Bottom Remainders, wrote songs with Warren Zevon and saw Strip Tease transformed into a blockbuster film starring Demi Moore and Burt Reynolds.

In his latest novel, Razor Girl, Hiaasen returns to Key West for another twisted tale featuring ex-detective Andrew Yancy (Bad Monkey), who’s been demoted to island restaurant inspector. Warning: You may not get past page one without a spit-take at the set up for this ribald tale involving staged accidents, mob-backed beach renourishment, a “Duck Dynasty”-like reality TV star run amok—and something called a Gambian pouched rat.

Did you vet that first scene in Razor Girl with your wife, Fenia, and the family?
It was based on an actual accident that had happened in the Keys a few years ago. My oldest son had emailed me the newspaper article about a woman who was shaving her “bikini area” and crashing a car. It elicited some wonderfully bewildered comments from the State Highway Patrolman who had to work the accident. Anyway, I’d filed it away and kept wondering, how do I work something like this into the book somehow? So I finally decided to hell with it, I’ll just start the book with it and see what happens from there, because there’s no subtle way to ease into a scene like that.

Florida being an epicenter of staged accident fraud . . .
Yeah, it’s a big deal down there. We have such insurance fraud in general and Medicare in particular, so there’s no shortage of manpower if you want to launch a scam like [the title character Merry does]; we have plenty of volunteers. It’s amazing what people will do, the amount of enterprise that goes into a crime. If only they could have redirected that energy to something productive.

For the first time in years, you’re no longer a Keys resident, right?
Yeah, we just closed on our place in Islamorada, as a matter of fact. It was painful, but we weren’t spending very much time down there. We lived there for quite a while, then we moved and got down there whenever we could, but it wasn’t enough. And the kids are basically grown at this point; our youngest is starting his junior year in high school, and that’s a pretty consuming year. Our recent family vacation trips are numbered and you fit in the college search, so. We still go down there; we just stay in a hotel like normal people.

The best part of the closing was, the buyers had the walk-through and we have a North American crocodile that lives down there. You don’t see them that much; they’re very skittish, not like alligators. They really stay away from people. So it’s very cool when you see one. So they did the walk through with their Realtor and there was the croc sprawled out on our beach. They signed the papers right away, so it didn’t scare them off. Florida is one of the few places where you have to worry about something like that screwing up your real estate deal. I was pleased that he put in an appearance.

"Florida is one of the few places where you have to worry about [a crocodile] screwing up your real estate deal."

You’re a master at weaving in all manner of Florida exotica into your novels, but readers may not have heard of Razor Girl’s resident rodent, the Gambian pouched rat. Is there such a beast?
Yeah, yeah, they’re real. I’ve never laid eyes on one; I wish I had. I’ve been reading news stories for years about these in the Marathon area, so I started to research these things and they’re exactly as I describe them in the book. Nowadays you can go online and see images of them, and the very first one I pulled up to look at showed some guy in Senegal holding one up on a pitchfork, and they’re huge. In others, people made pets out of them and were walking them like poodles on little harnesses. I just became intrigued that these would make a great foe for Yancy as a restaurant inspector. It feeds all of my perverse literary instincts.

Floridians do tend to underestimate the breeding potential of nonnative wild animals, as witnessed by the python population in the Everglades.
Yeah, these would be perfect python food. The pythons might take care of them, but then what takes care of the python?

Yancy made his debut in your last adult novel, Bad Monkey. Are we talking series here?
I like him. I’ve never had the same protagonist in two successive novels, but I like him. I’m fond of the guy and I felt bad for him. He was a good cop and I wanted to see him press on his case to get back on the police force, so I decided to give him a try to get his badge back.

Yancy’s restaurant-inspector purgatory does have its warped appeal, however.
I do enjoy the restaurant inspection stuff. In Florida, all the restaurant inspections are a matter of public record and you can go online and call up your favorite or least favorite restaurant and read with either glee or chagrin what was discovered in the last rodent feces and pestilence. They count them, even. It was fascinating, so I had a bunch of those files I used. And when I met my wife, she was managing a restaurant down in the Keys, so I certainly had some insight in that sense, and it just seemed like an interesting kind of job to go to from being a cop. At the same time, you still need some cop skills. Some of those kitchens look like crime scenes! If you’ve read Anthony Bourdain’s early books, he just went nuts!

Speaking of nuts, Yancy’s romance with our razor girl Merry is hardly beach-read material.
(Laughs) No; sometimes people are attracted to the wrong kind of people for the right kind of reasons, if that makes sense. I like the character of Merry quite a bit from the very first page on. She had a good energy and kept everyone off-balance, which is something you look for in a character because that happens in real life. You meet people like that. Yes, she’s involved in this scam, but she does have morals and lines she doesn’t cross. Plus, she’s smarter than most of the guys she meets, which is also true in real life for the most part. She’s resourceful and doesn’t let herself get pushed around. I like women characters who are always a step or two ahead of the male characters. Those type of characters end up surprising you as you’re writing them, and that’s great fun.

"Sometimes people are attracted to the wrong kind of people for the right kind of reasons, if that makes sense."

You managed to keep the “Duck Dynasty”-inspired Buck Nance subplot comfortably offstage for the most part. Was that intentional?
Oh God, yeah; especially now. I was writing and some of this was set pre-Trump.

Speaking of Trump, did you sign the anti-Trump petition along with your Rock-Bottom Remainder comrade Stephen King and hundreds of other authors?
I haven’t even seen it, but I’ve been in Montana for several months. I’ve had him in my columns so my position is pretty clear on him.

I take it you won’t be checking the Donald’s ballot box this fall?
Yeah. Selfishly, part of me would want to, just because of the column material I would have. I’ve met him twice; once at a movie premiere in New York, the other at an Everglades Foundation conference at Mar-a-Lago. I’ll look up Stephen’s petition, but suffice to say I’m not going to get invited back to Mar-a-Lago.

It’s been 30 years since your breakthrough novel, Tourist Season. Since then, you’ve had bestselling films made of your books, Jimmy Buffett songs written about your characters and a rock band of literary musicians to occupy your spare time.
It’s mindboggling. Almost impossible to think about that. I haven’t been on stage with the Remainders or touched a guitar in 10 years. I don’t really have an excuse for that. Since my buddy Warren Zevon passed away a few years ago, I haven’t felt the mood to pick up the six or seven chords that I actually knew.

One of your nonfiction books that has earned its own rabid following is The Downhill Lie, about your futile attempt to master the game of golf. Do you still play, if only in vain?
No. I messed up my back and had surgery about two-and-a-half years ago, and they assured me I would be back on the golf course inside of three months, but that’s not the case. I do go back and try, but I get about seven holes and it hurts. Tiger Woods has had the same surgery several times, but it only took one time to put me out of action. It does get to me. I could probably still play a little, but all it would take in my case is one bad shot and I would be back on the operating table. I still love to follow it on television very avidly, but when you have that kind of pain, you don’t need to be asked twice to take a seat.           

