Alyssa Cole’s work has always had two common threads: a social conscience and a central love story. That combination remains in her debut thriller, When No One Is Watching, as Sydney, a Black Brooklynite, begins to suspect that the gentrification of her neighborhood may be the result of a sinister conspiracy.

What made you want to write about gentrification?
I’ve wanted to write about it for years, in part because real estate and home ownership—who gets to own and who gets to keep what they own—is one of the major forces in American society and the results of the ways in which those forces are guided are often overlooked or attributed to other sources. Everywhere I’ve lived as an adult, I’ve seen the effects of gentrification. One of my first memories of moving to Brooklyn after college was seeing a Black man on the stoop, holding his child and arguing with his landlord, asking where he was supposed to go if he couldn’t afford the rent there. My parents own a home that they’ve put 20 years into but have to sell it due to the absolutely unfathomable increase in property taxes. So, this is specifically personal to me, but it’s also something that is unfair and pisses me off in general which is often a factor for why I decide to write certain things. (Note: I just received a forwarded email from my father, in which one of his friends asked if I had written When No One Is Watching. His reply answers your question too, lol: “Yes she is the author of the book. The book covers one of her interests, gentrification in Brooklyn.”)

When No One Is Watching blends social realism and a strong social justice critique with elements of fantasy and horror. Why did you want to tell the story in this way?
It was a way of processing the emotions I’ve experienced while writing historical romances set in America, and researching and seeing all of the horrible, flat-out evil things done to Black, Indigenous, Asian . . . basically all nonwhite people. Things that were evil in the time they were done were known to be evil, despite what people try to tell you, and were done anyway in the names of white supremacy and profit. There’s a cyclical nature to these things. Fantasy and horror can be a way of grappling with these kinds of overwhelming topics, just as romance can. But also: The things that have been done in America in the name of profit are literal horror stories.

"The things that happen in the book are based on things I’ve experienced, my family has experienced, my friends have experienced, my community has experienced."

There’s a scene in which a recent white transplant to the neighborhood threatens to call the police on Sydney for making her feel “unsafe,” weaponizing her privilege in a way that’s eerily familiar. Did you have anything particular in mind when you were writing this scene?
Amy Cooper threatening a Black bird-watcher with police just to flex her own power; learning that Breonna Taylor was possibly killed because of a warrant executed in the name of gentrifying her historically Black neighborhood; EVERYTHING going on in the news right now—all of that has been a lot. A LOT. The things that happen in the book are based on things I’ve experienced, my family has experienced, my friends have experienced, my community has experienced and things I’ve seen pop up again and again during my years of research. As to Amy Cooper, several of my works, notably my Civil War romances An Extraordinary Union and A Hope Divided, explore how white womanhood has been used as a weapon. It’s something that we see play out every day on social media, with these videos of the “Karens” (a term I don’t like because it cordons these people off into a specific group of evil white woman, when they are just normal people doing what is normal for them in situations where they want to maintain control).

Sydney finds her greatest ally in Theo, who candidly describes himself as a “mediocre white man.” Did you ever consider making Theo Black or multiracial? Or was he always white in your mind?
I’ll be honest that when I was working on this, I didn’t feel like writing a sympathetic white main character at all. I didn’t want anyone who readers might cling to as a white savior. However, though the book is about gentrification, it’s also about whiteness, and I thought that Theo needed to be there to interrogate his own whiteness in a way that many people don’t seem to do. We’re seeing this right now with many white people who, due to an aversion to looking at the reality of things for other people, are just now horrified at what’s been going on forever. Living in a world with so much injustice and only just now realizing how bad it is shows that there has been a kind of walking around with blinders on, but on a societal level. So yes, I did consider making Theo Black or a non-Black person of color, but in the end whiteness works best for this specific story. I also wanted him to be an outsider, not only to the neighborhood but also to the idea of critical thinking about race and how it affects communities. I’ve had so many ideas over the years about how to tell the story of gentrification from the perspectives of Black characters and characters of color. I still want to tell and read those stories, because this kind of injustice is so immense and so central to America that you can come at it from hundreds of angles and have a fresh story every time.

