Wisconsin sheriff Heidi Kick has enough to deal with—an ice storm, her tragic past, the lack of support from her rural community—without a murder case to solve. But when she encounters a decade-old corpse while trying to track down a missing girl, the trail leads her to uncover some of Bad Axe County’s dark secrets. We talked to author John Galligan about the allure and the danger of sports, how fly fishing is an excellent hobby for a writer and why Wisconsin fascinates him.

Whew! Bad Axe County is truly a thriller—so many gasp-inducing action scenes, lots of people to whom the word “evil” would apply sans hyperbole, a landscape of drug abuse and sex trafficking, and several suspenseful plot threads to follow. Was the book as much of a heart-pounding endeavor to write as it was to read? Do you have a routine, or mantra or some such, that helps you emerge from your stories as you create them?
To answer your first question in a word, no. I wish that writing a thriller were a thrill. I’m so glad to know that the book worked for you, making you gasp and your heart pound. That’s what every writer wants to hear. But reading and writing are very different experiences, and the old saw applies about eating the sausage versus watching it get made. At least for me, the writing process is slow, layered, recursive and often arduous, usually involving plenty of false starts, frustrations, flushes and back-to-the-drawing-board moments—in short, a grind. Not to say that there aren’t many moments when I feel excited by what I’m writing and get totally immersed in a scene or a chapter or a plot line. There are. But it’s far from the “vivid and continuous dream” (John Gardner) that I’m striving to create for the reader.

That brings us to your excellent second question: How do I maintain a healthy perspective while in the process? This was especially important in the writing of Bad Axe County due to the darkness of the subject matter and some of the scenes. Creating and then revising scenes of sexual violence didn’t feel good, and there were plenty of times, especially when I wasn’t sure the story was working, when the whole thing felt misbegotten and grotesque and I wasn’t sure I could continue. And I was alone with these doubts, since there really is no one else involved in the process at these early phases. So basically my formula for survival is patience (take the long view and trust the process), stubbornness (believe and don’t give up) and clear the mind daily (exercise, fly fishing, etc.).

Heidi experienced a crime in her past that still affects her and seems to drive a lot of her choices in the present day. Although I confess I haven’t read your Fly-Fishing Mystery books (yet!), I did see in a review that your Ned Ogilvie character also struggles to reconcile his very different past. What about that—the persistence of our past selves, let’s say—has inspired you to explore it in your work? Do you think a need for closure helps make for good case-closers in the ranks of law enforcement?
My protagonist in the Fly-Fishing Mysteries is dealing with overwhelming guilt and grief, and my line about him is that he is “crisscrossing the country in an old RV trying to fish himself to death.” But somebody always beats him to the “death” part, and that’s what keeps him alive. You put it well: We are all about the persistence of our past selves, and our happiness or lack thereof is a function of the relationships we maintain with those selves. What I think happens with Ned Oglivie and to an extent Heidi Kick is that their pasts are unresolvable, their past selves are unforgiveable, and this directs relentless energy at the solutions to “proxy” problems that can be solved. The cases they get involved in are both projections and diversions, and there is always sadness (but also sequels) that comes with resolution, because the protagonist then returns to his or her own original torment.

Heidi Kick is the first female sheriff in Bad Axe and your first female protagonist. What made you decide to write her, and really go for it, by putting her in a setting so rife with misogyny, from daily workplace sexism to heinous crimes against women? Did the recent increase in women speaking up about their experiences spark something for you?
You’re right that the cultural moment had an influence on Bad Axe County. I researched harassment in the workplace, and some of the things that were said/tweeted/posted to/at/about women in positions of power just took my breath away. In Bad Axe County, the horrific tweets directed at Sheriff Heidi Kick (“why dont you drink bleech ill buy the bleech”) are actual tweets from my research. Also . . . Bill Cosby? And then to find out that it’s not just him, but this is a thing, there is a drug you can get, and a whole bunch of men make a practice of drugging and raping women? How much do you have to hate women to get satisfaction from that? How powerful is the patriarchy that this goes unnoticed, unprosecuted, that the victims stay silent? I didn’t set out to catch the cultural wave so much as the wave arose while I was writing about sexual harassment and sex trafficking, and that groundswell of women’s voices telling dark truths gave me the confidence to continue. Like I said in the answer above, there were tough times for me in the writing process, but at a certain point I knew I was being real. Having the wind of the zeitgeist at my back really helped.

Heidi and her office ally, Denise, preemptively crack sexist jokes as a way to vaccinate against said chauvinism. Was it a challenge to calibrate the jokes, to ensure that they landed as sardonic rather than self-flagellating? Do you think there’s hope for change in the workplace, for a day when such inoculation won’t be needed quite so much?
The jokes were a huge risk . . . yet somehow as soon as the idea occurred, I knew it was a winner if I could pull it off. You would not believe how many hours I spent combing through bad sexist jokes to find just the right ones for the moment. Fortunately, I’m the kind of person who cannot remember a joke to save his life, otherwise I think I would be permanently brain-damaged. The jokes had to hit just the right note: appropriate to the moment in the story, the particular flavor of sexism at issue, strong enough to have a bite, funny in their disgusting way, and overall they had to leave both Heidi Kick and the reader feeling refreshed and empowered. Sure, I have hope that the workplace will improve, with respect not only to gender equity but also to race and sexuality. I think improvement will be slow and painful, though, with plenty of backlash, as we are witnessing on the national stage. I think at some point we reach “peak white male” (or “peak orange male”—please don’t quote me), go through an excruciating transition and emerge in a more balanced place. I mean, if I can’t hope for that, then . . .

Sports are a strong throughline in Bad Axe County: Heidi’s husband Harley is a local legend; a central character, Angus Beavers, is a gifted player; and the corruption in town flows directly through the baseball team. I see that your earlier books have hockey and fly fishing in them, too. What do sports represent for you, and why is it important for you to include this in your books?
I grew up as a full-on jock, so my connection with sports is deep and personal. To me, sports represent institutionalized masculinity and both the strengths and dangers of that. My understanding, I think, is nuanced, paradoxical, maybe conflicted. A lot of successful male athletes are misunderstood and unfairly judged. They are complex people who are good at sports because their intelligence and discipline make them good at everything they do. I think “dumb jock” is mostly wishful thinking practiced by people who can’t or don’t play sports. So there is that.