Is there a book you’ve always wanted to write? Your great white whale?
No. I have to say, and this is going to sound very unambitious, but it’s always the next book. I do alternate between the kids’ books and the grownup books now, so as soon as I’ve finished one, I’m already fixating on the next one. I think it’s sort of a newspaper mentality: What’s the next story? What’s the next book? I love fly-fishing, but so many great writers have written about fly-fishing that I have no great desire to weigh in on that; it’s been done better than I could do it.

What writers excite you today?
There’s a really great young fiction writer out in Montana named Callan Wink, who just had a book of short stories out (In Hindsight). You read his stuff and you hear echoes of Tom McGuane and Jim Harrison. I think he’s going to be a big talent; he really is a sharp kid.

Will we be seeing Skink again?
I don’t know. I never am sure. They’ve got to be books in which he fits; where it’s logical for him to sort of pop up. The story may come to me. Right now, I’m focused on a new kid’s book, and Skink appeared in the last one of those, but this one is different. My characters go all over the map and it’s like herding kittens to try to keep them confined. I get so wrapped up in that that I don’t think very far down the road. I know some writers who can tell you what their next three books will be, but I can’t tell you what my next three paragraphs will be. That’s just the way I’ve always done it. And all the time, keeping one eye on the news because I’m still doing the Herald column once a week when I’m not traveling. And in political years, that always claims a lot of my attention.

Prediction time: Who’s going to win the presidential election this November?
I think Hillary is going to win. It’s going to be difficult for Trump to carry Florida because of the Hispanics and African Americans. And women; women voters are not fond of him down there. Those are key groups. That’s why Obama won Florida in 2008 and 2012. But our hope and prayer is that it doesn’t come down to Florida; let it be Ohio or Pennsylvania. We’ve had our share of the spotlight.

As if!

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Razor Girl.

 Author photo by Quinn Hiaasen.

It’s been 30 years since homegrown Florida farceur Carl Hiaasen sucker-punched us with Tourist Season, his cockeyed beach-read salute to a state far weirder and funnier than we were led to believe by the works of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings or John D. MacDonald. He's back with a new madcap adventure set in the Florida Keys.

Interview by

Like all powerful over-the-counter drugs, Behind Her Eyes deserves its own warning label. Although you’ve probably never heard of British novelist Sarah Pinborough, trust me: She’s all you’ll be talking about this spring, once you’ve recovered from her mindblowing, genre-bending, breakthrough psychological thriller.

To fully savor this Stephen King Carrie-esque moment, avoid any contact with the growing buzz concerning the novel’s ingenious, to-die-for twist. Rest assured, you won’t find spoilers here.

Behind Her Eyes opens with a classic love-triangle premise. One night in a pub, Louise, a single mom who works as a secretary at a London psychiatric clinic, meets—and shares a drunken, soul-stirring kiss with—a random bloke named David. On Monday, David turns up at work as her new boss. Awkward. Louise then bumps into a beautiful stranger named Adele on a latte run. Adele is new to town and clearly bestie material, but there’s a small problem: Adele is married to David.

“This may well be a Marmite book: You’ll either love it or hate it.” 

Though it may read effortlessly, this story didn’t come easy. Although the novelist and BBC screenwriter already had more than 20 young adult, horror and thriller novels to her credit, Pinborough drew a complete blank when it came to plotting her big stateside break. 

“I spent a week panicking about not having an idea, and that this was the biggest opportunity of my career and I was about to flush it down the toilet,” she says.

First, she narrowed her plot options to an affair. Then an affair with a secret. But that still felt far too run-of-the-mill for a free-range novelist who eschews genre-fication.

“As I was about to give up, I was looking for a coffee shop to work in and they were all busy and I thought, wow, this is never going to work. So I went to the pub and ordered a glass of wine and I immediately got the ending in my head,” Pinborough recalls.

That’s right: Behind Her Eyes sprang to life with a twist on that classic opener: “a girl walks into a bar.” Pinborough’s creative breakthrough not only morphed into the setup of the book, it also set the stage for a story told almost entirely through the alternating internal monologues of Adele and Louise.

“I’m really fascinated with what we present to the world compared to who we really are,” Pinborough explains. “We’re never truly honest because we’re never presenting our internal selves, which are normally filled with self-loathing, anxiety, worry; all the nasty sides we don’t want to show the world. Everybody has secrets, all the time. Even if they’re not dangerous secrets, we all keep secrets from each other.”

Pinborough admits that her surgically precise presentation of each woman’s ongoing internal dialogue, questioning and, ultimately, devious strategizing surrounding the affair was drawn from her own experience.

“I’m going to fess up: I’m a 45-year-old single woman and the veteran of many affairs, as has happened with many of my friends. Relationships tend to end these days because another one has started. We like to think that we’re all faithful, blah blah blah, but life is messy,” she says. “What I’ve realized is that when it’s a dynamic with a married man, the man becomes almost irrelevant and the women are entirely fascinated by the other woman.”

Credit the author with truth in packaging; this tale, including its incendiary twists, takes place almost entirely behind the eyes of Adele and Louise. Why not give David a perspective?

“I wanted it to be about Adele and Louise’s fascination with each other, and if David had a voice? It’s kind of all about him, but it kind of isn’t. It’s terrible: I’m a master feminist and this book is all about two women vying for a man! It’s kind of an observation of women as much as anything else,” she explains. “Besides, men are all so terrible at saying the right things that it’s quite easy to make a man look suspicious!”

How much of Pinborough might readers find in wealthy, troubled Adele or frustrated single mom Louise?

“We all really want to be Adele but we’re all Louise!” she laughs. “The difference between what we like to show the world and who we really are is in Adele and Louise. I’ve given up my electronic cigarettes now, but [like Louise] I was the queen of the electronic cigarette, and the glasses of wine at night, and wanting to lose three or four pounds. I am not Adele, but I think I’ve got Adele’s independence. I’m very friendly but I’m not very easy to get to know.”

Pinborough is well aware that she’s breaking new ground with the gob-smacking twist in Behind Her Eyes. If all goes as planned, her follow-up, Cross Your Heart, and her new YA title, 13 Minutes (soon to be adapted by Netflix), will be the start of something she dreamed about as a restless kid curled up reading Stephen King.

“I’ve created my own genre of female-centric thrillers, which is writing books where you can’t say what they’re about or you’ll give it away,” she says proudly. “When people are surprised, I’m like, it’s there; you just couldn’t tell what you were looking for. You shouldn’t cheat the reader; that’s my one big thing. They should get to the end and think, Ah! I should have seen that! Which is the important point, because I know that this may well be a Marmite book: You’ll either love it or hate it.” 

 

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Like all powerful over-the-counter drugs, Behind Her Eyes deserves its own warning label. Although you’ve probably never heard of British novelist Sarah Pinborough, trust me: She’s all you’ll be talking about this spring, once you’ve recovered from her mindblowing, genre-bending, breakthrough psychological thriller.
Interview by

As a young girl, Edgar-winning mystery writer Meg Gardiner lay awake nights wondering if the headline-seizing San Francisco killer known as the Zodiac might one day drift south to her Santa Barbara neighborhood. Years later, her childhood fears became reality when two neighborhood couples were murdered by another notorious serial killer, the Night Stalker.