You’ve talked about dealing with burnout and depression and how romance can provide a boost in those times. If you’re willing to talk about that, what are some of the books that made a positive impact on you in the past? What book has made an impact on you this year?
Yes! Some of my favorite recent reads are Wolf Rain and Alpha Night from Nalini Singh, the latest two books in her Psy-Changeling Trinity series. Both of these books, in my reading of them, deal with recovering from psychological trauma, emotional overload and depression through a sci-fi/paranormal romance angle. Rebekah Weatherspoon’s Xeni and Harbor were both sexy, hilarious and emotionally edifying. Courtney Milan’s Hold Me (contemporary) and The Suffragette Scandal (historical) and honestly pretty much everything she’s written. Beverly Jenkins’s Destiny series, and also pretty much everything she’s written! Lucy Parker’s Act Like It (contemporary romance with grumpy hero), and Cecilia Grant’s A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong (historical, and though it’s a bit on the nose since the word is in the title—a perfect romance). For spec-fic romance, Kit Rocha’s Beyond series and their upcoming Mercenary Librarians series starting with Deal With the Devil. For short stories/novellas, I’d recommend Katrina Jackson’s Layover and Nia Forrester’s Resistance (about a couple who meet during the current ongoing protests), as well as their full-length works!

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of When No One Is Watching.

What other books would you recommend for readers who love When No One is Watching?
I’d recommend Victoria Helen Stone’s Jane Doe, about a sociopath trying to get revenge on the man who hurt someone she cared about. Nalini Singh’s A Madness of Sunshine, a super atmospheric thriller set in a tiny New Zealand town where a girl has gone missing. Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay, about a Black-American and Korean-American family in L.A. dealing with the reverberations of a gunshot decades earlier. Two upcoming thrillers people should check out are Rachel Howzell Hall’s And Now She’s Gone, which is full of twists and turns that make for a thrilling read, and Tiffany Jackson’s Grown, which tackles what happens when a teen girl is suspected of killing a famous older singer who’d drawn her into his web.

What’s next for you? Do you have a dream project that you have left to tackle or a writing goal yet to achieve?
Next up after When No One Is Watching is the first in my Runaway Royals series, How To Catch A Queen. It’s about an arranged marriage with a time limit, a kingdom trapped by the trauma of colonialism and a married couple falling for each other and trying to save their kingdom. It’s a play on the Bluebeard fairytale and the laird-takes-a wife trope, with an African highland king.

One of my dream projects is comics writing, which I’ve done a little of and I’m working on a proposal for a project now (I wanted to be a comic book artist when I was younger and love that medium). But I’d also love to write more audio scripts and also try my hand at a screenplay. And also to get back to short fictions and . . . I have so many ideas. It’s overwhelming, lol. So I guess my goal is to be able to write as many of those ideas as I can, in the medium that best suits them, with the time I have. And to show Black women being loved and appreciated in all of those mediums.

Author photo © Alyssa Cole.

After writing Diamond, a nonfiction book on the allure of diamonds and the complexities of the international market and constant demand for them, journalist Matthew Hart has returned to familiar territory for his debut thriller. The Russian Pink follows U.S. Treasury operative Alex Turner as he explores the shady provenance of the titular diamond, which leads him to uncover a tangled web of fraud, crime and possibly treason.

We asked Hart why diamonds continue to fascinate him, how he kept all the double- and triple-crosses straight and whether we can expect more from Alex Turner.

What first drew you to the subject of diamonds, and what made you decide to return to this territory in fiction?
Diamonds are a parallel universe, and its enchantments are addictive. My baptism came when explorers put a drill through the ice of a frozen lake in the Canadian Arctic and discovered diamonds. I began to cover the diamond rush that followed and met people like Eira Thomas, a 24-year-old geologist on her first job. In a race against melting springtime ice, with water literally sloshing around her drill shack, Eira kept drilling long after her bosses had told her to quit, and struck the richest diamond pipe in that rich field.

