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Behind the Book by C.S. Graham

by C.S. Graham

Psychic spies. Remote viewers. It sounds like the stuff of fiction. Our latest thriller, The Solomon Effect, features a remote viewer named Tobie Guinness and her reluctant, skeptical partner, CIA agent Jax Alexander. But the truth behind the fiction is that virtually every United States intelligence agency in existence actually has dabbled in the paranormal for decades. Of course, military and government types generally like to avoid admitting they’re spending taxpayers’ money investigating something as woo-woo as clairvoyance. So they came up with their own name for it: remote viewing.

What exactly is remote viewing? Basically, it’s a method for experiencing and describing events, objects, and people from a distance, using only the mind. Does it really work? Yes. Do we know how or why it works? No. But we do know that anyone can be trained to do it, while those with a natural talent can learn to do it very, very well.

My own experience with the U.S. Army’s remote viewing program dates back to the 1980s. By that time I’d been an Army Intelligence officer for many years. Most of those years were spent doing typical espionage stuff like running agents in Southeast Asia, flying into Laos with Air America types, infiltrating and spying on domestic organizations like the SDS and the John Birch Society, and studying Soviet weapons systems. But then one memorable spring day the Army sent me—along with bunch of other majors and captains—for a weeklong course at the Monroe Institute to learn how to have out of body experiences.

Hard to believe, I know. But it was all part of a top secret program that saw colonels and generals attending “spoon bending parties” and learning to walk barefoot over live coals. The U.S. government was obsessed with the idea that the Soviet Union was using clairvoyants to spy on America. Our mission was to find a way to bridge the perceived gap in the “psychic arms race.”

Did we succeed? Well, much of that information is still secret. But in 1995/96, the government officially shut down all remote viewing projects and declassified the program’s existence. Which means that I’m now free to use my knowledge of remote viewing in novels.

Written in partnership with my wife, the novelist Candice Proctor (who also writes the Sebastian St. Cyr Regency-era mystery series as C.S. Harris), The Solomon Effect is a rollercoaster ride of a romp through Russia, the Middle East, and Germany, as Iraq War vet October (Tobie) Guinness uses her remote viewing talents to track down a sunken Nazi U-boat and the deadly secret it once hid.

Yes, this is fiction. But it’s based on a real program that once existed—and may still exist. While all remote viewing projects were officially ended in 1996, the British government recently admitted to using remote viewers to try to track down Osama bin Laden after 9/1l, and there are rumors that American programs likewise persist. It was Major General Ed Thompson, a former Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, who once said, "I never liked to get into debates with skeptics, because if you didn’t believe that remote viewing was real, you hadn’t done your homework."

Lt. Col. Steven Harris (Ret.) and Candice Proctor, who write together as C.S. Graham, now live in New Orleans. Their latest novel, The Solomon Effect, is being published this month by HarperCollins.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Behind the book: An English guy brings an English spy to the USA

Behind the Book by Andrew Grant

by Andrew Grant

I was lucky enough to attend the excellent Murder 203 conference in Connecticut recently, and one of the questions I was asked most often during the event concerned the settings of the first two David Trevellyan novels. Specifically, panel-goers were curious about how I came to base them both in U.S. cities. Specially as I—and my protagonist—actually come from the U.K.?

I thought this was an excellent question, because it touches on something which is very important to me as a fan of crime fiction—that location should be a critical part of the book as a whole, and not feel like it was sketched in afterwards as a random backdrop for the action. I’ve always felt as a reader that a well-chosen and carefully integrated location can make all the difference in the world. There are lots of ways in which the setting can be the key factor that takes a good book and transforms it into a great one. An author can build the bones of a mystery through intricate plotting, for example, and that may satisfy a reader’s mind. But to fully engage the rest of the senses, nothing can beat the sights and sounds and smells of an appropriately exotic and mysterious location. Not to mention that books are simply more enjoyable to read if the location is inherently interesting. I love traveling to new places, and often my first sense of somewhere that will become a favourite destination comes from reading a book that is set there. And I think this sense of discovery can be heightened if the area is first seen through the eyes of a stranger—like David or me—because all the tiny mundane details that merge into the background to people who are familiar with them will stand out so much more clearly.

For me, though, the most significant impact of a good location is the way it can be used to flesh out the understanding of a book’s main characters. It’s one thing to be told that a detective is a smart, adaptable woman, for example, but this can’t compete with the insight you gain from seeing how she reacts to being placed in a brutal, deprived, inner-city environment which might be a million miles from the conditions she grew up in. This is a principle I’ve tried to carry over into my writing, and—while not denying how much I love to spend time in Union Square and Lincoln Park—explains why I chose New York for David Trevellyan’s first adventure and Chicago for his second.

At the start of Even, we first catch sight of David when he discovers the body of a homeless man lying discarded in a filthy alleyway. This initial scene could have taken place in most cities in most countries of the world, but I chose my setting for a specific reason. I wanted David to be quickly drawn into an accelerating spiral of deceit and it was important not just for the plot, but for our understanding of the man himself, to see how he responded to immense extremes of glamour and decay. I also needed these to be constrained by a tightly defined geographical area, and of all the places I’d spent time in, none fitted the bill better than Manhattan.

In Die Twice, David finds himself on the tail of a rogue Royal Navy Intelligence agent. This time I decided on Chicago, because as well as its spectacular architectural gems, the city offers such a diverse range of contrasting districts. It allowed me to show David at work in smart office buildings, seedy nightclubs, prosperous neighbourhoods, and grimy backstreets—as well as stranding him in the kind of abandoned industrial complex that no-one would want to be caught in after dark. I also happen to live in the city, so I allowed myself the luxury of including some of the places I have a particular soft spot for. My very favourite building is the John Hancock Center, so that’s the first place David mentions when he arrives from the airport. I couldn’t get him up to the Signature Lounge—I love to drink there, myself—but he does at least visit the top of the Sears Tower. Though not in a way most tourists will experience . . .

Andrew Grant’s second David Trevellyan novel, Die Twice, hits shelves May 11. Grant, a native of England, now lives in Chicago, where he is at work on the third David Trevellyan thriller.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

The Listening Man

Behind the Book by bookpagedev

Tony Hillerman once inscribed a book to me with these words:

“For Rosemary – Who qualifies for the ‘Listening Woman’ title I once used.

–Tony Hillerman”

That inscription ranks with the most cherished compliments I have received in my life. But much as I love to know that he valued me as a good listener, I have to admit, it was easy to listen to Tony Hillerman. In fact, it was a breeze.