“By the time they announced this, it was just a deep, sick feeling that you couldn’t believe you’d been so close to something this dark and massive,” Gardiner says.

“The killings were 18 months apart, so they weren’t immediately connected like he went from one house to the next, but it just echoes and reverberates. Then you start thinking, did this guy literally walk by the bedroom where my sister was sleeping? Did he walk up the creek where I used to play and catch tadpoles before he climbed the bank and broke the back window of these peoples’ houses? It does knock down your sense of security.”

What’s a bestselling author to do with such a gut punch from the past? In Gardiner’s case, she harnessed her personal horror into UNSUB (FBI shorthand for “unknown subject”), a gripping, Zodiac-inspired thrill ride guaranteed to turn nighttime readers into daytime readers. It’s so visceral, CBS has already bought the rights to adapt it into a TV series.

Set in the Bay Area where Gardiner spent seven years earning her undergraduate and law degrees from Stanford University, UNSUB centers on newbie detective Caitlin Hendrix, herself a victim of a similar childhood trauma. Caitlin’s father, Detective Mack Hendrix, spent years as the lead investigator in pursuit of a brazen, cryptic serial killer known as the Prophet, wrecking himself and his family in the process. As the book opens, the Prophet’s trademark symbol is found carved into a new set of victims 20 years later.

For Caitlin, the suddenly red-hot cold case poses an irresistible opportunity to vindicate her father, but at what price? Mack’s entreaties to steer clear are no match for Caitlin’s resolve to capture the killer who stole her childhood.

Gardiner welcomed the opportunity to dive into a new world with a female detective at the helm, a nice fit alongside her other two successful series featuring feisty freelance journalist Evan Delaney (China Lake) and forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett (The Dirty Secrets Club). In addition to researching unsolved murder cases and speaking with psychiatrists and investigators, Gardiner had to take a journey back in time to put herself in Caitlin’s shoes.

“It is fiction, but I’m drawing from the idea of how a case would have been handled 20 years ago versus how it would be handled today, with greater coordination and crisis response,” Gardiner says. “You can find all the original files for so many of these real-life UNSUB cold cases and read through them and see how the investigations ran and the frustrations and the dedication of the law enforcement officers. It affected them terribly. I know that some retired cops every year still go to the cemetery on the anniversary of one of the Zodiac attacks and leave flowers on the victims’ graves.”

Bringing Caitlin’s broken, bitter father to life as a central character proved something of a balancing act.

“He is the person who has taken on all of the pain, and that aspect comes out in his character throughout the story. But it’s also got to be a story of him as a father. That’s as much a part of everything as the killer in the story,” she says.

"The Zodiac was the first modern serial killer who really lusted for publicity and wanted to invoke terror and bring it all back to feed his own ego, really."

Conversations with actual law enforcement officers proved crucial to presenting a realistic picture of a family driven to the brink by a psychotic killer.

“It just trickles down to every level. For cops, being able to draw the line between work and home so they can turn off, that becomes difficult,” Gardiner explains. “I’ve spoken to cops who needed to switch from night shift to day shift because the cases they were getting were bleeding over to the breakfast table with their first graders. How do you take care of yourself when you’re responsible for taking care of the community?”

While it would have been accurate to cast a fellow cop as Caitlin’s love interest, Gardiner added a humorous twist in creating Sean Rawlins, an FBI-trained federal explosives expert who shares custody of a young daughter with his ex.

“It is true that female police officers often do end up in relationships with male officers or another policewoman because it’s so unusual for them to be in this world that they find it easier to deal with someone who understands the job and why they are doing it,” Gardiner says. “And their relationship is fun as well; he’s a bomb explosives specialist, not a botanist.”

While it’s often Sean who helps Caitlin unwind, Gardiner has beaucoup experience conjuring fully formed, flawed and funny female protagonists.

“I’m glad you think she’s fun!” the author cheers when I ask about Caitlin’s humorous side. “She takes her work seriously but she doesn’t take herself that seriously. I write thrillers that are supposed to make you gasp and hold your breath and bite your nails out of concern for the characters, but the thing I would never, ever want to write is something that anyone would describe as bleak. If a character can’t laugh at themselves, then I want them to leave.”

It wouldn’t be a Gardiner book without at least one child in the mix. The author and her husband raised three, and she considers it a must to invoke the joys of family life when writing thrillers.

“People do enjoy families, and you want to have a sense that it’s just a little beyond the tunnel focus of whatever is going on out on the crime scene,” she explains. “You want there to be a larger life that people find rewarding and want to preserve and nurture. I like writing about kids, too. My [grown] daughter doesn’t play with My Little Pony anymore, so I have to find some way to slip that in!”

She grants no such levity to the Prophet however. His sick mind-games to baffle law enforcement prove as disturbing in UNSUB as it was in real life for those who remember the Zodiac.

“That’s part of the intrigue of both reading and writing a novel, to give readers what they want but not in the way they expect it,” Gardiner explains. “The Zodiac was the first modern serial killer who really lusted for publicity and wanted to invoke terror and bring it all back to feed his own ego, really. That still horrifies and fascinates me, that somebody would try to gain self-importance in that way, and I tried to give the Prophet something mysteriously similar to that.

“Certainly, with the Zodiac, who wanted people to think perhaps that he was smarter and deeper than he actually is or was, the cops were all over every possible connection, because there were all these cyphers, cryptograms and references to the afterlife; all these symbols. The Zodiac symbol itself, what does it mean? Did it have to do with astrology? Astronomy? Devil worship? Everybody was starting to pull at every possible thread. In a mystery novel, you want people to wonder what’s going on, and you want to offer ambiguous signposts that let them try to figure it out for themselves.”

Odds are we’ll once again be day reading and signpost heeding in January when Gardiner’s Ted Bundy-based second UNSUB thriller, Into the Black Nowhere, hits bookstores.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo credit Stuart Boreham.

Meg Gardiner has harnessed her personal horror into UNSUB (FBI shorthand for “unknown subject”), a gripping, Zodiac-inspired thrill ride guaranteed to turn nighttime readers into daytime readers. It’s so visceral, CBS has already bought the rights to adapt it into a TV series.

Interview by

Endurance proves a fitting title for the eye-opening autobiography of astronaut Scott Kelly, who in 2014-15 spent a record-breaking year in space aboard the International Space Station as a prelude to one day placing space boots on Mars.

While conducting scientific experiments in orbit, Kelly’s body became one of the key NASA test cases for the effects of prolonged space flight on humans. He was subjected to 30 times the radiation of those of us below, or the equivalent of about 10 chest X-rays each day.