Once I started writing about diamonds, I was drawn into the arcane world that gives them meaning. Suddenly I found myself visiting places like the bleak and staggeringly rich Namibian diamond coast, the polishing factories of India, the secretive headquarters of the London-based De Beers cartel. In that world, an object the size of a pea can be worth $10 million. It’s a world as much of the illusory as of the real, so it seemed natural to stay there when I turned to fiction.

“[Diamonds are] enthralling because the people who run the business make sure they are.”

Alex Turner is an interesting hero in that he really navigates a legal—and possibly ethical—gray space. Do you consider him an antihero?
If you mean flawed, sure. Alex lost his mother as a boy and grew up with an unloving father in African diamond camps. He was 22 when the CIA blackmailed him into working for them. So he has a pretty chilly sense of how things work. In the pursuit of people who are really bad, he won’t hesitate to cross into the outlaw world they try to hide in. He knows that world as well as they do.

But you raise the issue of ethics, and that’s important. Alex is cynical, but he knows what’s right and wrong. I think the reader can detect that some ballast keeps him even as he navigates the betrayals and treacheries of transnational crime. He loves his daughter, and while evil people can love their kids, too, the reader can recognize in Alex’s struggles with his own failures a man striving for at least integrity.

It seems like everyone surrounding Alex has an ulterior motive. How did you keep track of all the crosses and double crosses (and sometimes triple crosses)?
Oh, boy. I started with big sheets of newsprint pinned to the corkboard, with little squiggles to represent each character and boxes with coded shorthand to describe crucial plot points. Then I’d draw in arrows to show how the characters were going to deceive each other. I would fill in the whole sheet, fighting off my own growing confusion at the tangled mess. In the end I’d tear it off and start in again with a fresh sheet. Same result. Finally, I just waded in and let the characters take care of themselves as I wrote. If you understand their motives and objectives, and you know where they have to end up, I think it’s better to take the deceptions page by page, as the characters advance through the story.

Elements of this book felt very timely, including a fraught presidential election with possible Russian interference. Were you inspired by current events?
I set the book in the midst of a presidential campaign to give the plot two things: one, a ticking clock; and two, a climate of moral warfare. The story takes energy from that weather, when partisan passions are high. In that turbulence, it’s easy to imagine the powerful and rich—already wealthier than ever before in history—seizing the chaotic moment to get even richer.

The diamond known as the Russian Pink is almost a character in itself. Why do you think people are so enthralled with diamonds?
They’re pretty cool when you look at them up close, for one thing, and then there’s the whole romantic history stacked up behind them—the Koh-i-Noor and the Hope Diamond. But mostly they’re enthralling because the people who run the business make sure they are. I’ll give you an example. Oscar night, 1998. Gwyneth Paltrow won best actress for Shakespeare in Love. She appeared on stage in a $160,000 diamond necklace designed by Harry Winston. By the time the night was out Winston had 25 firm orders for copies of that necklace. And that’s not all. That same night on that same stage, Whoopi Goldberg and Geena Davis were also blazing away with fabulous diamonds. But here’s the real point. None of the three women actually owned the stones they were wearing. Every diamond was a loaner from Harry Winston. Basically, the stars were the jeweler’s billboards. Royalty does the same thing for diamonds. They invest the stones with the sacred aura of the divine right of kings. In the Tower of London, the longest lines are at the Jewel House, where the Crown Jewels are on display.

This is the first thriller I’ve read with a U.S. Treasury agent as a protagonist. How did you research that job?
Alex works for the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network—FinCEN—a bureau of the U.S. Treasury. They’re a secretive operation that reports to the Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. I read all I could about them. FinCEN’s mission is to safeguard the financial system from hostile powers and prevent criminal activities like money laundering. The Treasury has very powerful punitive measures available to enforce its interests, such as cutting off a bank’s access to the U.S. system, effectively ruining it. I simply created a super-secret agency of FinCEN—Special Audits—whose agents step outside the normal strictures of the law in their pursuit of the country’s most dangerous enemies.