Like so many other people who came to know and love Tony Hillerman and his work, I first met him at a book-signing event. Working on assignment for a newspaper, I figured that while the occasion and the man would become indelible memories for me, I would be sure to fade into a sea of media faces in the mystery writer’s recollection.

I soon discovered that I was, as Tony would put it, “dead wrong.” I could not know then that I would have the privilege of co-editing The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories and A New Omnibus of Crime with this man.

When I was putting together my first book, The Fatal Art of Entertainment: Interviews with Mystery Writers (G.K. Hall, 1994), Tony was on my wish list of interviewees. It seemed a long shot but nevertheless I sat down and wrote a letter beginning, “Dear Mr. Hillerman . . .”

To my delight, I received an immediate reply, inviting me to interview the author in his home on the outskirts of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Arriving at his door after the long trip from Boston, Massachusetts, I again referred to the author as “Mr. Hillerman” as I greeted him.

“Well, Ms. Herbert, you can call me Tony,” he said, smiling. “But do you know, I appreciate that you called me ‘Mr. Hillerman.’ It was one of the things that made me remember you from that time you interviewed me in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I find that politeness refreshing.”

For my part, I found it intensely stimulating to hear Tony talk about his life and work in an interview that lasted for hours, during which he even showed me a manuscript in progress and asked my opinion of a proposed plot twist. Although Tony would have shrugged off any extolling of his own importance, I felt not just trusted but honored to be privy to that secret in his plot.

When Oxford University Press asked me to find an important American mystery writer to co-edit The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories with me, Tony leapt to mind. But I wondered if he could make time for the project. So I offered to do all the groundwork and to write all the essays introducing each story and author. I told him all he would have to do is decide on the final contents and write a preface.

Tony told me, “That’s not fair. I insist on writing my share of the essays. And I’ll do the preface, too.”

And he was true to his word.

More recently, when I approached Oxford University Press to put together an anthology that would begin where Dorothy L. Sayers’ landmark 1928 anthology, The Omnibus of Crime, left off, Tony readily agreed to edit it with me. And so we launched into selecting stories to represent three quarters of a century of developments in our beloved genre.

We both knew it was a tall order to walk in the footsteps of Dorothy L. Sayers, but we were absolutely game to give it a try. To honor Sayers, we decided to call our book A New Omnibus of Crime. But while, like her volume, ours would be packed with stories that have crime at their hearts, our Omnibus was destined to speed at a faster pace than Sayers’, and to showcase crime writing in profoundly changing times.

As Tony wrote in his “Preface” to our book, Sayers’ The Omnibus of Crime “was and is a masterwork and a treasure. But, as Bob Dylan musically warned us, ‘The times they are a-changin’.

“And so has crime and the nature of mystery and detective fiction. . . . Therefore after seventy-five years which have included global warfare, the rise and fall of nations, the advent of space flight, motorized roller skates, crack cocaine, political correctness, and all sorts of other innovations, Rosemary Herbert and I feel the time is ripe for another look at what has become the most read form of printed literature on the planet.”

“How’s that for a start, Rosemary?” Tony asked me after reading those paragraphs to me out loud. Am I stealing anything you want to say in your ‘Introduction’?”

We were sitting side-by-side at two computers in his home office. I read him the opening words of my piece. It was clear we were working in tandem, without stealing one another’s thunder. And I was not just listening to Tony. He was listening to me.

When we turned back to our computer screens, Tony proved himself to be just as polite to Sayers as I had once been to him.

“With Miss Sayers,” he wrote, “and readers of today and tomorrow—in mind, we put together A New Omnibus of Crime. We think it does a fair job of representing the strengths of the crime writing genre in our time. Like her book, we hope it will also stand the test of time.”

While Tony is not here to celebrate the paperback release of our book, I’m proud to attest that his taste, his love and knowledge of the genre, and his voice are all alive in the book that was my very great joy to co-edit with him.

Rosemary Herbert co-edited A New Omnibus of Crime and The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories with Tony Hillerman, and served as editor-in-chief of The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing, all published by Oxford University Press. Her forthcoming mystery novel, Front Page Teaser: A Liz Higgins Mystery will be published by Down East Books in October.

Tony Hillerman created the celebrated Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee mysteries, set in New Mexico. He was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America.

Tony Hillerman once inscribed a book to me with these words:

“For Rosemary – Who qualifies for the ‘Listening Woman’ title I once used.
–Tony Hillerman”

That inscription ranks with the most cherished compliments I have received in my life. But much as I…

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

Characters with secrets—and stories—to tell

Behind the Book by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

In some respects, the germ for Darkness, My Old Friend took hold a long time ago. Its prequel, Fragile, was loosely based on an event from my own past. In high school, a girl I knew was abducted and murdered. The event—a shocking, horrifying thing—reverberated through the small town where I grew up. And I felt its impact for many years. I wouldn’t say the incident haunted me, but my thoughts returned to that time quite often. Finally, the story, or at least a heavily fictionalized version of it, found its way onto the page when I sat down to write Fragile.

During that process, I met Jones Cooper. When he first showed up in Fragile, he was the husband of my main character Maggie and I didn’t think he had an especially big role to play. As it turned out, he was a critical character. The entire book hinged on his past deeds, and how he’d sought to escape them.

When Fragile was done, I was still thinking about Jones. He and I don’t have that much in common. He is an older guy, in his late 40s. He has retired from his career as a detective, and he isn’t totally sure what he’s going to do next. His marriage is under a tremendous strain as he deals with how his past actions have affected his present, and what they mean for his future. He’s in therapy (very reluctantly). I kept wondering: How is he going to move forward? He has this tremendous darkness within him; how is he going to conquer that? What is he going to do with his life? He can’t just putter around the house! He’s too smart, too interesting.

Usually when I have that many questions and worries about a character, I have no choice but to explore him further on the page. And so began Darkness, My Old Friend, the next chapter of the story.

In a safe, picture-perfect town, the very worst possible thing occurred on a bright and sunny day when all was exactly as it should be.

We had to remain in The Hollows, of course, because Jones is part of that place, and it is part of him. This fictional town from Fragile was at first just a place I came up with because it was similar, if not identical, to the area where I grew up—some hybrid of that spot and an ideal town I had in my head. Near to the city but removed enough to be peaceful and close to nature, The Hollows had a hip, picturesque downtown center, safe streets, a coffee shop, a yoga studio. Again, I didn’t think very much of it at first. But it too evolved and became something more than I expected.