But if Kelly’s prologue (in which his excruciating return to gravity after a year in space prompts him to plead, “Stick a fork in me, I’m done.”) could serve as the ultimate NASA buzzkill, Kelly’s colorful look back on how a New Jersey underachiever wound up putting the “rock” in rocket man is anything but. Honest, funny and frequently hair-raising, Kelly’s flight notes and family struggles, including his painful isolation in space during the assassination attempt on his astronaut twin brother’s wife, U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, really bring this space tale down to earth.

We spoke with Kelly as he drove with his wife, Amiko, through the hills outside Houston, where they live.

Endurance is an unusually candid behind-the-scenes look at the life of an astronaut.
That was my intent, to be honest about it. Hopefully by doing that, it would let people feel like they were part of the experience.

As a wayward teen, you were inspired by reading Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff to reach for the stars. How crazy did that seem then?
I was headed to apply to NASA, but I would never say that I felt like I even had a chance [laughs]. That was what I wanted to do, but also, if that didn’t work out, my plan was to stay in the Navy and hopefully be the commander of an aircraft carrier someday.

What were the best and worst surprises your first time in space?
I would say the good surprise is the view. The bad surprise is how zero gravity makes almost everything harder to do, with the exception of moving stuff that is heavy or getting into odd positions or orientations—like floating upside down to hook up the cable to the back of your entertainment center.

Were you aware going in that your body would become an ongoing NASA scientific experiment for the rest of your life?
Not when I became an astronaut. I knew that the science experiments were a part of the shuttle program, but I joined NASA to be a space shuttle pilot and commander; the science was more a secondary responsibility. I never thought going in that, on the back end of my career, I would be such a large part of a human research study like that.

You describe the headache-­causing, underperforming carbon dioxide removal assembly (CDRA) in the ISS as the bane of your existence. How did you muster the nerve to confront NASA about it?
I think everyone has similar reactions to the CO2 issue, but when you’re discussing stuff like your physical reaction to things, NASA kind of keeps that . . . There are privacy issues involved. I thought that since I was spending the longest time up there at one time of any other American, I had an obligation, not only to NASA but to the public, to let them know the physical and psychological effects of that.

You open several chapters with excerpts from your dream journal. How did that come about, and do you dream differently in space?
When I flew my previous long flight of 159 days, I knew I had dreams in space, and when I got back, the psychologists would ask, “Were they Earth dreams or space dreams?” And I really couldn’t remember. So this time, I made an effort to write them down, and it was interesting. In the beginning, they were more like Earth dreams, but as I was up there longer, they became more like space dreams, like I was in space. And as I got closer to coming home, they were more like Earth-centered dreams, which I think was kind of just looking forward to being back on Earth.

Did the ISS come to feel like home?
Oh, absolutely. At some point, it felt like I lived my whole life up there. You kind of forget what Earth is like.

For most earthlings, the one cringe-worthy fact of space flight is the urine-to-drinking water system. How did you adapt?
It’s actually pretty funny because I was involved in it when they were designing and making the system in Huntsville, Alabama, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I went out there to look at the system, and they were making water out of the urine of the workers in the lab, and I drank some and it tasted fine. So I took a bottle of it home and had my ex-wife, Leslie, and daughter Samantha drink it, and they were like, ‘Oh, this tastes perfectly fine.’ But then I told them it was water made out of urine and they got really mad at me, even though technically it was cleaner than what came out of the tap.

You describe being in orbit when Gabby Giffords was shot as a heartbreaking experience.
Yeah, you have no control over the situation, really. I was mad at the guy who shot her. He killed a bunch of people, injured others and ruined his own life.

As someone who obviously has it, what is “the right stuff”?
The way I describe this is, I’m a below-average person doing a slightly above-average job. I think if you are persistent and prepared and don’t give up and prioritize things to where you focus on the stuff that’s really important and don’t let the stuff that’s not important get under your skin, you can go a long way.

With four space flights under your belt, any interest in going to Mars?
Yeah, I’d go to Mars. I wouldn’t go on that one-way trip there’s talk of. It would take about six months to get there. They’ll do it someday. It’s not the rocket science; it’s the political science.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

(Author photo by NASA-Bill Ingalls.)

Endurance proves a fitting title for the eye-opening autobiography of astronaut Scott Kelly, who in 2014-15 spent a record-breaking year in space aboard the International Space Station as a prelude to one day placing space boots on Mars.

Interview by

John Grisham’s fans await his annual legal thriller the way a starved jury anticipates free donuts in the break room. Through 30 novels, the master behind such big-screen bestsellers as The Firm and The Pelican Brief has kept us guessing about the fate of lawyers in love and peril.

Still, even the seasoned author was surprised to find the plotlines of his latest thriller popping up in the news as he was bringing them to life in his arresting new tort-ture tale, The Rooster Bar.

As the book opens, the suicide of third-year law school student Gordy shocks friends Mark, Todd and Zola into realizing that they’ve been suckered into acquiring six-figure student loan debt to attend the third-tier, for-profit Foggy Bottom Law School in Washington, D.C. Not only is the school so mediocre that its graduates stand only a 50-50 chance of passing the bar exam, but according to Gordy’s parting notes, it’s one of a chain owned by Hinds Rackley, a New York hedge-fund manager who also happens to own the very bank that will collect on their student loans.

Disheartened and desperate, the trio forgo their last semester of law school, assume false identities and form the bogus law firm Upshaw, Parker & Lane (short for ­Unlicensed Practice of Law), a high-stakes gamble designed to sustain them until they can win back their futures by exposing Rackley’s scam. To complicate matters, Zola’s immigrant family is simultaneously being deported to Senegal.

Student debt? For-profit schools? Brazen billionaires? Immigration issues? Grisham had no inkling when he started the book that its themes would soon play out on MSNBC.

“This story goes back two or three years when I read an article in the Atlantic called ‘The Law-School Scam’ that I was fascinated by, because I was not aware that we had such institutions as for-profit law schools in this country,” Grisham says by phone from his office in Charlottesville, Virginia. “I was stunned and became captivated by the issue.”

Intrigued, the former lawyer visited a few law schools. In one public law school, every third-year student carried debt, the average being $75,000. In another top-tier school, a third of students graduated without debt, but for the two-thirds who had debt, the average was $260,000.

“It’s astonishing, and the amounts were even greater when you combine grad school and undergrad,” he says. “Once they’re out, they can’t afford to start a family . . . to buy a house or a car. They’re mired into this unbelievable debt that’s choking them.”

While rare, some debt-strapped students choose the risky track Grisham’s fictional trio takes and hustle clients without a license in hospital and court waiting rooms.

“I always worry about the story as I’m writing it—how much of this can I make plausible and believable—and it’s probably a bit implausible that they would go to this extreme to actually set up a law firm with business cards and fake names,” Grisham admits. “But if you’ve ever been through the suicide of a friend, it really can knock you off your stride; it’s not something that you can deal with easily. That’s why I introduced the tragedy of Gordy’s death, to kind of push these guys over the edge.”

Grisham targets sky-high student debt in an intriguing thriller that parallels real-life events.