In the acknowledgements, you mention the Hemlo gold rush and the Arctic diamond rush. Did those events inspire this novel in any way?
A mineral rush is the ultimate quest story. The searchers follow clues and discover the treasure. The Russian Pink moves with that wind under its sails, too. Their aim is to discover the truth behind the jewel, and part of that truth must be where it came from.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Russian Pink.

Are you considering an Alex Turner series, or will this book be a standalone?
I’ve just sent the sequel off to my editor! While I’m waiting for her notes, I’m working on the plot for number three. Alex and Slav Lily are keeping me company.

Paul Vidich’s spy thrillers have snaked through the history of the Cold War, beginning with his debut, An Honorable Man, which was set in 1950s Washington, D.C. His fourth novel, The Mercenary, opens in 1980s Moscow as a KGB agent attempts to defect to the United States. Former CIA officer Alex Garin has been sent to Moscow to make contact with and extract the agent. Here Vidich discusses the compelling humanity of spies and why the Cold War continues to fascinate readers.

First, congratulations on your new book, which is one of the most anticipated thrillers of 2021. Does it live up to the hype in your mind, or do you think the best Paul Vidich book is yet to come?
I think every writer suffers from the useful delusion that the book they are in the midst of writing is their best, which protects their fragile ego from the depressing prospect that their best work is behind them. This is what I know: Every book is hard work. I try new things with every novel in order to challenge myself and to surprise the reader. I play with point of view, with time, with narrative structure. So while every book is a spy novel, I experiment with new ways of engaging the reader. A bad novel for me would be the one where I got lazy.

It is an honor to be on a few of these lists, and hopefully they will bring attention to the novel, but my hope for any of my books is that a reader is taken in by the story. That’s all that matters.

Your novels have drawn favorable comparisons to authors like Joseph Conrad and John le Carré. How does that make you feel, and how do you live up to that sort of expectation?
I am a great admirer of Joseph Conrad and John le Carré, so comparisons to them are humbling. But it is dangerous to be lulled into believing comparisons to great dead writers because there is no way that you can live up to the comparisons, not just because they’re better, but because in death they are elevated to an unimpeachable status.

"Today, the enemy is stateless and violence seemingly random, which I believe makes us nostalgic for the measurable dangers of the Cold War."

What do you think you’ve been able to do in your writing that is unique to the literary spy genre?
My novels are character driven, and while they are plotted and the plots may be complex, the novels explore the difficult moral choices that men and women in the spy business make. Spies operate at the limits of civilized behavior, almost as outsiders, and their work requires them to betray acquaintances, suborn friends and sometimes murder adversaries, and inevitably these highly educated men and women bring some of that darkness into themselves. I am fascinated by that world. I explore themes of honor, trust, truth, betrayal and revenge in my characters, all with a dose of light-hearted fun.

What is your research process like?
Before sitting down to write a novel, I usually do six months of research to become comfortable with the novel’s elements: setting, characters, dialogue, theme and the historical context. Setting is not just scenery or nice descriptive passages, although an illustrator’s eye for a place is part of it. It’s about mood. It’s about the things that draw a character to a place, establish the novel’s atmosphere and provide the yearnings, fears, attractions and possibilities that are available to characters who find themselves at a unique moment in a particular place.

For The Mercenary, I read several autobiographies of high-ranking KGB officers who successfully defected to the West. They are gripping real-life stories of spies that paint a graphic picture of the paranoia, incompetence, intrigues and sheer nastiness of the KGB. I was able to understand the hopes and fears of men who were caught in the Soviet system, and once I inhabited their world, I created Viktor Petrov, a KGB Lieutenant Colonel who wanted out.

I usually visit the city where the novel is set, doing something akin to location scouting. I want to see where the action happened, the routes my characters take from their hotel, where my characters live and what they see when they walk down the street. I also look at old photographs, read newspapers from the time, and along the way I develop dossiers for my characters so I know what type of scotch they drink, or if they drink at all, their faith, speech patterns, the books they read. I try to have in my mind all the little details that make up a whole person. This research then goes into a chapter-by-chapter outline of the novel. Then, I begin to write.