As I did with Jones, I came to sense a great darkness within The Hollows. It has a history, a spirit and a personality. It has wants and needs; it has an agenda. It’s not malicious precisely. Not exactly. I’m not quite sure what The Hollows is up to, to be honest. But I delved a little deeper in Darkness, My Old Friend. And I’m not done with it yet. Or, rather, it’s not done with me.

Shortly after I started writing, a girl by the name of Willow Graves appeared in the narrative. All I knew about her was her misery at living in The Hollows; she hated it. "THE HOLLOWS SUCKS," was what she was writing in her notebook when I first saw her, sitting in her English class, bored to tears. Her mother Bethany, a best-selling novelist, had moved them from New York City after a bitter divorce from Willow’s stepfather. Willow was getting into trouble. So Bethany thought that The Hollows, far from Manhattan and all its temptations, was a safer place for her wild child. Little did she know that trouble finds a girl like Willow anywhere, maybe especially in The Hollows.

I had a lot more in common with Willow than with Jones. In many ways, with her quasi-gothic look, and her rebel’s heart, her penchant for—ahem—storytelling, she reminds me of the girl I was a million years ago. She was out of place, the misfit in a small town, filled with lots of self-imposed angst. She was sure that anyplace was better than The Hollows. I felt for Willow, wished I could tell her to just hang in there. And to try, try, to stay away from that dark place inside. If you follow, I wanted her to know, you can’t always find your way home. But most of us have to learn that lesson that hard way, and Willow was no exception.

It’s the juxtaposition of disparate things that fascinates me: Dark and light, death and life, bad and good. The thin, blurry line between those things keeps me up at night, churning out the pages. And when that line exists within a character, as it does with most of the people who populate Darkness, My Old Friend, I am obsessed with it.

I suspect that my obsession with this idea began more than 25 years ago, when I was a girl, not unlike Willow, living in a place not unlike The Hollows. In a safe, picture-perfect town, the very worst possible thing occurred on a bright and sunny day when all was exactly as it should be. I know Fragile came from there, and Darkness, My Old Friend is certainly an evolution of that story. In a way, maybe all my books began there. Maybe I’m still the girl trying to understand all the many different ways something so horrible could happen to someone so innocent on an ordinary day.

Best-selling writer Lisa Unger takes on the dark side of small-town life in Darkness, My Old Friend, her sixth novel. She divides her time between New York City and Florida. Visit her website for more information.

Fiction, Suspense

Fiction Suspense

Ending the ‘Child 44’ trilogy

Behind the Book by Tom Rob Smith

by Tom Rob Smith

One of the most exciting challenges in writing a trilogy of novels is trying to create connections that go beyond having a set of characters return. Of course, there are no rules to writing, but it strikes me that if you’re going to stipulate that there are three books rather than an undefined number, you need to make creative use of that decision.

As someone who enjoys wandering around old churches, whether in England or on my research trips to Russia, I’ve seen lots of triptych paintings. The form offers a way of presenting three images that can be viewed in any order, images which exist in their own right but which are at their most powerful when considered together.

The number three has powerful signals for any writer—suggesting a three-act structure, implying that the books are telling an over-arching story that will come to a satisfying conclusion. But a trilogy is not one enormous novel being split into three parts. The reader must be taken on a journey during each individual novel. Furthermore, since many readers will come to the novels in a different order, readers should be allowed to build the experience in their own way. It must be as fascinating for a reader to construct their relationship to the novels by starting at the end as it is for a reader who has followed them from the beginning.

In the broadest sense, my three novels not only tell the history of the main character Leo Demidov, they tell the story of the Soviet regime, beginning with the Stalinist paranoia and fear, followed by the moral confusion that followed the dictator’s death, which is at the center of my second book, The Secret Speech, and ultimately ending with Agent 6 and the depiction of an empire in decay, expressed through the occupation and invasion of Afghanistan.

Yet beyond historical and biographical chronology, the books within a fiction trilogy must reflect upon each other in some way. With Child 44, I wanted to use the criminal investigation to explore the society in which the crimes took place—not to concentrate on the forensic, or procedural, but to look at the way in which Communist Russia tried to claim there was no crime in its Utopian society at a time when a series of terrible murders were taking place. In a sense, it was about a reaction to the crimes, rather than crimes. It was about one man fighting against a political system that refused to allow him access to the truth.

With Agent 6 I mirrored this approach, fascinated by the emotional impact of a brilliant and determined detective trying to solve the murder of someone he loves, in a time when geopolitics make it entirely impossible to reach the crime scene. How do you live with knowing that the investigation has been nothing more than a cover-up—and being unable to petition those responsible, unable even to set foot in the country where the crime took place? Once again detective Leo Demidov comes up against political obstacles in his attempt to solve the most important case in his life.

Going further, I used the structural device of echoes and parallels across the three books to take very different angles on similar ideas. In Child 44 Leo Demidov is an officer of the MGB, part of the secret police apparatus. Leo witnesses the brutality of the secret police, he is part of its brutality and he turns his back on it. In Agent 6, he is sent as a Soviet advisor to Afghanistan, where he is ordered to help create an Afghan secret police. He watches with dismay and despair as a young idealistic Afghan woman makes the same mistakes he did, becoming a State Security officer in order, she believes, to build a better country. It was fascinating to reverse the relationship that I created in Child 44.

In similar fashion, the combination of characteristics that Leo embodies as a young man seen in Child 44 are found in the American Communist Jesse Austin, a character based on the singer and athlete Paul Robeson, in Agent 6. The two are a curious pair, similar on many levels, both passionate believers, yet whereas Leo’s idealism cracks, Austin’s remains unbreakable even when his career and wealth are taken from him, even when confronted with the awful truth of the Soviet regime.

So, with the trilogy at a close, I hope I’ve created three books that not only stand on their own but also dance with each other.

After graduating from Cambridge, Tom Rob Smith spent time as a TV screenwriter before publishing his best-selling debut novel, Child 44, in 2008. In Agent 6, Smith’s Russian hero Leo Demidov takes on his most personal case yet—one that takes nearly 20 years to solve.

RELATED CONTENT
Read a review of Agent 6.

Read an interview with Tom Rob Smith for Child 44.

Read a review of The Secret Speech.

Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense

Jane Eyre inspires a life—and a novel

Behind the Book by Joanna Campbell Slan

by Joanna Campbell Slan

I grew up in a chaotic, violent household. Notice I chose the word “household” rather than “home.” To me a “home” is a place of solace, renewal and love. None of those adjectives describe the rundown house in Vincennes, Indiana, the dwelling I shared with my alcoholic parents and two sisters.

Although he wasn’t averse to shoves and slaps, my father’s real forte was emotional abuse. “You will never be able to support yourself. You’ll come running back to me,” he told me, over and over.

I worried that he was right. There seemed to be no way out, no escape. Just an endless horizon of more of the same.

My only respite was reading. “You always have your nose in a book,” my mother would sneer.

Books offered a portal to other worlds, fantastical universes so unlike the one I knew that the fiction seemed obvious. But one book, long forgotten at the back of a bookshelf, gave me more than a mental vacation. It gave me hope. It saved my life. It served as a fingerpost pointing the way to freedom.

That book was Jane Eyre.

Through the rough spots—and there were many—Brontë’s heroine sustained me. “What would Jane do?” I often wondered.

Recall, Gentle Reader, that the subtitle of Jane Eyre calls the tale “An Autobiography.” How was I to know that this story was fiction? To me it rang true. I understood being small, insignificant and plain. At age 10, I had unruly curly hair, glasses, buck teeth and a scar that traced an angry path across my right cheek.

“No one is ever going to love you but me,” my father told me repeatedly, his eyes teary and his mouth quivering with sadness.

The mirror confirmed that he was right, and my mother never corrected him.

But I was no longer alone. Jane Eyre shared my afflictions. Lacking the power of beauty and bankrupt in a world where money begets choices, we were often at the mercy of others. Then Jane finished her education at Lowood Institution—and everything changed.

Charlotte Brontë’s classic provided me with an answer to my prayers: I would get an education. Turning the pages quickly, I hatched a plan. I would go to college. I would get a degree. Even if I wasn’t attractive, I could be respected. Although I longed for love, I could settle for a tranquil environment.

Much later I learned that “education” comes from the Latin “educo,” meaning, “to lead out of.” Thus, education led Jane—and me—out of the bleak future predicted for us. At Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, I held down a full-time job, managing a pet shop. In addition, I tutored other students and wrote a weekly column for the local newspaper, the Muncie Star.

Through the rough spots—and there were many—Brontë’s heroine sustained me. “What would Jane do?” I often wondered. The strong-willed orphan became a talisman, my personal lucky penny.

Little wonder that after the launch of my first successful mystery series, the plucky governess came to mind as the perfect protagonist for a new series called “The Jane Eyre Chronicles.” Nor should it be surprising that Jane’s first adventure, Death of a Schoolgirl, sends her to the rescue of a group of schoolgirls who have been largely abandoned by their parents.

Jane Eyre exhibits the important qualities of an amateur sleuth: a passion for justice, curiosity, an understanding of human nature and a mind that grasps patterns. Because she is slight and not terribly attractive, she blends in. Just like any survivor of abuse, Jane tends to be hyper-vigilant.

But she is also strong. Actually, we are strong. In ways I could have never once imagined.

Joanna Campbell Slan is the author of the Kiki Lowenstein mystery series and 11 nonfiction books (including many on scrapbooking). Death of a Schoolgirl is the first novel in her new series, the Jane Eyre Chronicles. It stars Jane Eyre as an amateur sleuth and picks up where Charlotte Brontë’s novel left off.

Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense

Behind the book: Success of home repair series is no mystery

Behind the Book by Jennie Bentley

by Jennie Bentley

I never planned to write cozy mysteries. Back 10 years ago or so, when I first decided to try my hand at becoming an author, I thought I’d write romance novels. I was young, not too long married (i.e. I was having sex regularly), and someone had told me it was easy to get published in romance.

Hah.

Needless to say that didn’t work out. I got pregnant, had a couple of kids, and didn’t write for a few years. Instead, we bought a cheap little house in what’s diplomatically called a ‘transitional neighborhood,’ and I became a stay-at-home mom. Because it was our first house and we were poor as the proverbial church mice, I did things like refinish the floors and paint the walls and re-glaze the tub while the kids were napping. And then we sold that house and bought another, and then another, and then another . . . and pretty soon I decided I’d better get a real estate license, because the way we were buying and selling houses, someone was getting rich, but it wasn’t me.

I went back to writing eventually, once my eldest son started school and the youngest got lonely enough to welcome the idea of daycare, but I no longer felt the urge to write romance. There was precious little of that commodity in my own life, with two boys under six underfoot, and with two boys under six underfoot, violence was a bigger part of my daily life than sex, anyway.

So I wrote what I knew, a mystery about a new-minted real estate agent who walks into an empty house and finds a dead body.

In an ironic twist on what happened five years earlier, someone told me that books about realtors are notoriously hard to sell, but I’d learned my lesson from last time, so of course I didn’t listen. Of course, this time the advice was right on.

A Cutthroat Business was not an easy sell, although it got there in the end. On its way to publication, though, one of the many editors who passed on the manuscript, nonetheless liked it well enough to hand it off to a friend at Berkley Prime Crime, who called with a question. Given my background in real estate and renovation, would I be interested in creating a series about a renovator for them? Something to capitalize on the current interest in HGTV and "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition." Something with a hot handyman in tight jeans and a low-slung tool belt, and with tips for do-it-yourself projects in the back.

The result was Fatal Fixer-Upper, the first book in the Do-It-Yourself home renovation mystery series. The story introduces Avery Baker, a New York textile designer, who inherits her Aunt Inga’s decrepit Victorian cottage, and who travels to the wilds of Maine to spend the summer renovating it, with the help of local handyman Derek Ellis. (He’s the guy with the tight jeans and the power tools. Just FYI.)

Of course, as anyone who has ever tried to renovate a house knows, the path is seldom smooth. There’s wood rot and leaking pipes and falling bricks and termites . . . and in Avery’s case, there’s also murders current and past, scheming relatives, a missing history professor, a fake Frenchman, a boatload of valuable antiques, two Maine coon cats, ties to Marie Antoinette, and Derek’s perfect—and perfectly annoying—ex-wife.

At the end of the book, with mysteries solved and house sparkling, Avery decides to stay in Maine and continue to renovate houses, thus paving the way for my new release, Spackled and Spooked.