But on the other hand, all-male sports teams, at least in my day and in my personal experience, were hotbeds of misogyny, racism and homophobia, and much of this was passed down and reinforced through the leadership of older players and coaches. Clearly I have strong feelings all over the map about sports, so it’s fertile ground for me as a writer.

I wouldn’t call fly fishing a “sport” in the sense that I’m using the word above. But to me it involves much of what I love about sports—physical skill is required to do it well, and you can always get much better than you are—and it strips away the team and all the negatives and replaces those with the challenge to be present and immerse yourself in nature. Lots can go wrong—both outside and inside the self. You get to be a fool on a regular basis. You also get to touch what feels to me like the source of life. Fly fishing is also very fertile ground for me as a writer.

Honesty (and the lack thereof) is a theme that resonates throughout your book. There are old, buried secrets that affect the present day; lies and shame passed down through generations; and present-day secrets among Heidi and her husband, colleagues and more. The fate of many in Bad Axe County are excellent testaments to the ways in which secrets and lies can be debilitating and damaging. Did a desire to explore this motivate you to write the book? Are you good at spotting liars (or spinning falsehoods) yourself?
I think I’m about average in terms of both promulgating and spotting b.s. I do think that shame, especially, is a powerful and fascinating engine for a character and a story, and I think that shame involves a secret world inside the self, an epic struggle hidden from others, and the perfectly solved crime for me means not so much the capture of the criminal but the reader’s epiphany as to what dark yet universal force, in all of us, drives the crime.

We often hear that Manhattan is itself a character in a story, or Hollywood, or Paris . . . the usual cities. Bad Axe is the newest entry in that category! Online images of coulees convey just how dangerous nighttime car chases, let alone daytime jaunts, can be in such a landscape. Did you travel to that area in order to really capture what it might feel like to grow up and/or live there? What stood out to you the most? Do you think it’s harder for people to leave or to stay?
Yes, the Driftless area, or coulees, of Wisconsin is my favorite place to be, and I spend as much time there as I can. I have a camper, and I stay out there to write and fish. I immerse myself in the landscape and the culture. Bad Axe County is a fictional county inserted between two real ones. The region’s beauty and its challenges fascinate me. There are hundreds of miles of spring creeks where wild trout still thrive. At the same time factory farms and sand-fracking outfits are moving in, and climate change is having a devastating impact, with seven “100-year floods” in the last 10 years. That region is losing family farms faster than any place in the state and perhaps the country. At the same time, it has one of the highest concentrations of Amish people anywhere in the country and the highest concentration of organic farms. Hunting is a religion. The military is a fetish. Neighbors look out for each other. Meth is a scourge. You can find a pancake breakfast or a brat fry on any day of the week. People both leave and stay with equal degrees of passion, but my reading (of what high school graduates say about their futures) is that most kids who grow up there are taught to love the place and the lifestyle and want to stay (i.e., go to the tech college for diesel mechanics or dental hygiene). For sure the economy and the culture are shifting, and the ecosystem is under threat.

Per your website, you’ve had some interesting-sounding jobs. After reading Bad Axe County, “freezer boy in a salmon cannery” sure did catch my eye. Did you draw from any of your own experiences, whether lived/observed/imagined, when creating the book?
I have deep connections and experiences in the region, and I have a background in sports and in baseball in particular that informs some of the story. I can identify with Angus being channeled a certain way by adults in his life, for their own purposes, and belatedly coming to the realization that this is his life to live. My experience as a parent, for sure, informs my relationship to Heidi as a mother. It just feels so easy for me to relate to the challenges she faces in being a mother and a wife while handling a pressure-packed job. (As for “freezer boy,” I rode on tender ships out to meet fishing boats in the ocean off Alaska, jumped into holds with dead salmon up to my armpits and one-by-one heaved those fat, slippery suckers out over my head. Later, after they were gutted, I would ice-glaze them together in triplets and file them in boxcar freezers for shipment to Japan.)

You teach writing at Madison College. Do you think your teaching informs your writing and vice versa? Do your students read and give you feedback on your books?
Yes, teaching informs my writing. Imagine the human experience, the characters, after 32 years at a rate of about 250 students per year (wow, 8,000 in total!). The coolest thing about teaching where I do is the diversity of students, especially non-traditional students, whom I have the privilege of working with—literally from every corner, both local and worldwide. No . . . I don’t even let on to my students that I do what I do. They get a link to my website, and if they’re curious enough and interested enough to discover it, great, I’m happy to meet them as John Galligan, author of Bad Axe County. But I’ve never felt comfortable wearing that up front. Serious writing students have it all figured out and take my classes for that reason. The rest are free to see me just as the guy standing between them and three credits.

What’s coming up next for you?
I have a two-book contract with Simon & Schuster, and I’m working on the next book set in the coulees featuring Sheriff Heidi Kick, tentatively titled Dead Man Polka.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Bad Axe County.

Author photo by Ya-Ling Tsai.

Catriona McPherson’s Strangers at the Gate is a twisty-turny, darkly atmospheric novel that begins with Finn and Paddy Lamb embarking on a promising new chapter of their lives: Husband Paddy has just landed a partnership at a law firm in a small town, a rent-free cottage on his employer’s property and a deacon job for wife Finn at the parish church. But their optimism turns to horror when they stumble upon a bloody-murder tableaux—and decide to pretend they didn’t. As the days pass and they wait for someone, anyone, to find the bodies and report the crime, their paranoia grows. Did someone see them? Was it a murder-suicide, or just plain murder? Are the neighbors eccentric, or something worse?

We spoke with McPherson about secrets and lies, her writing process and the dramatic landscape that serves as a spooky backdrop for her newest book.

What an exciting, creepy, suspenseful book you’ve written! I ended up reading Strangers at the Gate in one sitting (and putting off other things in the meantime—oops). Do you find yourself getting swept up in your stories and writing wherever and whenever the muse takes you, or are you a more methodical sort who uses outlines, set hours or words per day, that sort of thing?
Well, thank you! That’s just about the best thing any author can hear. Sorry not sorry about your derailed day.

I’m a mixture between the two types of writer. I don’t outline or make any kind of plans before I start. I just write the first draft out of my system—no reading, no editing—then see what I’ve got afterwards. However, that process goes on at two thousand words a day, five days a week. Ideally. Life gets in the way, of course, and I miss days, work weekends, etc. Always at the end I find myself, crab-handed and lunching on peanut butter a la spoon, hunched over my desk trying to get to the end. But then I print it out and dance around—“Uptown Funk,” “Cake by the Ocean” (it’s no time to be cool)—truly feeling like a room without a roof. (That’s another good one.)