He had no such challenge bringing Hinds Rackley to life; news reports did that for him. “Trump loves these for-profit schools. He couldn’t make one go. . . . He tried . . . and it crashed,” Grisham says. “But with the Department of Education now, you can’t walk in Congress for all the lobbyists hired by the for-profit college industry. They have tons of money, and they’re getting whatever they want because they have all the money. It’s a rotten system.”

Likewise, Zola’s DACA-esque immigration battle parallels real-life events. “The more I wrote about Zola and her family, the more I really enjoyed that subplot,” he says. “And then I had the benefit of Trump taking office in January, and with all the anti-immigration stuff and the ramped-up ICE raids, that just fell into my lap.”

Grisham was a practicing lawyer when he attained superstardom with the release of The Firm, which became the bestselling novel of 1991. He now has more than 300 million books in print worldwide, including novels, short stories, nonfiction and a children’s series.

Though he was taken with the cutting-edge storylines he rather presciently wove together in The Rooster Bar, Grisham says he felt compelled to make one adjustment.

“I set the book in 2014 and not 2017, because the bubble is bursting with these for-profit law schools because they’re too expensive, they’re not any good, you can’t pass the bar, and you can’t find a job,” he says. “It’s not sustainable because of the job market. That’s why we’re watching it blow up.”

Without revealing the book’s ingenious ending, suffice it to say that Mark, Todd and Zola ironically reveal themselves to be exactly the kind of creative, caring problem-solvers and risk-takers that the best lawyers are made of.

“Well, that’s the beauty of fiction!” Grisham chuckles. “At some point, you suspend disbelief and you make them a whole lot smarter and a whole lot luckier than they really should be. That’s when storytelling kicks in. Of course, they’re your heroes and you want them to succeed. Even though they’re doing some bad things and breaking a bunch of laws, you’re on their side. Let’s just say they’re smart and they’re lucky.”

 

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

(Author photo by Billy Hunt.)

John Grisham’s fans await his annual legal thriller the way a starved jury anticipates free donuts in the break room. Still, even the seasoned author was surprised to find the plotlines of his latest thriller popping up in the news as he was bringing them to life in his arresting new tort-ture tale, The Rooster Bar.

Interview by

In suspense fiction, as in life, things aren’t always as they appear. We view events through similar, although by no means identical, lenses. And therein lies the fun, both between the covers of The Woman in the Window, the new year’s most audacious psychological suspense debut, and in the intriguing, real-life turn of the table by its pseudonymous author, A.J. Finn.

As The Woman in the Window opens, we meet Dr. Anna Fox, a New York child psychologist turned thoroughly modern mess following her unexplained separation from her husband and daughter 11 months prior. Now an agoraphobic, voyeuristic shut-in, Anna whiles away the days within her Manhattan brownstone, wineglass in hand, monitoring her park-side neighbors through her digital camera, binge-watching classic movies (Rear Window, anyone?) and counseling other agoraphobics online.

Then Anna observes and reports to police a shocking act of violence at the residence of a new neighbor. Did she imagine it? Can police (and the reader) trust her interpretation of the event? Suffice to say, the plot twists that follow blow the roof off her carefully insulated world.

While fans of Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train and Alfred Hitchcock’s films will feel right at home in Anna’s wine-addled reality, the unusual backstory behind its provenance bears a touch of suspense fiction as well.

A.J. Finn is actually Dan Mallory, a 38-year-old senior vice president and editor for William Morrow who studied literature,* inspired by his love of Agatha Christie, Ruth Ware and his dissertation subject, Patricia Highsmith. Like many in publishing, Mallory admits he’d fantasized about tasting life on the other side of the editing desk. Unfortunately, timing was an issue.

“It was a flicker in my mind for some time—this idea that I could write something—but [it wasn’t something] that I pursued with any intent whatsoever,” Mallory says by phone from his Manhattan office. “I never wrote so much as a poem as an adult, in part because, for the longest time—probably since 1988 when The Silence of the Lambs was published—the market was dominated by serial killer thrillers by the likes of Thomas Harris, James Patterson and Patricia Cornwell. I enjoyed the serial killer thriller as much as the next reader; I just didn’t have one in me.”

That changed dramatically in 2012 with the publication of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, which ushered in a new era of psychological suspense. "This was the sort of book that I had read and studied, that I might try to write,” Mallory says. “It was only after the market seemed propitious and readers demonstrated an appetite for this sort of literature that I thought to myself, right—if I come up with a story, perhaps now is the time to strike. And lo and behold, this character strolled into my head, dragging her story behind her.”

As Anna made herself at home, Mallory found her overactive, incessantly introspective mind to be a “comfortable fit.” Like Anna, the author has struggled with severe depression, and explains that Anna’s experience with agoraphobia closely matches his own. “Since I wrote the book, I’ve been in a much better place psychologically than I was for over a decade,” Mallory says. “At the same time, I developed a pretty keen sense of empathy. That’s the silver lining of depression, or at least it was in my case. So I felt for this character.”

“‘Is this really plausible? Wouldn’t people shut their blinds?’ NO! No one in New York shuts their blinds!”

As easy as it was to channel Anna, Mallory also effortlessly accessed the inner voyeur of his readers.

“I wrote the book in my flat in Chelsea, and my desk is right beside the window in my living room. Across the street is a pair of beautiful brownstones, and the windows are never shuttered, the curtains never drawn,” he says. “A few readers, on finishing or even getting a couple chapters into the book, have said to me, ‘Is this really plausible? Wouldn’t people shut their blinds?’ NO! No one in New York shuts their blinds!”

But why the pseudonym? This is where Mallory performed his own third-act twist.

“Because I work in publishing, I wanted to hedge my bets when it came time to submit the book,” he explains. “It would have been embarrassing for me had the book not been acquired, which was what I expected. But we submitted the book, and within 36 hours, we were fielding offers. At which point my agent and I said, ‘Right, it’s time for me to come clean and introduce myself as myself, so they know what they’re getting into.’ Happily, no one backed out.”

One thing’s for sure: The format of The Woman in the Window, with exactly 100 chapters, each no more than five or six pages, is a thriller editor’s dream.

“I don’t know that I consciously tapped into much of my [editorial] experience, but then I wouldn’t need to, would I? Because it’s built into me, it’s baked into me by this point!” Mallory chuckles. “Man, I love a short chapter. This is a technique that I admired in James Patterson’s work.”

Mallory’s success with his debut thriller, which sold in September for a rumored seven figures and will be marketed in 38 territories, may have set a record for a newcomer. Having successfully jumped the table from editor to author, Mallory bid farewell to William Morrow in December to craft his next psychological thriller, set in San Francisco.

Until then, we’ll start closing our blinds.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

*The original version of this interview stated that Mallory obtained a doctorate at Oxford. A February 2019 article in the New Yorker revealed that this was not true and alleged that several other aspects of Mallory's biography had been falsified. 