The decision to continue renovating is one I understand. In the nine years since we bought that first little house in the transitional area, we’ve bought—and renovated—nine more. Our current project is a mid-century ranch, just like the one Avery is working on in Spackled and Spooked. Big and rambling, with sprawling rooms, big windows, and a sort of open and airy feel. But while the worst thing I’ve encountered is a complicated plumbing problem, Avery gets unexplained footsteps in the hallway when no one is there, a skeleton in the crawlspace, and murder in the neighborhood. And Avery is on the hunt again, knee-deep not only in drywall and paint, but in murder and mayhem and mysteries old and new.

And it goes on from there. Just like me and my list of projects, which include a couple of cottages, a couple of ranches, a craftsman bungalow, and a brick Tudor, Avery is looking at a list of upcoming projects, as well. Most of them more exciting than mine, I have to admit. Renovation is easier on the page than in the flesh. Avery’s from-Victorian-carriage-house-into-romantic-retreat-for-two is arriving in March 2010, titled Plaster and Poison. After that, there’s a 1783 Colonial on an island off the coast that needs renovating, and a little craftsman cottage in the historic district, that gets a quick flip while the TV cameras are rolling. That’ll take me, and Avery, into 2011 or thereabouts.

By then, I’ll probably be on to another project of my own, too. So many houses, so little time.

Jennie Bentley is the author of the Do-It-Yourself Home Renovation mysteries from Berkley Prime Crime. Book 1, Fatal Fixer-Upper was released in November 2008, and went on to become a bestseller for the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. You can learn more about Jennie and the DIY-series on her website.

Fiction, Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Mystery

The road to ‘That Night’

Behind the Book by Chevy Stevens

by Chevy Stevens

With her 2010 debut novel, Still Missing, Canadian author Chevy Stevens established herself as a writer who can tranform small fears into ultimate nightmares. Her new novel, That Night, evolves a tale of high school bullying into a story of revenge and twisted girl-world secrets.

In 1998, due to false testimony from classmate Shauna and her posse, high school sweethearts Toni and Ryan went to prison for killing Toni’s younger sister, Nicole—a haunted girl with well-hidden secrets. Seventeen years later, Toni and Ryan are out on parole and determined to clear their names—but Shauna's bent on sending them back behind bars. Writes our reviewer, "Chevy Stevens’ account of what it’s like to be powerless—whether as a grounded 12th-grader or a prison inmate—is pitch perfect (and relatable to anyone who’s ever been a teen)."

Stevens shares a look behind the curtain into the changing tides of her writing life:

Some people say that certain songs remind them of a time in their life. For me, it’s each of my books. When I started Still Missing I was in a transitional stage, not happy in my career, my relationship or my house. I started writing the book on my old computer in the upstairs bedroom of the character home I owned. The temperature was inconsistent, and I was either too cold or sweltering in the summer. Six months later, I sold that house, and continued writing in the office at my townhouse. I can still close my eyes and see Post-it notes stuck all over the wall from when I was mapping out the sessions.

When I rewrote all the session openings, I was now single. I rented a cabin on Thetis Island, taking long walks with my dog, Annie, then writing some more. I know exactly which paragraphs I wrote when I was there. If I read them again, I’m transported back to that island, to those days when it was just us.

Not long after I signed with my agent, I met my husband, who was living down in Victoria, about an hour and a half away from me. At the time I’d gone back to work in sales, having used up almost all my savings, and I’d stay with him or a hotel when I was working in the south end of the island. I’d get up early to write on my laptop in his office, trying to be quiet so I didn’t wake him, or I’d come home to my hotel room at lunch, sneaking in a few lines before my next appointment. I was also planning our wedding during this time, excited about the beginning of my married life and my writing career.

Never Knowing was written while I lived at our townhouse, now sharing an office with my husband, our chairs back to back. It was a chaotic time in my life, trying to balance the marketing leading up the publishing of Still Missing, and then my beloved dog, Annie, became very sick. I’d write while she slept on the couch in the office. I’d glance over often, agonizing whether her breathing was okay, how she was feeling that day, if she needed medication. A lot of the stress I was feeling went into that book.

When I was writing Always Watching, I worked through my grief over having lost Annie and my own questions about the universe and whether there was a Heaven, and if I would see her again. We sold our house, and I wrote with boxes stacked around me, then at my friend’s kitchen table while we stayed there for a few days, then finally on my computer in my new office. Toward the end of the book, I found out I was pregnant. For the final three months of that book I had to take long naps on the floor in my office, constantly nauseous. Finally the book was finished—and I was out of the first trimester!

I have my best memories of the time when I was working on That Night. I loved being pregnant, the energy, the clarity of thought. Initially I wrote in my office every day, but the more pregnant I became, the more uncomfortable my seat. Finally I had to work downstairs at our table—for some reason that chair felt better. I remember that fall, looking out at the leaves coming down in our backyard, feeling the baby move in my belly. I also got a cold and spent the last trimester sneezing all over my keyboard.

In December of 2012, I was close to finishing the last draft—and close my due date. If the baby held off for another week, I’d be done, but she thwarted my plan and I went into labor on her due date. I didn’t start work on the book again until late January. I remember all the breaks for nursing, the exhaustion. I had to start the day late, and then take afternoon naps, and still work in the evening some days. I was beyond tired, but head over heels in love with my daughter. Thankfully my husband was also home during that time, and he was with Piper whenever I was writing. A few months into the start of my fifth book, Piper finally started sleeping through the night, and my days gradually returned to normal.

Now it’s spring, and I’m working out in our travel trailer, my dog Oona sleeping quietly beside me. I will finish this book in the next couple of months, probably part of it while on tour, then I’ll start my next book, and the next stage of my life. I don’t know how either will unfold yet, but I’m excited to find out.

Thank you, Chevy!

Author photo credit Suzanne Teresa.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

An unsettling contagion exposes dark fears

Behind the Book by Megan Abbott

by Megan Abbott

With her 2012 novel Dare Me, Megan Abbott transformed high school bullying into a startling tale of reckless teenage chaos. In her new novel, The Fever, another group of young women find themselves at the center of pandemonium, as one by one girls fall to a mysterious infection that causes terrifying, gruesome seizures. The author shares how this haunting tale was inspired by a real-life “mass hysteria” outbreak in Le Roy, New York, in 2012.

