Shelf Life

Category: Fiction

  • We Are All the Same in the Dark

    We Are All the Same in the Dark

             Life hasn’t been kind to Wyatt Branson in the last decade but there’s always Trumanell, his older sister, homecoming queen and once the prettiest girl in the small Texas town where they live who is always there for him. So when Wyatt brings home an abandoned young girl he found lying out in the hot sun alongside a road and brings her home, Trumanell understands his need to keep her safe.

             But there’s a problem here and it’s not the young girl who Wyatt calls Angel as she refuses to talk, not even to give her name. The big trouble is that Trumanell disappeared ten years ago on the same evening their abusive father also vanished. That was also the night Wyatt’s girlfriend Odette was in a car accident and lost her leg.

             So begins Julia Heaberlin’s newest mystery thriller “We Are All the Same in the Dark” (Ballantine 2020) Heaberlin, who worked for two decades as a journalist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and The Detroit News started reading thrillers when very young. Her favorite authors included Stephen King, Tana French, Thomas Harris, Daphne du Maurier, Edgar Allan Poe and Patricia Highsmith. Writing a novel was always her dream but it never seemed to happen.

             “My husband encouraged me to take a chance,” says Heaberlin.

             And so she did.

             “I was very lucky,” she says, noting that she had struggled with how to write fiction, often getting stuck when outlining. “Then I read Stephen King’s book on writing. He says go with the character and so I did to the point that sometimes I don’t know what’s going to happen next when I’m writing.”

             Her novels include “Black-Eyed Susans” and “Playing Dead,” each, as she describes them, an ode to Texas, her beloved home state.

             Heaberlin likes writing about strong, resilient female characters, women like Odette, who hasn’t let the loss of a limb slow her down and is now the youngest police detective in town. Hearing that there’s a young girl at Wyatt’s house, she stops by to see what’s happening. Resistant at first, Odette starts the bonding process after noticing Angel is missing an eye and immediately shows she’s missing a leg. That starts their friendship, one where Odette, like Wyatt, wants to protect Angel and is afraid a state agency might send her back to her abusive father.

             Because she is strong, Odette has found the courage to go on with her life despite losing her leg. But Wyatt has not. Suspicion has always surrounded him because of his missing family and it only increases when a pseudo-documentary mixes facts and fiction to make it look like he’s murdered them.

             For Odette, saving Angel again involves her in the mystery of what happened the night Trumanell disappeared. Unfortunately, as she begins digging deeper into the past, someone is working equally hard to keep her from learning the truth.

     #mystery #thriller #art #horror #bookstagram #love #drama #crime #murder

  • The Herd

    The Herd

             Founded by the beautiful and charismatic Eleanor Walsh, Herd is an elite, glamorous all-female co-working space in New York City. It’s a scene where employees are considered celebrities and a lure for young and ambitious women. Katie Bradley believes she has a serious in there, her older sister Hana was Eleanor’s roommate in college and is head of Herd’s public relations department.

             But Eleanor, who always treated Katie like a younger sister, isn’t so sure that she has what it takes for Herd. After all, Katie had a spectacular book deal that fell apart and for the last year she’s been living in Kalamazoo, Michigan (which for this uber group of New York women is like time spent on the Mongolian Plains) taking care of her mother who was undergoing cancer treatments.  For her part, Katie, desperate to jumpstart her failing career, is secretly planning on making Eleanor the subject of her new book. With all these factors in play, on the evening when Eleanor says she will be making a huge announcement, she disappears instead.

             And so begins The Herd, the second thriller written by Andrea Bartz, who the Los Angeles Times called a master “of the female thrillers.”

             As Katie, Hana and other staff members attempt to discover what happened to their missing boss, they unearth secrets not only about her but each other. It seems that everyone had something to hide.

             “I had the idea for The Herd a few years ago, when I was trying to come up with a great setting for a mystery: somewhere exclusive and tightly knit, with its own complex social dynamics,” says Bartz whose first novel, The Lost Night, was optioned for TV by actress Mila Kunis’ production company, Orchard Farm.  “A lightbulb went off when I pictured The Herd with the H-E-R in purple, and I was off and running. The Herd is a dark and twisty take on commercial feminism, ambition, and the pressures of being a woman in the world, and hopefully it’s a super fun read.”

             Bartz, who never outlines and allows her many plot twists to “develop organically as she writes,” says she learns about her characters while working on her first draft.

             “Trust me at the beginning they were much less interesting,” she says. “Once I’d hammered out the theme I wanted to explore–how hard it is for women to succeed in a man’s world, I wanted all the female characters to have very different approaches to success.”

             Where the book goes is as much a surprise to Bartz as it is to her readers.