The character George Mueller appears in all four of your novels so far, albeit in varying degrees. He is not the main emphasis of this book but sort of gets the ball rolling. Do you see him as the glue that holds your novels together? Where do you see this character going in your future works?
Jennifer Egan’s brilliant A Visit From the Goon Squad was marketed as novel, but it’s really a series of interlocking short stories in which the main character in one story becomes a minor character in another, and from chapter to chapter the cast of characters changes. The book is more complex and, in my view, more groundbreaking, because of the way she chose to tell it.

Mueller is a major character in two of my novels and a smaller character in the other two. He connects the novels, but because his role is reduced in two of them, I can enlarge my canvas with other characters and themes. I am not writing Mueller’s story. I am writing about men in the CIA in the Cold War. Mueller appears in my next novel, which is set in Berlin in 1989.

Do you find any similarities between yourself and your characters? What traits do you or they share, good or bad?
I was not a spy. I did not work at the CIA. None of my characters are my silhouette. Very little of my life is directly reflected in the book; however, we all see the world through the lens of our own experience. I was a senior executive at Time Warner, and I know how a bureaucracy like the CIA works—men and women with ambition, who game the politics of the organization, who betray colleagues when needed to advance themselves. These things I know, and I use them in my novels.

I place my characters in circumstances that test decency, honor, trust or friendship, often where there is tension between national security and personal integrity, and I see what choices the characters make. I am often surprised by their humanity. I suppose, in a way, that is one thing I share with my characters. The humanity. Humans suffer, they torture each other, but they can know hope on the far side of revenge.

What is it about the Cold War era that still appeals to readers? What is the key to keeping this type of story and this period fresh?
The Cold War gave rise to the golden age of the literary spy novel. Novels by le Carré, Greene, Kanon, McCarry and others put a human face on the Cold War by focusing on the psychological burdens of its characters. Doubt and paranoia bred in a culture of secrecy characterize these novels, as does the sophisticated amorality of the men at the top of the intelligence bureaucracies. The novels explore the strain that covert work places on family, friends and faith—themes that resonate today long after the end of the Cold War.

And there is another thing at work. We were able to measure things in the Cold War — borders, hope, annihilation. Today, the enemy is stateless and violence seemingly random, which I believe makes us nostalgic for the measurable dangers of the Cold War. The resurgence of Cold War fiction coincides with the enormous popularity of current Cold War movies, notably Bridge of Spies, and television series like “The Americans.” Readers can look to the literary spy novel to glide beneath the noise of headlines and see a complex world through the knowing eyes of empathetic characters. The age of surveillance in which we live makes the genre feel contemporary.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Mercenary.

Have you considered writing a book set in our contemporary era? Or is it too soon to go there?
I am researching a novel about the CIA and the war on terror that is set a few years after the World Trade Center attack.

Do you have any aspirations or desires to tell stories outside of this genre? What’s next for you?
John le Carré stayed in the spy genre most of his career, taking a brief detour after A Spy Who Came in from the Cold to write The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971), a pretentious romantic story about a ménage à trois and his biggest flop. He returned to the spy novel after that and stayed with it for the rest of his career.

He discovered in the spy novel a laboratory in which he could lay bare the intricacies of human nature. He once said in an interview: “A spy story is not just a spy story. It can be a love story, a story about engagement and escape, about the search for institutional integrity.” But because it was a spy story, he culled a much larger readership than if he had written about a suburban English housewife. He found that the constraints of genre gave him greater freedom to explore the things he wanted to say. I like to think I am doing the same thing.

My next novel, The Matchmaker, is set in Berlin in 1989 in the months that bookend the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Author photo © Bekka Palmer

When I tell Megan Miranda, “I was in the woods yesterday and I thought of you,” the bestselling author laughs (rather than being creeped out) and says, “I love it!”