She’s pretty, fresh-faced. A cheerleader in a hoodie, her nervous smile lurking. But something’s wrong. “I was always so active,” she says, her words broken up by a sharp vocal outburst, her head jerking. “Everyone was always so happy to be around me. I just don’t feel like myself anymore.” Her name is Thera Sanchez, and I first saw her on the “Today” show in January 2012, a time when she and several other female teens in Le Roy, New York—all with similar vocal tics and twitches—were appearing everywhere: the morning shows; CNN; every major newspaper and magazine. All these lovely, panicked girls begging for answers to the strange affliction that seemed to be spreading through their school like a plague. Watching them and their terrified parents, I couldn’t look away.

Within days of first hearing about the young women—18 in all—of Le Roy, I began writing The Fever, which chronicles a mysterious outbreak in a small town. In the novel, we see everything through the eyes of the Nash family: Tom, a high school teacher, and his two teenage children, Eli and Deenie. One by one, Deenie’s friends are struck by terrifying, unexplained seizures, and fear and hysteria spread through the town.

For several months in early 2012, it seemed like the Le Roy story was amplifying in size, with concerned parents, the media and various activists pointing the finger at environmental toxins, the HPV vaccine, rare autoimmune disorders and other potential threats. Ultimately, the medical diagnosis—accepted by most—was that the girls were suffering from “conversion disorder,” a condition in which the body “converts” emotional distress into physical symptoms. Though psychological in origin, the symptoms are involuntary and completely real. When it occurs in groups, spreading from one to the next, it is called “mass psychogenic illness,” or “mass hysteria.”

While The Fever’s plot diverges dramatically from what happened in Le Roy, I was continually reminded of the stakes for these afflicted girls, for their parents, for the community. And that fear in the girls’ eyes, which was so complicated, so haunting and real: What’s happening to me? When will I be myself again? And, perhaps most hauntingly of all, What if no one believes me?

Comparisons to the Salem witch trials appeared (and remain) everywhere, except in this case it was the afflicted girls themselves who were put on trial, accused of faking their symptoms, of being dramatic look-at-me teenagers, of making it all up, as if it were a game. One needs only to survey a few Internet comments on the articles written about the case to get a sense of what the girls faced: “This is how the herd mentality works. These little heifers are enjoying the show they’ve produced for themselves.”

The young women of Le Roy had undergone significant emotional upheavals (a sick parent, domestic abuse) that triggered the symptoms we all saw on TV, but they were being treated as unruly drama queens. Perhaps in some way, their tics made us deeply uncomfortable. And it was easier to minimize them, dismiss them. Place blame.

Last month, The Fever long finished, I began to wonder how it might be for the girls now, reportedly recovered and no longer under the media glare. I contacted Dr. Jennifer McVige, the neurologist who treated 10 of them. We talked for a long time about the experience and the aftermath, but one thing she said has hummed in my brain ever since: “I’d tell the girls, what you’re going through now is so challenging, but you’re going to come out stronger, smarter. You’re going to look back to this time in your life and say, I got through that, I can get through this. I can do anything now.”

It felt like such a parable of female adolescence, writ large. I think back to Thera Sanchez on the “Today” show, to the words she said—which, on one level, could be the words of any teenage girl, any young woman ever. There’s part of her that wants to please (“Everyone was always so happy to be around me.”), part of her that wants to do (“I was always so active.”) and part that feels lost (“I just don’t feel like myself anymore.”). She knows she’s changing, and it’s so hard because it feels like everyone’s watching, judging. And she’s just asking to be heard and understood.

Megan Abbott is the Edgar Award-winning author of seven novels. She lives in Queens, New York.

This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With her 2012 novel Dare Me, Megan Abbott transformed high school bullying into a startling tale of reckless teenage chaos. In her new novel, The Fever, another group of young women find themselves at the center of pandemonium, as one by one girls fall to a mysterious infection that causes terrifying, gruesome seizures. The author shares how this haunting tale was inspired by a real-life “mass hysteria” outbreak in Le Roy, New York, in 2012.

Fiction, Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Mystery

Doing unto others—without becoming undone

Behind the Book by Julia Keller

by Julia Keller

Julia Keller's debut mystery, A Killing in the Hills, introduced prosecuting attorney Belfa “Bell” Elkins and the small Appalachian town of Acker's Gap, West Virginia. In Summer of the Dead, Keller's third mystery set in Acker's Gap, Bell faces a new murderer, as well as family challenges and the burdens of the coal mining community.

The opening acknowledgements in Summer of the Dead hint at a heartbreaking story: "Some years ago I met the wise and stalwart wife of a coal miner in McDowell County, West Virginia. She had created a place for her husband under the big kitchen table; because of his many years spent working underground, and injuries to his spine, he was only comfortable in a crouching position. The story has haunted me ever since, and it inspired a key element of this novel."

Keller shed some light on this inspiration and the questions and challenges of caretaking.

A sick old man who lives in the perpetual twilight of an ancient cellar. A wayward sister trying to find herself after three decades in prison. A woman with a serious mental illness who hates being a burden to her husband.

Those people live in and around Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, the setting for my new novel, Summer of the Dead. They happen to be fictional, but in their incompleteness, their neediness, they embody a real-life dilemma of our times: caretaking. How much should we do for others? What do we owe our aging parents, our troubled siblings or spouses or friends, our children in crisis? At what point do our efforts on behalf of others actually do more harm than good—as we rob those we assist of the opportunity to develop their own strengths and inner resources? As a nation, we wonder if a surfeit of government aid might be creating a culture of dependency.

So many people I know are wrestling with these questions in their own lives. They have parents who can no longer live on their own. Or children in their 20s who can’t find jobs, hence return home. And thus when I sat down to write the third book in my mystery series set in a tattered town in the Appalachian foothills, I decided to explore the question that haunts so many of us: When it comes to loved ones in need, how can we strike a balance between helping and also preserving an individual’s dignity?

Make no mistake: Summer of the Dead is a murder mystery, and there are the requisite unsolved homicides and desperate searches for the bad guys (or gals). But as a reader, I’ve always been drawn to stories that are told obliquely, that require us to do more than merely follow the surface maneuverings of a plot. I admire Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River (2001) for its superbly drawn characters and headlong narrative—but also for its nuanced analysis of the crushing weight of class differences in a big city like Boston. Tana French’s Broken Harbor (2012) is a marvelous piece of crime fiction—and a heartbreaking depiction of the psychological impact of the housing crisis that accompanied the recent global recession, when homes in which people had poured their life savings suddenly were almost worthless. “Broke can lead people to places they would never have imagined,” muses French’s narrator. “It can scour away a lifetime of mild, peaceful decency until all that’s left is teeth and claws and terror.”