You’ve written some 25 books and often publish more than one a year. Is it challenging for you to toggle between your Dandy Gilver and Lexy Campbell series and your standalone work? Or is it perhaps more fun to change things up on a regular basis?
Honestly? If every year had about 13 and a half months, I could do it comfortably. As it stands, I’m a quarter-turn too tightly wound, but I do a lot of yoga, and I take two weeks off in the summer and two weeks for Christmas. Ha! I’ve just realized as I write that—I don’t need a 13-month year; I just need to give up my 11-month one. Well, I’m not going to. Those weeks are probably helping, eh?

I do think that writing completely different books in succession helps. I’m drawing on different bits of my brain and writing in very different tones. But the main thing for me is that I was bewildered, unhappy and unsuccessful doing what I trained to do—academic linguistics—and even after nearly 20 years of writing fiction full-time, I still feel relieved and lucky that I’m doing something I understand now. I think that’s what keeps me going.

“I can spot a lie, a half-truth, a quarter truth or an eighth truth and draw you a diagram of where the element of falsehood is lurking.”

Finn and Paddy are offered, all at once, some wonderful things: a law partnership for Paddy, a church deacon job for Finn and a rent-free cottage on Paddy’s employer’s land. Finn does, of course, think it might be too good to be true—and it certainly turns out to be! Is the havoc that can occur when we ignore our instincts something you like to explore in your work in general, as well as specifically in this book? It seems to be something we’re often told, to follow our instincts, but it seems to be easier said than done, yes?
I went off and made tea to ponder this one, and I think you’re right. I do often write about people trying to believe something and slowly becoming unable to ignore the truth they don’t want to see. And you’re right, too, that we know we should follow our instincts, but we talk ourselves out of it all the time. I certainly did that a couple of times in a professional setting, signing up to work with people I knew weren’t a good fit and didn’t get me or my books. No one I’m working with now, I hasten to add—this was years and years ago.

#MeToo made us all think more clearly about the perils of ignoring instincts as well, didn’t it? A few short years ago, when creepers were being creepy, I’d still wonder if I was misreading the situation, and I’d hesitate to speak up. Not actual flashers and gropers, you understand—I’m talking about the really skillful ones who do the deniability dance and react with authentic-looking shock when you call them on their crummy behavior. That’s been scraped up and double-bagged now, thank God.

The landscape of Strangers at the Gate feels darkly beautiful and quite eerie. You do an excellent job of conveying Finn’s uncertainty and unease amid the looming trees and deep valleys of small-town Simmerton versus the city streets that she’s used to. Are you more of a country or city mouse? Did you go back to Scotland to immerse yourself in the landscape in preparation for the book, or does it stay fresh in your mind?
I’m absolutely a country mouse. I gave Finnie similar experiences to some of mine when I first moved to the country and learned what a vixen scream sounds like (it sounds like a woman being murdered) and why you should never shine a light up at an owl (it’ll dive bomb the light). But the same silent blackness that freaks Finnie out felt like being snuggled up in a velvety blanket to me. It’s all still there in my memory, but I do go back pretty much every year to top up.

It’s fascinating (and frightening) to think about how we can be married to, or be friends with or live next to people for years and never really know them. Is that a theme that resonates with you as a writer—the differences between people’s public and private faces, and the surprising things that are revealed?
I’ve not been aware of it, but now you mention it and as I cast my mind back over my books . . . you’ve got me bang to rights. It’s not the first time someone else has revealed what I write about. A few years ago, as I handed a book over to my agent she said, in a throwaway remark: “Where’s the missing child in this one then?” I was taken aback, but she was dead right. There is always a lost or missing child somewhere in my books, including this one. Paging Dr. Freud!

Secrets and lies play a central role in this book from start to finish, and the various revelations are delightfully shocking—not least because your characters are so good at being personable even as they hide important truths. Gaslighting virtuosos! Are you good at telling when that’s happening in real life? Are there any skilled fibbers you know, in real life or in literature, movies, etc., who inspired you?
I’m a trained BS detector. Seriously—for my linguistics Ph.D. my thesis topic was truth in spoken discourse. I can spot a lie, a half-truth, a quarter truth or an eighth truth and draw you a diagram of where the element of falsehood is lurking. Mostly that translates into shouting at the radio as if the interviewer can hear me telling them what question they need to ask the politician who’s dishing it out. My favorite liars in fiction are the sneaky gaslighters in Joy Fielding’s books. Kiss Mommy Goodbye and See Jane Run are master classes.

Finn’s stress builds and builds over the course of a week; it was such fun to experience things as they happened, so to speak, right along with her and the other characters. Do you like to read stories or watch movies or plays like this? Is it easier or more difficult, do you think, for you to build tension within a defined timeframe?
I love books and movies like that! Dog Day Afternoon, Clockwise, Independence Day, Jurassic Park, The Da Vinci Code. They’re so propulsive. As for writing them—this takes me back to one of the earlier questions. I know I couldn’t write more than one book a year if the books I wrote took place over generations. Somehow, if the duration of the events in the novel is short, it’s easier to write quickly. Even when I recently wrote a book that covered a year, it was a year consisting of four weekends, one in each season.

You’ve been shortlisted for and won numerous awards—Agatha, Edgar, Mary Higgins Clark, among others. Congratulations! How has this recognition changed (or not) your writing life?
Thank you! It is lovely to be recognized, whether by judges (as in the Edgars) or peers (as in the Anthonys). If I needed more evidence that I’m in the right job now, that would do it. But it doesn’t change the main bit of the work. I still need to make sure the next book is as good as I can possibly make it, and I still feel sick with nerves while I’m waiting to hear if the publisher wants to buy it. In fact, I think the awards make that worse. They raise expectations, and they would make the career-ending humiliation and scorching failure that could be waiting round the next corner that bit more painful.

Oh, God. I wish I hadn’t let that thought bubble to the surface. I’m glad there’s another question. Hurrying on then . . .