In suspense fiction, as in life, things aren’t always as they appear. We view events through similar, although by no means identical, lenses. And therein lies the fun, both between the covers of The Woman in the Window, the new year’s most audacious psychological suspense debut, and in the intriguing, real-life turn of the table by its pseudonymous author, A.J. Finn.

Interview by

Taut, brutal and filled with author Walter Mosley’s trademark mix of imperfect winners and losers, Down the River Unto the Sea introduces a new hero: the complicated and endearing New York detective Joe King Oliver.

It’s a name that may catch the eye of Louis Armstrong fans: Band leader Joe “King” Oliver famously taught the jazz legend. Three pages into this fast-moving jazz solo of a noir, Mosley’s riffs on contemporary life will have you as hooked as Armstrong’s fans were on his mind-bending improvisations a century ago.

“To write about someone who has the name of Louis Armstrong’s mentor is . . . kind of wonderful. That was just fun,” Mosley says. “[Joe] may be around for a while, who knows.”

Sixty-six-year-old Mosley, who began writing at age 34, burst out of the gate with his 1990 Shamus Award-winning debut, Devil in a Blue Dress. Set in the Watts neighborhood in late-1940s Los Angeles and featuring the hard-drinking private eye Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, Devil also became a successful film featuring Denzel Washington as Easy and Don Cheadle as his sidekick, Mouse. The series, now 14 books deep, has worked its way to 1968 with Charcoal Joe, which was released in 2016.

Mosley readily admits his compelling and timeless examination of the African-American experience has benefited as much from timing as technique. “One of the bad things about America, and I benefit from it, is that whenever you’re telling a real story about a black person or a group of black people in America, it probably hasn’t been written,” Mosley says. “Easy Rawlins is that detective.”

However, Mosley says, “It’s not like it hasn’t been done.” He acknowledges his thematic contemporaries, Chester Himes, author of Cotton Comes to Harlem, and Ishmael Reed, author of The Last Days of Louisiana Red. “But Easy Rawlins was a new character, and Mouse was a new character, and Leonid McGill was a new character. It’s so interesting for me, writing these stories.”

And Joe is definitely a new character. On the inspiration behind Joe’s backstory, Mosley says, “There are so many conflicts between authority and people who have been disenfranchised in some way.” Mosley muses that Down the River Unto the Sea reflects a broad view of marginalized Americans. “How does one live in a world where half the people in prison are people of color, and they don’t represent nearly that percentage of the population?”

Recent conversations around racial prejudice in both the justice system and media inspired Mosley to create a character forced to walk between authority, as a detective and former police officer, and guilt, as a man falsely charged with sexual assault.

When we meet Joe King, he is depressed and ruminating on a host of conflicts in his sleepy PI agency. The former detective was one of the NYPD’s top investigators until he was dispatched to arrest an alluring car thief. When, much to Joe’s surprise, his investigation led to a sexual encounter with the woman in question, he found himself framed, arrested and sentenced to Rikers Island, where he spent nine months.

“Joe is a pretty good guy in a world that’s not quite up to his standards.”

In the decade since Joe’s near-fatal stay in Rikers Island, he has had to rebuild his life and reclaim his sexuality after it was used against him. Mosley explains, “For me, there is no conflict between wanting to do what’s right and having a healthy libido.”

The dark cloud surrounding Joe’s past begins to lift when he receives a mysterious card from the woman who ended his career. Suddenly, his worst suspicions are confirmed—the shadowy forces who moved so effectively to frame and nearly kill him intend to complete the job.

Mosley says,“Joe is a pretty good guy in a world that’s not quite up to his standards.” Once he discovers the truth, Joe vows to clear his name with the help of his teenage daughter and office assistant, Aja-Denise.

Long the creator of hard-boiled and hard-loving detectives, Mosley also admits that gender and equality issues have impacted character relationships in Down the River Unto the Sea.

One of those relationships is Joe’s loving—if sometimes misguided—bond with his daughter, who is grappling with her own issues even as Joe does his best to protect her from the cruel realities of the world. Mosley says, “The thing that he does right is, he loves her. And that’s what she needs.”

Joe’s quest for truth also involves his violent yet loyal partner, Melquarth “Mel” Frost, and an unexpected client—Frankie Figures, aka A Free Man, a black militant journalist condemned to death for killing two police officers under similarly suspect circumstances. According to A Free Man’s friends and followers, the journalist had discovered cops trafficking in drugs and prostitution in some of New York’s roughest neighborhoods.

As Joe begins to uncover what really happened, Mosley paints a complex portrait of law and order. “You’re living in a world that’s moving on, it’s leaving most people behind, and the thing to figure out is, what does that mean? Where are we going? And I don’t know.”

Assisted by Aja-Denise, Joe and Mel blaze through the boroughs, collecting clues from Mosley’s fully drawn and delightfully unlikely assemblage of characters, with two lives hanging in the balance.

With all the conspiracies, relationships and self-discovery lining the pages of Down the River Unto the Sea, Mosley admits enjoying a character willing to bend the rules.

“The mystery of it is inside Joe himself: What will he do? How does he solve—and fail to solve—these mysteries that he’s faced with?”

Readers will discover that Joe isn’t afraid to flout the norm. “I think it goes far out of the realm of the expected in the same way that Chester Himes does . . . because we feel trapped by rules. To be able to go beyond that trap is kind of wonderful to me.”

Mosley’s mysteries may belong on a shelf alongside Himes and Reed—but some critics argue differently. Mosley’s work has been drawn into an unlikely debate over whether he qualifies as a Jewish writer.

“There was a big online argument about whether or not I was a Jewish writer,” says Mosley, who explains that he is not religious. “My mother was Jewish, so I’m a Jewish writer. That looks fine. I was never going to get involved in that argument. It’s hard enough to write books. I save that for my novels.”

In addition to his daily writing routine, Mosley spends time in the writers’ room of director John Singleton’s FX series, “Snowfall,” and he’s also working on a new TV series based on his Leonid McGill books and developing a film version of his stand-alone The Man in My Basement with director William Oldroyd. Mosley also continues to tap his passion for jazz as he works on developing a musical based on Devil in a Blue Dress.

All this from a guy who considers himself a man out of time. “I’m very old fashioned,” Mosley muses, “certainly not of this century. . . . The way I approach writing goes back to the 19th century. I’ve published 55 books, and I’m still writing them. I have three yet to come out. That’s what I do. So if you want to know what I think, read the books.”

 

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Marcia Wilson.

Taut, brutal and filled with author Walter Mosley’s trademark mix of imperfect winners and losers, Down the River Unto the Sea introduces a new hero: the complicated and endearing New York detective Joe King Oliver.

Interview by

Just after 11 a.m. on a bright spring morning, wealthy widow Diana Cowper waltzes into the London funeral home of Cornwallis and Sons to plan her own funeral service. Six hours later, she’s found strangled to death in her terraced Chelsea home.

Who arranges their final bow and then gets killed the same day? Baffled, the police turn to Daniel Hawthorne, a disgraced yet brilliant investigator whose uncanny detective skills are matched only by his mysterious past.