A novel always has two stories to tell: What happens—and why it’s happening. That second story is often the more interesting one. In Summer of the Dead, the characters must make agonizing decisions about how much to help those whom they love. If they do too little, they feel selfish; if they do too much, they risk feeling put-upon, filled with bitterness and resentment. And a long-simmering resentment can lead the human soul into some dark and lethal places.

Julia Keller's debut mystery, A Killing in the Hills, introduced prosecuting attorney Belfa “Bell” Elkins and the small Appalachian town of Acker's Gap, West Virginia. In Summer of the Dead, Keller's third mystery set in Acker's Gap, Bell faces a new murderer, as well as family challenges and the burdens of the coal mining community.

Keller shed some light on this inspiration and the questions and challenges of caretaking.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Masquerading as a literary master

Behind the Book by Bradford Morrow

by Bradford Morrow

In his latest novel, Bradford Morrow exposes the dark side of the rare-book world, where literary forgers create fake letters, signatures and manuscripts by famous authors. His richly detailed mystery opens with a grisly scene: A reclusive book collector is found in his studio with his head bashed in and his hands severed. Morrow, a professor of literature at Bard College, explains why he was drawn to this shadowy subject.

The Forgers is a novel I have been unintentionally researching my entire adult life. How so? In my 20s I worked in both used and rare bookshops, even opened my own shop for a time, and have been a book collector ever since I sold off most of my inventory to launch the literary journal Conjunctions. My life has been thoroughly steeped in books. Over the years I’ve done almost everything one can do with a book, having spent time as a tradesman, binder, editor, translator, bibliographer, teacher, writer and voracious reader of books. The world in which The Forgers is set, then—a world of both secondhand bookshops and high-end antiquarian booksellers who deal in valuable first editions—is one I know well. Indeed, writing The Forgers propelled me back to every book fair I’ve ever attended over the years, whether it was in rural New Jersey, at a fairgrounds in California or the annual Antiquarian Booksellers Association fair at the Armory on Park Avenue.

This is not to suggest, however, that I have ever been a literary forger. Far from it. To be honest, I don’t have the strangely impressive array of skills necessary to the task. A master forger must, after all, excel as a calligrapher, a chemist and a con-man connoisseur. Forgers must have a deep, even scholarly, understanding of the author whose handwriting is to be mimicked if they are going to achieve the kind of perfection needed to get their handiwork past eagle-eyed experts. While I spent many months inside the head of my narrator—himself a master forger with a particular taste for manufacturing inscriptions, letters and manuscripts by Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James and W.B. Yeats, and for all his faults a protagonist for whom I have a lot of affection—I don’t find his passion for messing with history to be an altogether admirable one.

And yet literary forgers from past eras have always fascinated me, such as master deceivers William Ireland, Thomas Chatterton and Thomas J. Wise, each of whom has an interesting personal backstory. All were wildly talented, imaginative and flawed. Ireland’s father, for instance, was a Shakespeare scholar and collector, and given there are precious few verified Shakespeare autographs extant, young Will decided to create some others that would enhance his father’s collection. Emboldened, he even penned some “undiscovered” Shakespeare manuscripts and letters to Anne Hathaway and Queen Elizabeth, among others. His high-wire ruse worked nicely for quite a while, although those who venerated authenticity eventually, as they are wont to do, raised concerns. It is his and others’ gnarly paths that my narrator, also named Will, has chosen to follow.

Why forgery? And why a murder mystery in which forgery is the prime focus? At lunch last year in New York, my editor, Otto Penzler, wondered if I would write a short story for a series he publishes at his wonderful Mysterious Bookshop, called Bibliomysteries. I asked him precisely how he defined bibliomystery and he said, simply, it’s a work of fiction in which books are central and a murder takes place. Although I have long been considered a so-called “literary writer,” in recent years I’ve become deeply interested in genre fiction, a neighborhood in the city of literature that is inspiring, rigorous in its architectures and terribly inviting. In part because I consider the best genre fiction, from crime to sci-fi, horror to fantasy, to be every bit as literary as literary fiction, I said yes. I settled on forgery as my theme because I felt the travesties of other misfits—like book thieves, let’s say—offered me a bit less to explore, certainly in terms of technical sophistication.

As I began sketching ideas, writing some pages in search of the right voice, I realized that my forgers would be functioning in the netherlands of the community I knew so well. With that realization, I felt immediately at home.

The next question to address was, what is the most serious deprivation a forger could suffer? Of course he needs his vintage pens and papers, his custom-mixed inks, first editions in which to create inscriptions from long-dead authors, perhaps to other long-dead authors or hitherto unsuspected lovers. Take those away, you interfere with his illicit, to him beautiful, art. But to take away his hands? You terminate it forever. So when I settled on my first line—“They never found his hands”—I was fully underway.

The thing about writing The Forgers is that the further I got into it, the more I understood I needed a larger canvas than that of a short story to explore the lives of these dark, compelling people. That short story commission turned within a matter of months into a novel, and the novel eventually explored far more than murder and rare books. Indeed, much of The Forgers is a love story complicated by death and deception, but also suffused with bibliophilia, a shared love of books. It’s a novel about secrecy, about faith and the fragile nature of redemption. It is also about the very nature of truth, the curious plasticity of reality and how history itself may be radically altered with the stroke of a pen.

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fiction, Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Mystery

Edison-Tesla bad blood in new mystery

Behind the Book by Lawrence H. Levy

by Lawrence H. Levy

Lawrence H. Levy's debut mystery takes readers to the late 19th century, where we meet Brooklyn's first woman detective, Mary Handley. She's investigating a murder with ties to Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, whose famous feud is even darker than you'd expect.

My debut novel, Second Street Station, takes place in the late 19th century and centers around Mary Handley, a real person who was asked by the Brooklyn police department, when there were no policewomen, to help sleuth a high-profile murder. I crafted Mary into an extremely bright, ambitious yet sensitive woman who wants to fulfill her dream of being a detective and to also prove that a woman can do a man’s job. She constantly does battle with the “powers that be” and has to deal with adversity from every direction. Mary is a wonderful protagonist but, oddly enough, she wasn’t the original inspiration to write my book.