That’s because, as her millions of fans know, Miranda likes to have her characters spend quality time among the trees. From her New York Times bestseller The Last House Guest and 2020’s The Girl From Widow Hills to her newest book, Such a Quiet Place, the liminal beauty of the forest—quiet and light-dappled by day, shadowy and ominous by night—helps set the tone for Miranda’s tense psychological thrillers. As she explains in a call to the North Carolina home she shares with her husband and two children, “I’m so inspired by settings in the woods, near water, in the mountains. There’s so much atmosphere in those types of places.” 

In a wonderful 2016 Medium essay titled “Writing the Woods,” Miranda described the woods as “a place where it’s possible to believe in magic. In the myths. In monsters. Even if, all along, there was only you.” That sentiment, with its appreciation for the unknowability of nature and its parallels to the human soul, is a key element of Such a Quiet Place, which is set at the edge of a forested lake in a lovely upper-middle-class community called Hollow’s Edge.

A map at the beginning of the book offers an aerial view of one particular crescent-shaped street dotted with 10 close-set homes and a community pool. Looking at the map, it’s easy to imagine residents gathering poolside for hangouts or parties, dragging a kayak through the woods and down to the sparkling water, or strolling along the street chatting to one another in the evening air.

All of those things do happen in Hollow’s Edge, to be sure, but not nearly as much as they used to. Fourteen months ago, 25-year-old Ruby Fletcher left the neighborhood to begin her 20-year prison sentence for murdering married couple Brandon and Fiona Truett, a conviction aided by speculation and testimony from her neighbors. From their perspectives, Ruby never really fit in (she was younger, a renter rather than an owner, comfortable with being disliked), so the notion of her criminality didn’t completely surprise them.

But since Ruby’s departure, the residents have felt trapped. Tainted by the specter of the terrible murders, they’re unable to sell their houses or avoid the empty Truett house, which is a looming reminder that evil lurks among them despite their security cameras, neighborhood watch program and the popular Hollow’s Edge Owners Association Message Board. 

"The crime is done, the person is convicted, what happens next?”

Miranda cleverly punctuates her story with excerpts from this forum, dispatches that range from informative to petty to provocative. “I thought it would be a really interesting way to show the undercurrents of each character, the things they’re not saying face-to-face but that are still apparent,” she says. 

This is a hallmark of Miranda’s thrillers: exploring the positive and negative aspects of something, then pushing the negative to its extreme. For the residents of Hollow’s Edge, the message board was a helpful resource—until it became a key force in Ruby’s false conviction. 

Ruby has only served 14 months of her sentence when the courts determine that her “trials had been tainted, the investigation deemed unfair, the verdict thrown out,” says the novel’s narrator, Ruby’s former frenemy and housemate, Harper Nash. Just as this news has begun to circulate, Ruby suddenly materializes in Hollow’s Edge, moving back into the house with Harper, charmingly insouciant as ever and bent on, well, nobody’s really sure what. 

“The whole story of Such a Quiet Place begins as aftermath: The crime is done, the person is convicted, what happens next?” Miranda says of this deliciously nerve-fraying premise. “When Ruby pulls up on the street again, there’s no illusion of safety anymore. . . . I was struck with the idea of [Ruby] knowing that the neighborhood had contributed to her conviction. She chooses, of all places, to come back [to Hollow’s Edge]. It creates a really tense dynamic throughout the entire neighborhood.”

Ruby’s return also spurs an important question: Is she the victim, or is she the perpetrator? There are two possible answers, and neither one is good. “If she’s guilty, there’s a killer still in the neighborhood, and if she’s not, the killer has always been there in the neighborhood,” Miranda says. “[The residents] have to reevaluate all the steps that got them there, their relationship with her and their interpretation of events.”