What’s coming up next for you? Eager readers will want to know!
I’ve got a book in the historical series coming out in the U.S. next month, A Step So Grave—it’s the one with the four seasons. And there’s another two written and on my editor’s desk in London at various stages. Then the third in the Last Ditch series, working title Scot on the Rocks, comes out in the U.S. and U.K. next summer. August, I think. The next standalone is still being polished before I hand it over (gulp—see above!). I’m hoping it’ll be called A Gingerbread House, but who knows—I was thrilled when the Minotaur editor came up with Strangers at the Gate as a title for this book. I gave up on my working title without a backward glance. When something’s right, it’s right. Right?

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Strangers at the Gate.

Riley Sager’s childhood home was not an architectural delight. Rather, he says in a call from his current New Jersey home, “I grew up in Pennsylvania in a boring ranch house. I longed to live in a house that was exciting in some way. I would’ve settled for a second floor! That’s probably why I think haunted houses and buildings with history are cool: childhood boredom.”

The bestselling author of three previous thrillers (he is perhaps best known for 2017’s Final Girls) says the classic horror story The Amityville Horror served as inspiration for his new book, Home Before Dark—but he didn’t think the suburban Long Island setting of that iconic tale would provide the right “aura of creepiness” for his haunted Victorian manor. So he set his supernatural story in a remote area of Vermont, in a small town with beautiful woodlands that become decidedly more threatening under the dark of night.

This turns out to be the least of protagonist Maggie Holt’s problems when she sets out to renovate Baneberry Hall. She inherited the home from her father, who wrote about the horrors that he and his family experienced there 25 years ago in a hugely successful memoir. After just 20 days in the gothic fixer-upper, they abandoned their attempts to downplay and then deal with increasingly terrifying ghostly goings-on. They fled in the middle of the night, leaving all their possessions behind.

“I don’t believe in ghosts, yet the thought of them is very, very frightening to me. That’s what I was aiming for with this book: coming from a place of skepticism, yet also being scared at the same time.”

Her father’s book and the fame and notoriety it engendered have embarrassed Maggie her entire life; she was just 5 when the family made their escape, and she doesn’t remember the events her dad describes. In fact, she thinks her parents made the whole thing up, so it seems perfectly safe to stay in the house while she revamps and sells it, in service of releasing herself from it (and the hurt she feels at her parents’ lying to her).

Maggie muses, “I believe science, which has concluded that when we die, we die. Our souls don’t stay behind, lingering like stray cats until someone notices us. . . . We don’t haunt.” So what if she’s long been bedeviled by nightmares about the threatening figures of Mr. Shadow and Miss Pennyface?

Readers will be delighted to discover that they are not only able to immerse themselves in Maggie’s story (which ultimately transforms into something far more dramatic and frightening than she could’ve anticipated), but they also get to read what her father wrote in his book—a deliciously frightening story well told, even if it might not be true.

After all, Sager notes, “I don’t believe in ghosts, yet the thought of them is very, very frightening to me. That’s what I was aiming for with this book: coming from a place of skepticism, yet also being scared at the same time.”

For Sager, crafting the book-within-a-book was one of the most rewarding aspects of writing Home Before Dark. “It was really interesting to do the back-and-forth,” he says. “Maggie and her father were sort of in a dialogue with each other, almost comparing and contrasting their recollections with each other, like a fun-house mirror. . . . It was fascinating to come up with ways to do that, and have her father’s book be the unreliable narrator, in a sense.”

As Maggie’s days in the house tick by, readers will indeed begin to wonder which narrator is telling the truth—or if anyone is. To add to the mystery, the neighbors, many of whom were there 25 years ago, are by turns friendly and angry, inquisitive and brusque. Might they be hiding something, too? Soon Maggie begins to experience disorienting flashes of memory, but she’s unsure if they’re real or just imprinted on her consciousness after years of hearing about Baneberry Hall’s generations of pain and sorrow.

Like her parents before her, Maggie finds that her stress is amplified by her reluctance to leave the house, because of both her skepticism and her desire to sell the place. That’s in keeping with a theme that’s been woven through Sager’s work thus far: the ways in which dire financial straits can constrain people’s choices and well-being. His characters often make decisions they hope will give them a monetary boost with, shall we say, mixed results.

“It does make plotting things easier when there’s desperation involved,” he says. “For example, Maggie’s family felt they couldn’t leave Baneberry Hall because they didn’t have money to buy a new house,” thus making them less likely to immediately run screaming into the night like people with more money could and would have.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Home Before Dark.

“That’s one thing I think genre books are able to do very well: address important issues while still entertaining,” Sager says, adding that the financial insecurities of his characters come from his own experience. “Five years ago, I was laid off from my job [at a newspaper] and had a year of unemployment. During that year, I wrote Final Girls. So something great came out of it, but it was just this year of constant worry. I knew that if I put on the page how I felt at that time, a lot of people would be like, I hear you, I’ve been there.”

Sager explains that it’s important for him “to put my concerns and thoughts into these books, a bit of myself. A lot of times in genre fiction, the characters are just wealthy. It doesn’t say how, they’re all just wealthy. . . . I like to put a little bit of realism in.”

Another element that’s become a Sager signature is his female protagonists. He says that writing women characters “started by happy accident through my first book, Final Girls, because the trope in horror movies is final girls. If it had been final boys, it would’ve been a very different book, and probably a very different career.”

It’s crucial that, in Sager’s books, there isn’t much talk of female characters’ clothing, makeup, physicality, etc. Instead, the focus is on what they’re thinking and experiencing—which is by design. “I think about what makes this person tick, not what makes this woman tick,” he says.

“I’m fully cognizant how darn lucky I am [that] this is my full-time job. I don’t work in a coal mine; my job is to sit here and try and scare people.”

Thus, having half of Home Before Dark “be from a man’s point of view was kind of worrisome to me. In my other three books, there’s a first-person female present-tense narrative,” he says. “To throw this male past-tense narrative in the mix . . . how much should be Maggie’s, and how much should be her father’s? It was definitely a challenge.”

What hasn’t been so difficult, he says, is diving into a whole new set of characters and storylines with each new book. “It’s not easier than writing a series,” he says, which he did under his real name, Todd Ritter, before he adopted the Riley Sager nom de plume, “but it’s better for what I’m trying to do: create a little world in each book. It’s fun to not be tied down to one set of characters, or one style.”

Ultimately, Sager says, “I’m fully cognizant how darn lucky I am [that] this is my full-time job. I don’t work in a coal mine; my job is to sit here and try and scare people.”

Fortunately for Sager fans, there’s no rest for the spooky. Once readers have recovered from the goings-on at Baneberry Hall, they can keep an eye out for his next book, a story that goes in a “completely different direction from Home Before Dark.”