Years ago, I was helping my son with a term paper when I came across the Edison/Tesla feud over the electricity market in the late 19th century. At that time, Edison was and today continues to be an American icon, praised for his brilliant scientific contributions to society, where Tesla is just now becoming recognized for the genius that he was. Edison’s current was DC and Tesla’s was AC, which is still our standard and clearly the superior product. However, whether it was for purposes of ego or just pure greed (probably both), Edison wouldn’t admit this simple fact and went to great lengths to discredit Tesla’s AC. He commissioned Tom Brown to invent the electric chair with AC current and arranged public demonstrations where he cruelly executed animals to prove that AC was good to kill things but not safe for the home. He was able to delay the inevitable dominance of AC current until the early 20th century and made a lot of money doing it. When he died in 1931, he was a very wealthy man.

As I studied more about the two scientists, Edison quickly grew feet of clay. Though he is hailed as the “Father of Invention” and had over a thousand patents to his name when he died, only a fraction of those inventions were actually his own. He had talented scientists working for him and simply put his name on their work when he thought it had some merit. He was also known to have “borrowed” other scientists’ work. At best, Edison was a good scientist, a fabulous businessman and a very savvy promoter. At worst, he was an egocentric megalomaniac, a thief and possibly more. The truth is probably somewhere in between the two, but there is evidence, even in the notes that he left behind in his own handwriting, that he had a much darker side.

Though Tesla was a brilliant scientist, he had little acumen for business, had a combustible temper and was considered eccentric. His passion for his projects and his gullibility led him to make the wrong business decisions. George Westinghouse backed Tesla’s AC current, and when Westinghouse pleaded poverty to him, Tesla ceded his interest in AC, thus giving up millions of future dollars. His “Tesla coil” revolutionized modern communications, his research led to the invention of x-rays, and though Marconi, who was backed by Edison, was given credit for inventing the radio, it was really Tesla’s invention. Though a court decision in the 1940s confirmed this fact, schools today are still teaching students that it was Marconi. Thus was the course of Tesla’s life. As his frustrations mounted, his behavior became increasingly bizarre. He wound up dying penniless in a New York hotel room in 1943, claiming he could talk to pigeons.

Edison and Tesla shared a lifetime personal and professional enmity, which prevented them both from receiving the Nobel Price when they refused to share it with one another. I found these two men’s lives and fates to be fascinating, and they do encompass a significant part of Second Street Station. However, I decided it would be interesting to tell their story in the context of a real murder that occurred at that time. Once I found Mary Handley, I fell in love with her, and I think others will, too.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

Truth in Cambodian minefields

Behind the Book by K.T. Medina

by K.T. Medina

Drawing on years of experience in the British armed forces, debut author K.T. Medina delivers a striking thriller that bores into the dark heart of postwar Cambodia, fraught with poverty and superstition. Her heroine descends into the killing fields in search of her husband’s killer—but as Medina reveals in the essay below, evil goes much deeper than murder.

To my parents’ dismay, I was not a normal girl. I dressed in army fatigues, sported a crew cut and used to line my teddy bears up at either end of the lounge and send them into battle. My favorite game was to traverse blocks purely by climbing over fences, cutting through people’s gardens, sneaking through their open back doors and slipping out the front, unnoticed. My mother and father despaired, entirely nonplussed. However, my interest in all things military probably developed from the hours I spent hiding behind the sofa, when I was supposed to be asleep, watching such World War II classics as The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen through my father’s legs.

When I went to university to study psychology, it felt like a natural progression to join the Territorial Army, where I spent time both in the Infantry and in the Royal Engineers, rising to Troop Commander. On leaving university, I joined Jane’s Information Group, the world’s leading publisher of defense intelligence information. It was whilst working at Jane’s, responsible for land-based weapons, that I was inspired to write my debut thriller, White Crocodile. As part of that role, I spent a few weeks in the minefields of northern Cambodia, working alongside professional mine clearers from two clearance charities, Cambodian Mine Action Centre and Mines Advisory Group. I was privileged to get to know both Western and Khmer mine clearers and to spend time talking with Khmers who had lost limbs to land mines. I also visited many of the locations that appear in White Crocodile, including the great swathes of minefields that dominate the region and the Red Cross Hospital for the victims of land mines, where the novel’s fictional Dr Ung saves lives and rehabilitates. There are huge numbers of amputees in Cambodia, including very young children who, in many cases, thought that the anti-personnel mine they found was a toy.

"I wanted to use the power of fiction to take readers on an unforgettable journey to this dark and disturbing place."

Cambodia is a visually beautiful country of emerald green paddy fields and ochre earth; the people are friendly and the majority kind; but its traumatic history, including five years of mass genocide under the Khmer Rouge, depicted in the famous film The Killing Fields, casts an indelible shadow. Cambodia is still incredibly poor and the government corrupt, building presidential palaces and grand government buildings while the majority of the population live in unimaginable deprivation and hardship. There is no social security, and unless people make a living for themselves and their families, they quite literally starve. The presence of six million land mines, buried mainly in the northwest region around Battambang where White Crocodile is set, makes the job of survival even harder.

Off the tourist trail, Cambodia is a heartbreaking place to visit that left a huge and lasting impression on me. On coming home, back to England and the privileges that I enjoy here in the West, I felt very strongly that I wanted to use the power of fiction to take readers on an unforgettable journey to this dark and disturbing place—a journey that would have them wanting to read, without pause, until the very last page.

White Crocodile is also a story about families: love and hatred; kindness and cruelty; the destructive nature of some families and the long-term damage these families can cause. As part of my degree in psychology, I studied the effect of poor family dynamics and abuse on children. The fear and helplessness a child trapped in a severely dysfunctional family feels must be all-consuming, and for me was a very powerful emotion to explore in a novel, as was its flip side, intense love and an overwhelming desire to protect.

I am drawn to people who have a different psychology from my own, whether in terms of mass cultural beliefs, such as in Cambodia where the white crocodile signifies death, or with individuals who, perhaps because of their upbringing or life experiences, display an abnormal psychology. The heroine of White Crocodile is Tess Hardy, an ex-British Army combat engineer and mine clearer who, against her better judgment, travels to Cambodia to discover the truth behind the death of her violent husband Luke. However, whilst Tess is strong, clever and independent, she is also a complex character who has her own very personal demons to deal with.

I have always loved to read and write, and much of my childhood was spent immersed in stories. Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series was one of my early favorites, and in common with many other tomboys, I wanted to be George. I am still an avid crime and thriller reader, and I particularly like novels that bring more to me than just a great story. Novels that stay with me long after the last page are those such as Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, novels that explore real-life trauma through the medium of story and unforgettable characters, and that was my aim with White Crocodile.

K.T. Medina lives in London with her husband and three children.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of White Crocodile.

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