It’s tempting to wade into these first few pages of The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz, author of last year’s bestselling Magpie Murders and a BAFTA-winning screenwriter (“Foyle’s War,” “Midsomer Murders”), thinking that you’re about to enjoy a loving homage to the classic British mysteries of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. Then comes Horowitz’s inventive twist: The inscrutable Hawthorne enlists an author whose name happens to be Anthony Horowitz to join him as he probes the case and then to write a book about it, splitting the profits. And voila: This Holmes has his Watson, this Hastings his Poirot.

This literary technique, known as self-insertion, would prove problematic for most novelists. But for Horowitz, stepping into his own tale as first-person narrator allows him to introduce both an unorthodox reader relationship and an additional storyline—and a fun one at that.

“When my publishers asked me to do a series of murder mysteries, my first thought was, how do I do something that hasn’t been done before?” Horowitz says by phone from London. “I began to consider: Could I change the entire format, not only as another way to explore it but to enhance it? So I suddenly had this idea that if I became the narrator, everything changes. Instead of being on the mountain, seeing everything and knowing everything, I’m now in the valley, seeing nothing and knowing nothing. That suddenly struck me as fun—the author never knowing the ending of his own book.”

Once he found his (own) voice, The Word Is Murder took on the high-velocity twists and turns one would expect from a writer who has been wholly consumed with the conventions of classic murder mysteries since childhood. (As an upper-crust kid, Horowitz battled prep school bullies by reading golden age mysteries aloud.) Looking for suspects with possible motives, our oddly matched detectives visit the English seaside town of Dean, where 10 years prior, Cowper had struck two twin boys with her car, killing one and seriously disabling the other. She was charged but released without penalty, which leads Hawthorne and Horowitz down a trail of suspects, including the boys’ parents. Meanwhile, Cowper’s grown son, Damian, an actor whose rising star prompted a move to Hollywood, provides another lead that bears exploring. As does Raymond Clunes, a theater producer whose recent flop cost Cowper her investment in his theater troupe.

Central throughout is Hawthorne, an enigmatic hero who is also a blunt, brutal hothead. The self-insertion twist allows readers to enjoy Hawthorne and Horowitz as they bicker and brainstorm, but it also keeps this classic tale grounded in the 21st century, thanks to Horowitz’s brief asides on social media, Tintin screen production meetings with Stephen Spielberg and occasional conversations with his wife, Jill Green, who is also the producer of “Foyle’s War” and the upcoming TV adaptation of Magpie Murders.

“The whole business of being a writer is almost as weird as being a detective.”

“I’ve always loved books on writing, like William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade, and I’ve always wanted to do this,” Horowitz says. “I even tried at one point to write a book about writing, but my problem was that it was rather dull and not really worth reading. So this is my attempt to hone in on it and make it part of the narrative. Because the whole business of being a writer is almost as weird as being a detective.”

Horowitz’s mix of personal fact and fiction within his narrative is already paying off in unexpected ways.

“The people in England have been looking on Google to see if they can work out how much of the book is true and how much of it isn’t,” he says. “And that’s exactly what I wanted the readers to do, in a way. That seems like a fun way to approach it.”

However, Horowitz admits it was a little awkward to insert his wife and two sons into a work of fiction.

“My wife and children were, to say the least, alarmed that they would wind up in my new book, and quite wary as to how they should be treated. . . . My wife did insist on a few changes to make her kinder. What a terrible admission about our relationship!” Horowitz laughs. “We’ve been married 30 years, so we know each other pretty well.”

At age 63, when some writers are dialing back their workload, Horowitz finds himself suddenly in high demand. In addition to his popular Alex Rider teen spy series, Horowitz has completed two Sherlock Holmes sequels, The House of Silk (2011) and Moriarty (2014). This November, he’s following up his James Bond spy thriller Trigger Mortis, which was commissioned by the Ian Fleming estate, with Forever and a Day. He’s also 30,000 words into a Hawthorne sequel, and he couldn’t be happier.

“The plan is to write 10 or 11 of these Hawthorne novels,” he says. “I have five books in my head already, so that just shows how quickly the ideas are coming. . . . Having been a kid’s author and a TV writer, now I want to be a murder mystery writer.”

To which I would humbly add: mission accomplished.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Jon Cartwright.

Just after 11 a.m. on a bright spring morning, wealthy widow Diana Cowper waltzes into the London funeral home of Cornwallis and Sons to plan her own funeral service. Six hours later, she’s found strangled to death in her terraced Chelsea home.

Interview by

The year is 1921, the start of Prohibition. Mafia runaway Alice “Nobody” James has escaped trouble in Harlem by traveling cross-country by train while bleeding from a bullet wound. Max, a black porter, intervenes and checks the white Alice into the Paragon Hotel in Portland, Oregon. The hotel is an exclusively African-American sanctuary in a segregated city under siege by the Ku Klux Klan. There, Alice meets a host of compatriots who soon become like family as they bond together to search for one of their own, a biracial boy they fear may have fallen into the hands of the Klan.

With her sixth novel, stage actress-turned-novelist Faye, known for her Edgar-nominated Jane Eyre spoof Jane Steele, offers a surprising historical mystery that addresses America’s sexism, racism and anti-immigrant white power movements.

“I always write about something that’s pissing me off right now,” Faye says by phone from her New York home. “I find parallels to what was happening a very long time ago, because I don’t think anybody would be particularly interested if I just stood on a soapbox and said, ‘Racism is bad.’ But if I can set stories in other time periods, it’s sort of like Shakespeare setting Macbeth out of town: ‘Don’t get confused, this is not about you—this is those Scottish guys!’”

Alice’s escape to Portland allows Faye to write about a piece of history that she has long hoped to ponder in fiction. Born in San Jose, California, Faye moved with her family to Longview, Washington, a small town close to Portland, when she was 6 and remained there for 12 years. The move from her racially diverse San Jose birthplace to the predominantly white Longview revealed to Faye a dark section of American history—the Pacific Northwest’s deeply racist roots. The original Oregon settlers envisioned a utopia free from crime, poverty—and any nonwhite persons. Prior to statehood, any blacks who refused to leave the territory were sentenced to flogging every six months. In 1870, Oregon refused to ratify the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed voting rights to people of color, and didn’t correct this error until 1959. For black people, Oregon was hell with only a few havens. One of these was Portland’s Golden West Hotel, upon which the Paragon Hotel is based.

Along with exploring present-day social and cultural upheavals through a historical lens, The Paragon Hotel also allowed Faye to re-create the spoken language of 1921, both in Harlem and Portland. Faye proudly admits to having a passion for historical accuracy.

“That’s why this is a love letter. It’s very much not just a quest for identity but a quest to actually love that identity.”

“Slang is very, very much a part of my research process,” she says. “If you’re just looking through the boilerplate slang of the 1920s, you’re going to be finding a lot of words that didn’t really come into vogue until 1925, -6, -7. That was really the height of the flapper era, and I was not interested in those words; I was only interested in how you spoke in 1921.”