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.

A perennial scene-stealer in Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar series finally stars in a book of his very own.

There’s a line in Harlan Coben’s new novel, Win, that’s sure to evoke a frisson of anticipatory delight in the hearts of thriller readers everywhere: “We always knew this day would come.”

That sentence’s stark simplicity and resigned tone perfectly convey a universal truth at the heart of Coben’s body of work, which consists of 33 novels and counting. The author says it best during a call to his New Jersey home: “The past is never quite buried. You may try to bury it, you may throw a lot of dirt over it . . . but it will claw its way back out.”

And claw it does, whether in Coben’s 18 standalone novels, his YA trilogy or the Myron Bolitar series, in which Win—short for Windsor Horne Lockwood III—has served as a mysterious, witty, violence-prone sidekick to the affable Myron, a sports agent with a sideline in off-the-books criminal investigation, since the 1990s. 

Coben has fans worldwide: He’s got 75 million books in print in 45 languages, numerous Netflix series, a critically acclaimed French film adaptation of his 2001 book, Tell No One, and still more projects in the works (including a sequel to 2020’s The Boy From the Woods). He’s also won the Edgar Award, Shamus Award and Anthony Award. 

Through it all, there was one thing he didn’t want to do: write a book about Win. “People have been asking me about it for a long time, but I’ve been resisting it,” he says. “I usually come up with an idea and then ask myself who will tell the story.” Often the answer was Myron or a range of other characters. And then: “I had an idea involving an art heist and a hermit in a fancy Upper West Side apartment, and I thought, ‘That’s Win’s world. I wonder if he could tell the story.’”

"Sometimes nice guys are boring to hang out with. Win’s never boring."

In the novel, a Vermeer painting, stolen from Win’s family decades earlier, has been found at the homicide scene of a man Win had never met, along with a suitcase monogrammed with Win’s initials. The victim, a wealthy hoarder, seems to be connected to the years-ago kidnapping of Win’s cousin Patricia, which itself is tied to domestic terrorists who are still on the run after committing a deadly crime in the 1970s. And the police and FBI? They’re looking askance at Win, to say the least.

Although it feels right that Win’s day has come, writing his star turn was not without its challenges for Coben. For one thing, “My leads, like Myron Bolitar, David Beck in Tell No One or Grace Lawson in Just One Look, are usually fairly nice people. Win is a bit darker. He’s more of an antihero.” 

It’s true: Win is exceptionally handsome and exceedingly wealthy, with an insouciant attitude toward laws, feelings, authority—almost anything or anyone, really—that isn’t a priority for him. While he’s devoted to his longtime friend Myron and feels affection for his own father, Win is also quite comfortable with vigilantism, consequences be damned. “I confess I’m not good about considering long-term repercussions,” Win wryly confides.

What Win is good at is understanding his own tremendous advantages. “He would be insufferable if he didn’t get that,” says Coben. “And that’s also sort of fun for me, because a lot of people in that world don’t get it.”

To wit, while Win is on the hunt for the Vermeer painting’s thief, he muses, “There is an odd psychology amongst those who inherit great wealth, because deep down inside, they realize that they did nothing to earn it, that it really was just a matter of luck, and yet how can it be that they are not special? . . . It haunts us. It makes us compensate. It poisons.” 

Notes Coben, “I expect some people will not like Win, but they’ll find him compelling. That’s all that matters to me.” When asked if he likes Win, Coben pauses for a second and then laughs. “Who cares? I find him great company. He’s a guy I’d love to sit with at a bar and listen to, which is always what your hero should be. . . . Sometimes nice guys are boring to hang out with. Win’s never boring.”

And neither is Win’s story. As it plumbs the character’s complicated origins, it offers insight into what’s behind his obsession with martial arts training and his transactional approach to sex. There are also urgent visits to Lockwood Manor in Pennsylvania, where his father and Patricia begrudgingly reveal some family secrets and decline to address others. Readers join Win on a circuit of his high-end haunts in New York City, too, where he has an apartment in the Dakota and used to prowl the streets on “night tours” (read: opportunities for violence).

And yes, Win includes Coben’s trademark nerve-wracking action scenes as well. Win is savvy and skilled, but there’s always the possibility that he could be outnumbered or outplanned.  Coben does research the tactical nature of brawls, he explains, but “most of the time it’s just my imagination. I’ll put myself in that position . . . and figure out what is the best move. How would I get out of it? What’s a fight really like?” 

He demurs, though, at the notion that readers might be, say, keeping a mental list of techniques learned from Win and his other fisticuffs-minded characters. “I don’t know how many real self-defense things you’re learning from me. I would be careful,” he says with a laugh. “I just know enough to get myself in trouble.”

“I’ve always wanted to be the guy whose book you took on vacation,” Coben says, “but you don’t want to leave your hotel room because you have to know what’s going to happen next.”

As Win races to unravel a multitude of tangled threads, past and present, Coben reveals layers of deception among family members, wary witnesses, criminals who will do anything to avoid capture and perhaps even Win’s own psyche. His attractiveness and wealth gain him leverage and access but cannot ultimately protect him from harsh truths and exceptionally hard decisions. It’s an intriguing and sometimes mind-bending exercise in “What would I do?” This, Coben says, “is the main joy of Win. You may not agree with his decisions, they may not be ethical or legal, but you get it. You see that side of it, and there’s something very appealing about his side.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Win.

That, too, is an important element of the appeal of Win and Coben’s other work: the moral conundrums, the fights that are vicious but sometimes kinda fun, the shocking twists and surprising dispatches from long ago. “I’ve always wanted to be the guy whose book you took on vacation,” Coben says, “but you don’t want to leave your hotel room because you have to know what’s going to happen next.”

He doesn’t take this goal lightly, noting that it’s become something of a mission, or even a calling, for him. “I’ve been very, very lucky, and I take that very seriously. I work as hard as I’ve ever worked, if not harder, on every project I do, because if you’re going to walk into a bookstore and there’s a zillion books for you to buy and you’re choosing mine, that’s a heck of a responsibility.”

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

Chris Bohjalian’s latest novel is a legal thriller set in an era with seemingly little in common with our own: the perilous world of 17th-century New England. But through a young Puritan woman’s attempts to divorce her abusive husband, Bohjalian explores how the sexism, shame and rampant gossip of the early American colonies are eerily persistent to this day.