This is, of course, the opposite of relaxing at a time of year usually beloved in Hollow’s Edge: summer break from the College of Lake Hollow, where nearly everyone in town is employed. “Even though you’re at home, these are people who know you from a professional setting,” Miranda says. “There’s really no hiding from each other.” And when the neighborhood’s insider versus outsider designation can turn on a change of mood or a perceived slight, socializing becomes an even stickier proposition. 

As Such a Quiet Place unfolds bit by unsettling bit over the course of just 11 pivotal days—June 29 through July 9, with a much-anticipated Fourth of July celebration smack-dab in the middle—the neighborhood’s convivial closeness that was once a source of pride curdles into something much darker. It’s a whodunit with lots of plausible suspects simmering away in a pressure cooker of summer heat and increasing paranoia. 

Harper realizes that, in the wake of Ruby’s surprise return, she’s being excluded from gatherings, and side-eyed by her neighbors. But she’s afraid to insist that Ruby move out—just in case she really is a dangerous murderer. Anonymous threatening notes with frustratingly cryptic messages only compound her distress. Who’s been watching her, and what do they want?

As the neighbors grow increasingly anxious and indignant about the prospect of encountering Ruby on the street or even at the big Fourth of July party (something that queen-bee HOA leader Charlotte Brock does not want to happen), their polite masks begin to slip, and their true essences begin to peek through. Nature, too, erodes in parallel. “The hidden edges of the shore had slowly been revealed, the roots and mud and dirt and debris,” Harper observes.

Harper’s tendency toward timidity and self-doubt makes her an especially interesting unreliable narrator in an insidiously unstable environment. Often, characters like Ruby take the lead in thrillers, their unrepentant and unpredictable natures placing them front and center. Here, though, people-pleasing Harper filters the goings-on through her lived experience and complicated feelings about the neighborhood. 

This creates an immersive reading experience that sometimes gets frustrating when Harper doesn’t stand up for herself—and extremely tense when she decides to try out some sneaky, possibly ill-advised detective-like maneuvers. Harper’s various calculations and adventures inevitably and messily overlap with those of the other characters, offering lots of plot trails for readers to follow and theorize about. 

To keep track of these myriad threads, Miranda uses spreadsheets, mapping out plots and keeping track of clues. “It’s my methodical approach to writing thrillers,” she says. This penchant for columns and rows may hark back to her past experiences in the sciences. After graduating from MIT, Miranda worked in a laboratory setting at several biotech companies and taught high school science for a few years, too.

Despite this background, Miranda doesn’t consider her transition to fiction writing to be a sharp turn but rather “a completely natural progression, a continuation of things I’ve loved my entire life,” she says. “I’ve always loved reading mysteries and thrillers and consuming stories in all their formats. . . . I also love science and never felt those were opposing parts of me.” 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Such a Quiet Place.

Miranda’s first published books were YA novels, some of which (like Soulprint and Come Find Me) included scientific aspects “inspired by what-if scenarios.” That what-if inquisitiveness has proven indispensable to writing adult thrillers, as well. An experiment is a step-by-step process with many variables, Miranda explains, just like “steps in the process of telling a story. That mindset definitely helps with my [writing] process.”

Miranda also maintains a bright-line boundary between work and the rest of her life to ensure that she’s able to fully inhabit the minds of her narrators. “It lets me get really deep into a story, which is important to my writing in first person,” she says. “I dive in with a character and build up the premise and discover things as I write. . . . I do surprise myself sometimes.”

Certainly, there are surprises in Such a Quiet Place from start to finish—from seemingly minor to decidedly deadly. “I love those little shifts of perspective!” Miranda says. “I try to [include] them in my books throughout the story, those elements that change the way you see things.” 

It’s just that sort of unsteady ground, destabilized by trepidation and doubt, that moves beneath the Hollow’s Edge community as its story comes to a shocking conclusion. Miranda says she likes to “channel [my characters’] uncertainty,” and she does that to fine effect while challenging readers to cast a more critical eye on their own neighborhoods. Perhaps that’s a good way to pass the time until her next thriller, which is sure to have plenty of trees for characters to appreciate (and maybe even lurk behind).

Author photo by Magen Marie Photography.