Lacking a lexicon embedded in the arts and music of the pre-flapper era, Faye struggled until she stumbled upon an unlikely helping hand from someone who also knew how to sling the slang. “I was at a loss for quite some time,” she says, “until I attended a writer’s residency for a month down in Key West, Florida. There is tons of stuff from Hemingway down there for obvious reasons, and I found a huge volume with all of his [World War I] war correspondence.” She explains that a large percentage of the slang in The Paragon Hotel comes straight out of Hemingway’s 1918 letters.

Faye also credits her own years on stage with giving her the ear to recognize slang and use it effectively in her fiction. “I’ve never taken a creative writing class,” she says. “I was trained as an actor and worked as a professional stage actor for 10 years, and I was also trained as a singer, and there’s a real lilt in the ’20s stuff. I think that the rhythm of it is almost as important as some of the words. Even where they’re talking about very serious things, there’s this glib overtone to where they’re even replacing words with almost nonsense words. It’s fascinating.”

To voice the Portland perspective, Faye created Blossom Fontaine, the Paragon’s residential club chanteuse, whose sultry, outgoing stage personality belies the inner turmoil and discomfort she and many of her friends feel about America’s history of racism and sexism.

“In the case of Blossom, whose life has been defined by what society says, the question of who she is has been so important her whole life that when she meets Nobody, who has been taking advantage of hiding in plain sight, it’s such an asset to her,” Faye says. “Nobody lived in such a dangerous environment that she didn’t spend a lot of time really sitting down and defining herself. Blossom, on the other hand, has been so assertive and determined about who she is and so locked into a system. You’ve got two women who are coming at it from completely different directions. That’s why this is a love letter. It’s very much not just a quest for identity but a quest to actually love that identity.”

Will we see a sequel to The Paragon Hotel?

“I would love to say yes, but I never really know. So far, this is a standalone, but I wouldn’t rule it out,” Faye replies. “However, at the moment, what I’m working on is turning Hamlet into a modern-day crime novel. The working title? The King of Infinite Space. I’m very excited about it.”

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Anna Ty.

With her sixth novel, stage actress-turned-novelist Faye, known for her Edgar-nominated Jane Eyre spoof Jane Steele, offers a surprising historical mystery that addresses America’s sexism, racism and anti-immigrant white power movements. 

Interview by

English teacher Clare Cassidy is deeply troubled after the murder of fellow teacher and friend Ella Elphick. Ella’s death eerily mimics the plot of Clare’s favorite Victorian ghost story, “The Stranger,” by author R.M. Holland, whose historic home remains a landmark on the school’s campus. When Clare seeks solace in her daily diary, she finds a chilling message written by another hand: “Hallo, Clare. You don’t know me.” When another teacher is found slain, this time inside the notorious Holland House, Detective Sergeant Harbinder Kaur believes Clare is the link between the two deaths, prompting the teacher and her teenage daughter, Georgia, to flee Sussex on a sleeper train to Scotland.

Griffiths, the bestselling author of the Ruth Galloway and Magic Men mystery series, wisely chose to set her first standalone mystery on a campus similar to West Dean College in West Sussex, where she teaches creative writing.

“I love gothic fiction and Victorian stuff, but I wanted to set the book somewhere very everyday as well, somewhere that can bridge the everyday and the more spooky and surreal,” she explains by phone from her home in Brighton. “That’s why I chose an ordinary school.”

Every gothic tale needs a creepy building, and the mysterious Holland House—which is rumored to be the site of a murder at Holland’s own hand—has its roots in two vintage homes from Griffiths’ life, one an art patron’s home that now houses part of West Dean College, the other on the grounds where Griffiths attended secondary school in Sussex. “It happened to be in a very old building that was meant to be haunted,” she says. “And being a Catholic school, it was of course haunted by a spooky nun.”

Much like the presence of an ominous manor, the diary has a notable history in gothic fiction. Consider The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, in which Count Fosco reads Marian Halcombe’s diary and then writes in it. It’s a singular betrayal, a breach of an intimate space—and a clear inspiration for The Stranger Diaries. Griffiths, who has kept a diary since she was 11, admits that her ongoing fascination with the practice provided the tool that knit her mystery together with alternating first-person narration from Clare, Georgia and DS Kaur.

“Why do people keep diaries?” the author says. “I mean, I’d invite anyone to read mine, but then, why am I doing it? Sometimes I’ll put in a little quote and put in little brackets—King Lear, Act 1, Scene 5—and I think, why am I doing that? Who cares? You’re documenting your life for some particular reason.”

These traditional elements place The Stranger Diaries firmly among the finest of modern gothic—but much of the narrative charm that sets Griffiths’ novel apart comes from Georgia’s chapters, which feature a teenager’s often-overlooked wisdom. Griffiths credits this voice to her twin son and daughter, now 20.

“I do remember that feeling as a teenager [when adults] don’t really ask your opinion,” she says. “[Georgia’s] working things out ahead, and maybe some things she hasn’t got quite straight, but she certainly does have a view that they should be listening to. I really like Georgia, and I do feel we should listen to teenagers a bit more, because they do have this wonderful ability to observe things. Quite often my kids have said things and I’ll think, oh my gosh, they’re exactly right! I should have asked them before about that!”

As for Griffiths, who will release her first YA novel, A Girl Called Justice, this fall in the UK, weaving mysteries began at a very early age.

“I wrote a full-length mystery when I was 11,” she says. “It was called The Hair of the Dog, and it was a mystery set in a village in Sussex. It’s lost—my mom kept it for ages, and I’ve still got the beginning of it. Then when I was at secondary school, I used to write little episodes of ‘Starsky & Hutch’ that would be passed around in class, and kids would read them. And because I quite often used to kill Starsky or Hutch (’cause what can you do, really?), I remember that people would cry from them and be upset, and I suppose there was a moment when I realized, oh, you can do that with words.”

After earning a master’s degree in Victorian literature, Griffiths went to work in publishing at HarperCollins and ended up as an editorial director for children’s fiction. While on maternity leave, she wrote her first book, a memoir about her Italian immigrant father. After four more books written under her real name, Domenica de Rosa, she transitioned into crime fiction. “My then-agent said, ‘Oh, you need a crime name.’ So that’s how I became Elly Griffiths.”

Are we likely to revisit the academic world of The Stranger Diaries in a sequel? Maybe yes, at least in part.

“I really had meant it to be a standalone,” Griffiths says. “I think that was very liberating as well, because I was in this quite long-running series with Ruth Galloway, 10 books and the 11th coming up [The Stone Circle], and you’re writing a lot of books about specific characters, and you’ve got them into terrible complicated relationships by now. So I haven’t meant for there to be another [series]. Having said that, I did like the detective, Harbinder, and I could see that she might come into another book, maybe a different sort of book. . . . She felt like a cat you could write a bit more about.”

Elly Griffiths puts a contemporary twist on classic gothic mysteries with The Stranger Diaries, an entertaining collision of spooks and modern manners set in a British high school.

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Trending Features