What inspired you to write a novel of suspense set in 17th-century New England?
My work—at least my best work—is powered by dread. My books are slow burns. It’s not “action” in a conventional sense that keeps readers turning the pages, but rather a simmering anxiety.

And many of the Puritans lived with anxiety and dread: Satan was as real as your neighbor and they fretted constantly over whether they were saved or damned.

Now, when we think of New England’s history of hanging people for witchcraft, we beeline straight to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. But in 1656, the governor of Massachusetts had his own sister-in-law hanged as a witch. And the first real witch hunt was Hartford, Connecticutt, in 1662—three full decades before Salem.

One thing many of the women executed as witches had in common was that they were smart, opinionated and viewed as outsiders; sometimes, they saw through the patriarchal hypocrisy that marked a lot of New England Puritanism.

I was looking for a way into a novel of suspense set in the 17th century, but one that I hoped would chart new ground. I came across a reference in the records of Boston’s Court of Assistants from 1672: A woman named Nanny Naylor successfully sued her husband for divorce on the grounds of cruelty. And I was off and running.

The way Mary and those around her think is very different when compared to a modern reader’s perspective. For example, Mary is always looking for signs from God or the devil. How did you get into the mindset of a 17th-century Puritan?
I’ve been interested in Puritan theology and the Puritan mind since college. I still have many of the books I read for classes then.

The Puritans kept diaries and ledgers, and those were important to me, because they used them to try and see if they were likely saved or damned.

Moreover, as stern and cruel and condescending as the Puritans could be, there were moments when they understood the inherent beauty of the world. They were not joyless. (They sure loved their beer.) My favorite example of this is the poetry of Anne Bradstreet. Bradstreet, along with Emily Dickinson, has been a muse for me since college, and her 17th-century legacy includes love poems to her husband, wrenching testimonies to loss and meditations on faith and doubt.

"When you spend your life wondering if you are damned or saved, you are constantly looking for signs."

One of the catalysts for the novel’s central conflict was, of all things, the importation of forks. Did the Puritans really consider them tools of the devil? How did you discover this?
I was preparing some short remarks years ago about the first Thanksgiving for my daughter’s elementary school, and I came across a passage in George Francis Dow’s Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony that noted the Puritans did not use forks. They used knives and spoons and their fingers. When I embarked upon this novel, I recalled that tidbit and it led me down one of those great research rabbit holes.

By the mid-17th century, the three-tined fork was starting to gain favor in Europe. But it seems that the earliest “eating" forks found at New England archeological sites date from the early 1700s. The derivation of the word “fork,” of course, comes from “pitchfork,” and some scholars have argued that the implement had trouble gaining traction in New England because of its resemblance to the devil’s pitchfork. (The early forks were terrifying!)

Now, how many Puritans actually viewed them as the Devil’s Tines? I have no idea. But if you live in a world where Satan is an almost tangible presence? A three-tined fork is a great tool to make part of a spell.

I was struck by how, despite living more than 350 years ago, Mary’s struggle to escape an abusive marriage and her patriarchal upbringing still felt similar to stories we hear today. Do you think the power structures that kept Mary confined have changed that much?
In some ways, the Puritans were more progressive than we give them credit for. They viewed marriage as a civil ceremony and a wife who was granted a divorce from her husband was granted one-third of his estate. (I’m not saying one-third is fair, only that it is more than you might have expected.) At least 31 times, Puritan marriages ended in divorce.

But, of course, it was an inherently sexist culture. Exhibit A? It was a heck of a lot easier to get yourself hanged as a witch if you were female. In some ways, the culture defined toxic masculinity.

And just as today the burden of proof seems to fall unfairly on women so often that we actually need an #IBelieveHer movement, it was very difficult in the 17th century for a woman to win a dispute in a “he said/she said” confrontation. Of those 31 divorces, only one was for cruelty—what today we would call domestic abuse.

Yes, Hour of the Witch is set in 1662, but (by design) it is among the more timely novels I have written. I am confident most readers will get the reference when a member of Boston’s all-male Court of Assistants calls my heroine, Mary Deerfield, “a nasty woman.”

Why do you think the Puritans were so obsessed with witchcraft?
Because Satan and Hell and predestination were fixtures in their worldview. When you spend your life wondering if you are damned or saved, you are constantly looking for signs.

Moreover, how do you explain the tragedies that were part of their daily existence? The death and the disease and the accidents that left you disabled? Part of their answer was the devil and his human acolytes.

Mary’s concept of good and evil shifts dramatically throughout the novel. Is this born of necessity or of her world expanding or both?
My novels are character studies. It is character that interests me.

The great teacher of writing (and novelist and short story writer) John Gardner taught us that among the points that matter most in fiction is character transformation. And so I hope my characters change in the course of a story. And Mary Deerfield’s journey is certainly a tale of growth.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Hour of the Witch.

Part of this novel is a legal thriller. How did you research the complex legal system Mary finds herself tangled up in?
The Puritans didn’t have court stenographers, but they were avid record-keepers.

I hope the trial proceedings and the way a trial would have been conducted is fundamentally accurate. I had the great good fortune of becoming friends with L. Kinvin Wroth, professor emeritus of law at Vermont Law School. We first had lunch in the summer of 2001—20 years ago—when I reached out to him to discuss the novel I was contemplating about a Puritan woman’s attempt to divorce her husband. He pointed out to me the articles it was critical I read about 17th-century law and the first New England courts. He read a draft of the novel and patiently corrected my most egregious mistakes. I will always recall fondly our lunches over the decades in South Royalton, Vermont.

The power of gossip is very different in Mary’s life than it would be in the present day. How did the closeness of her community present a threat to her while still enabling the colony to survive?
The Puritans didn’t have Twitter, but they did have the whipping post and the stocks. They sure as heck weren’t slackers when it came to public shaming. And they depended to a large degree on people’s fear of shame to moderate their behavior (as if the fires of hell weren’t enough) and to keep order.

I find it interesting that both witchcraft and adultery were capital crimes, but no was ever executed for adultery.

Author photo © Victoria Blewe.

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.

S.A. Cosby has taken the literary world by storm. His first release from a major publisher, 2020’s Blacktop Wasteland, proved his ability to scale the professional heights without compromising his identity as a Black man raised in rural Virginia, even in an industry marred by severe inequities. Buttressed by its antiheroic protagonist, Beauregard, the car chase-strewn Southern noir made 22 best of the year lists, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery and was swiftly optioned for film, bringing Cosby a level of attention that he hadn’t yet seen in his 20-plus-year career. 

“The response to Blacktop Wasteland has been beyond my wildest dreams,” Cosby says from his home in Virginia. “I’ve been amazed by the fact that people are willing to take a walk through the shoes of someone like Beauregard.” 

Now Cosby returns with Razorblade Tears, which centers on the unlikely partnership between two ex-convicts: Ike, who is African American, and Buddy Lee, who is white. They pair up to avenge the untimely murders of their two sons, who were married and living seemingly harmless lives. As they investigate this mysterious tragedy, which seems to be connected to both a white supremacist biker gang and a furtive young woman named Tangerine, Ike and Buddy Lee go on a thrilling journey of self-discovery and social interrogation across the book’s 336 pages. 

Razorblade Tears is a mission-driven novel that finds Cosby directly deconstructing the cultural plague of homophobia, both in larger society and in the Black community. Ike and Buddy Lee’s quest for vengeance is partly fueled by the guilt they feel over their rejection of their queer-identifying sons while they were still alive. The genesis of the book was a conversation Cosby had with a Black gay friend who was struggling to decide whether to come out to his parents. 

“When I was a kid, someone calling you the N-word and somebody calling you a derogatory term for someone in the LGBTQ community would cause you to fight on sight,” Cosby says. “And in some instances, it was almost like people felt like it was worse to be called a derogatory name for an LGBTQ member than it was to be called the N-word. We really need to confront the issue of homophobia in our community, and as a crime writer, I decided to look at it through the prism of the genre that I love.”

"I love my hometown . . . I love the people there. But that doesn’t absolve myself or them from the truth."

Ike and Buddy Lee’s quest for vengeance forces them to question their complicated ideas about manhood, which have caused harm to themselves and others throughout their lives. Masculinity is a subject that Cosby has never shied away from in either his personal and creative life. “I think there’s such a convoluted sense of masculinity in the South and in rural towns and small towns,” he says. “I think that we have to expand our definition of what we consider masculine. That’s definitely an issue I’m exploring in Razorblade Tears.”

The rural South is not just a backdrop but also a generative force in Cosby’s writing. Through the lens of crime fiction, the author explores the contradictory nature of Southern living. Cosby grew up in Mathews County, a rural area a couple of hours away from Virginia’s largest city, Virginia Beach, and home to some 8,000 residents. “I love my hometown, and every book I write is basically [about] my hometown in disguise. I love the people there. But that doesn’t absolve myself or them from the truth,” he says. 

“Living in a rural environment, you have a sense of community and belonging that I don’t know you get anywhere else,” he continues. “At the same time, I live in a small town where there’s a gigantic Confederate statue right in front of the courthouse. I’m fully aware and cognizant of these diametrically opposed ideas. I have Black love, a Black family and a sense of belonging while living in a town where some of the inhabitants still idealize racist traitors.”

Cosby’s writing career reflects the same type of resolve that his characters display as they navigate their arduous lives. “It was a long and circuitous route to getting published,” he notes. Cosby fell in love with the craft when he first published a letter to Santa in the local newspaper at 7 years old. He studied English in college but was forced to drop out after his mother became ill. Since then, life has taken Cosby through a variety of spaces and occupations, but he always remained committed to writing. “I never gave up, I just kept plugging away at it,” Cosby, who is now 47, says. 

In 2011, he published a short story in a small quarterly called Thug Lit. “That was the beginning of my career as a crime writer,” he says. “I wrote more short stories that got published. I ended up publishing a short novel called My Darkest Prayer through an independent publishing firm. And then from that, I took the leap and wrote Blacktop Wasteland.”

Like Blacktop Wasteland, which won acclaim for its potent mix of social commentary and white-knuckle thrills, Razorblade Tears also offers understated yet powerful commentary about America’s racial problem. Many people, from all points on the political spectrum, reduce racism to moments of interpersonal conflict and unequal access. But as Cosby demonstrates throughout the book, racism also festers in the nuances and subtexts. This can especially be seen through the adroit and well-voiced conversations between Ike and Buddy Lee, who don’t like each other but are forced to work together. 

“There are scenes where Buddy Lee says casually racist things to Ike, and literally in the midst of them trying to find vengeance for their children, Ike has to break it down to explain his experience,” Cosby says. “There is a scene where Buddy Lee is looking at Ike’s lawn care truck and is like, ‘Hey man, you talk so much about racism, but you got this nice truck, and you got a business.’ And Ike is like, ‘Yeah, I got this nice truck, but I get pulled over like once a month. I’m doing all right, but when I go in the store, people don’t respect me.’ So, they’re having conversations about race and what race means. They’re growing in respect to their appreciation for their sons and their sons’ love, but they’re also growing and changing in respect to each other.”

In addition to homophobia, masculinity and race, Razorblade Tears examines poverty, classism and rural/urban divides. Cosby admits that grappling with such serious issues caused anxiety during the writing process. “It was terrifying, but as a writer you’ve got to challenge yourself,” he says. “I don’t think any of us are free or valued until everybody is free or valued. So I wanted to push myself and see if I could talk about those issues in a voice that was true to me.”

Cosby handles such material with great care. He conducted serious research to ensure that he could address these issues without causing further harm. “I think research is 30% to 40% of your writing if you’re trying to do it well,” he explains. “If you’re tackling something that is outside your purview, you’ve got to know what you’re talking about. And I think not only doing my own research but also having authenticity readers or sensitivity readers is an important part of the process.” 

Razorblade Tears’ commitment to addressing serious social issues is balanced by temperate pacing and a consistent rhythmic pulse that reflect the energy of rural Southern life. It’s like the blues, with Cosby as a contemporary manifestation of legendary bluesmen like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, whom he cites as influences. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Razorblade Tears.

In further accordance with the bluesman aesthetic, Cosby’s work is also creative ethnography, pulling from the everyday oral traditions of African Americans. “I grew up around a lot of backyard orators and barbecue philosophers. So I listened to my uncles and them trash talk over a spades or dominoes game. Or I would ride my bike down to the basketball court and listen to them trash talk,” he says. “Listening to the way people talk is a huge influence on me.”

Cosby’s investment in realistic dialogue and detailed characterization is never clearer than in Razorblade Tears’ incredibly rich and nuanced portraits of Black criminals, those who orbit them and others on the periphery of the law. Ike is a formidable character, a natural leader who commands respect in every space he enters. His temperament has been shaped, at least in part, by blood battles on the streets and in prison. Throughout the book, Ike manages his violent disposition as though it’s a chronic illness: It’s kept mostly at bay, but there’s always risk of a flare-up.

Some may question why Cosby, a man of such immense talents, would spend his time writing about Black criminals, especially considering the way Black people have been both symbolically and physically criminalized in this country. He is fearless and candid in response. “I think the value in exploring this particular aspect of our lives is to show that people can make mistakes, and still ultimately find redemption,” he says. “I have family members who have rightly and wrongly been convicted of crime, and they’ve come out and pulled themselves together and got second chances. If we try to hide that, then we’re no better than someone who says they see no color. We have to explore the full width and breadth of the Black experience.” 

As a Black writer at a time of great social and political division, Cosby feels a deep sense of responsibility. “As an African American writer, your first charge is to tell the truth about your experience,” says Cosby. He hopes that his own truth-telling will inspire others to do the same. “I would love for a little Black boy or girl to pick up my book and be like, ‘Wow, man, this dude is doing this. If he is publishing, then I can do it, too.’” 

Author photo by Sam Sauter Photography.

Despite the dance studio-setting of her new thriller, The Turnout, Megan Abbott was decidedly not a ballerina growing up.

“My dancing background is restricted to two years at a strip mall dance studio in Michigan,” Abbott says with a laugh. But that didn’t stop her from developing a lifelong fixation with ballet. “Like a lot of young women, because it’s so tied to femininity, I had a fascination with it at a young age. I read all the ballet memoirs. I loved all the stuff about ballet and about young women dying or contracting terrible diseases.”

Abbott famously writes intense, often noirish books. Her breakout 2012 thriller, Dare Me, was an unflinching look at the cutthroat world of high school cheerleading, and some of her 11 other novels are inspired by famous crimes from decades past. So talking to her on the phone from her home in the Queens borough of New York City is surprising; she is effusive and lighthearted as she talks about the inspiration for her haunting new book, The Turnout. 

It’s a beautifully written look at a musty ballet studio run by sisters Dara and Marie and Dara’s husband, Charlie, who came to live with Dara and Marie when they were teens. All three grapple with the trauma of their deeply troubled childhoods and the toll ballet has taken on their bodies. Once the most promising dancer of the three, Charlie has endured four surgeries and lives with ongoing chronic pain. “His body, still as lean and marble-cut as the day their mother brought him home, was a living reminder of how quickly things could turn,” Abbott writes, “how beautiful things could all be broken inside.”

“It seems the impulse is still there, despite everything, of women judging other women.”

The physically and emotionally grueling world of ballet was a subject Abbott had considered for years before finally sitting down to write The Turnout. “I was interested in the smells and the sort of fixations with the repetitions and discipline required,” she says. “The mind games dancers will do to get in that space.”

The relationship dynamics between women—how they both support and undermine each other—is a prominent theme in many of Abbott’s books. “When I started, there were a vanishingly few crime novels that had female characters,” she says. “I realized, oh, people haven’t really talked about [female relationships] so much in this world. . . . We know this [competitive dynamic] goes on and the way women talk to each other and are passive aggressive with each other. We know the casual comments that women know are a veiled insult—this secret language of women. [After] seeing how rich a mine it was, I just kept going back.”

One perhaps unexpected inspiration for The Turnout was the hit true crime podcast “Dirty John,” which tells the story of John Michael Meehan, a charmer who conned a successful California businesswoman into marriage with disastrous results for her and her family. 

“The listener comments would be almost entirely women commenting and basically trashing the [victims], these women who had been conned and brutalized,” Abbott says. “It seems the impulse is still there, despite everything, of women judging other women, particularly for their romantic choices. It’s obviously a really defensive posture, a fear that this could happen to you.”

When writing her suspense novels, Abbott starts out with a story and perspective in mind, but she remains open to her characters making choices, too, and she speaks of them as if they are co-authors. “We’re complex and complicated and ambivalent and change over time,” she says. “It does feel like they’re telling you what you want to do in the moment. I follow the breadcrumbs, so to speak.”

Constant change is an unavoidable part of another of Abbott’s passions: the “love story of her life,” New York City. She’s been a New Yorker since the early 1990s and has watched the city go through several iterations and waves of gentrification. “It was still a little rough around the edges when I moved here, then there was this Disneyfication and the slow ‘everyone is moving to the outer boroughs,’” she says. “Manhattan was becoming empty condos of wealthy internationalists, and now it’s coming back to life. I’ve seen many versions of it. I’ll never leave it.”

Despite this, Abbott does not set her books there. In fact, several of her novels are fairly vague on their exact locations, and that includes The Turnout, where the studio is set on the top two floors of a squat, rusty brick office building downtown—though downtown where is not readily apparent. 

“New York is home, so to me, it’s not exotic,” she says. “I do tend to want to write places where I don’t specify too many regional signifiers, so you can picture it and relate to it. I don’t want them to be quite that grounded.”

Living through the COVID-19 pandemic in the city was not easy for Abbott, but having consistent projects in TV and movie writing (including adapting The Turnout into a limited series) forced her to stay productive and focused. “Luckily I needed to basically write all the time during the pandemic,” she says. “With TV and film scripts, you literally don’t get paid until you finish it, and people are waiting! It gave me a rigor. Script work also kept me connected to people in a strange time. As a novelist, it’s a solitary life, but now I couldn’t even leave my apartment, so it was an umbilical cord to the rest of the world.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Turnout.

One of Abbott’s favorite recent TV projects was writing for the HBO series “The Deuce,” set in the seedy Times Square of the late 1970s. Abbott said it was thrilling, if daunting, to write about this period in the city’s storied history.

“I was so terrified that it really made me obsessively research,” she says. She describes most of her stories as being “very small . . . set in hothouses,” whereas the stories in “The Deuce” are “very expansive, with multiple characters and worlds like the police and pimps.”

Now that vaccines are available in the U.S. and the country appears to be opening up again, Abbott knows exactly how she’s going to reclaim her beloved city. “What I really missed, maybe the most, is a sweaty, loud, noisy bar with friends and the music throbbing and the sensate experience of that,” she says. “That experience of having to strain your voice to talk to your friends about some book you just read or movie you just saw.”

Author photo by Drew Reilly.