             “To give one of many examples, in the first chapter, someone scrawls misogynistic graffiti in the Herd; until the very end, I had no idea who had done it, or how, or why,” she says. “But somehow, the pieces come together at the eleventh hour—and then I go to work revising so that all the pieces align. It’s not very time-efficient, but it works for me.”   

             Female empowerment and the ensuing backlash is an important theme in Bartz’s book.

             “I’m frequently annoyed and exhausted by the double standards of how women are supposed to behave,” she says. “We’re supposed to be competent but not bossy, ambitious but not work-obsessed, agreeable but not weak, authoritative but not intimidating, pretty but not superficial, and so on. Men don’t have to bend themselves into a pretzel to be liked, the way that women do. The pressure to be perfect is such a huge mental and emotional drain on ambitious, high-achieving professional women, and I hoped to get readers thinking about the consequences of holding half the population up to impossibly high standards. All that said, I mostly hope it’s a fun, escapist read.”

    Sidebar: Virtual Book Events with Andrea Bartz

             Working with influencers, bookstores, podcasts, and Facebook groups, Bartz has set up virtual events that are livestreamed (and, ideally recorded so people can watch them later), to keep in touch. For the most part, she says, she chats about the book as she would in conversation with someone in an in-person bookstore event.

             Though it’s not as good as meeting people in real time, Bartz says it does allow folks from all over the world to tune in.

             Check out her virtual events at AndreaBartz.com/events.

  • Walk the Wire by David Baldacci

    Walk the Wire by David Baldacci

    A graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, David Baldacci first worked as a trial lawyer, and later a corporate lawyer in Washington, D.C.

    David Baldacci

    But he was a writer long before that, starting at age 8 when his mother gave him a notebook so he could write down his stories. He credits her with providing the spark that led him to become a New York Times best-selling author. Baldacci’s 40 adult novels have sold more than 130 million copies, are available in 45 languages and in 180 countries. Several have also been adapted for TV and movies.

    Besides that, he’s found time to pen seven children’s novels. And if that isn’t impressive enough, consider this: he’s not yet 60. That means, in addition to writing all those trial briefs when he worked as an attorney, Baldacci has turned out about two books a book a year since his first, “Absolute Power,” was published in 1996. (Clint Eastwood later directed and starred in the film adaptation.)

    As for Baldacci’s mother, well, she confessed that she gave him that notebook not to set him on a career as an author but to keep him quiet.

    Baldacci’s latest book, Walk the Wire, continues the story of Amos Decker, a former football player whose injuries have rewired his brain so that he has some very strange abilities, including remembering everything, even stuff he wants to forget. Oh, and he sees the recently dead in electrifying shades of blue.

    Now an FBI agent, Decker and his partner, Alex Jamison, find themselves trying to solve a gruesome murder in a small North Dakota town gone explosively big because of fracking.

    “The body of a woman has been found,” said Baldacci, giving a brief overview of his sixth novel in the Decker series. “The only thing is, she’s already been autopsied. The oil boom town is full of danger on a number of levels for Decker.”

    Baldacci has had an interest in boom-and-bust towns for awhile.

    “They’re as close as we’re going to get to the wild, wild west again, at least hopefully,” he said. “And it was a way to take Decker out of his comfort zone and see what he could do under really dire situations.”

    Decker’s total recall is actually a real, if exceedingly rare, syndrome called hyperthymesia. As for that blue body thing, well, it does exist, but maybe not in the way Decker experiences it.

    “Synesthesia is the term, and it refers to a comingling of sensory pathways in the brain,” said Baldacci. “Decker seeing electric blue around death was one manifestation I came up with. The more common ones are seeing numbers in color or sounds in color.”

    Besides the Amos Decker series, Baldacci has nine other series going, as well as numerous stand-alone books. When I ask him if he ever gets confused — he often is penning at least two books at one time — his answer is no.

    “I created them all, so it’s as easy as remembering your kids. They’re all unique to me, ” he said, noting that he is currently writing two books — the next Atlee Pine thriller, and then, going back in time to 1949, the sequel to “One Good Deed.”

    If they’re like his kids, then maybe it’s not fair to ask if he has a favorite. After all, you wouldn’t ask a parent that. But I do anyway.

    “I like all of my characters, or else I wouldn’t spend time with them,” he responded. “Decker is probably the most fun one to write about. It’s hard to predict what he’s going to say or do, and I like that about him. No parameters.”

    That statement brings us to another fascinating aspect of Baldacci’s writing. He really doesn’t do more than mini outlines for his books.

    “I like to let the plot and characters grow organically,” he said. “I like revelations and epiphanies along the way, those aha moments. If I surprise myself while writing the story, I’m going to knock readers on their butts.”

  • Pretty as a Picture

    Pretty as a Picture

    In Pretty as a Picture, Elizabeth Little’s latest thriller, film director Marissa Dahl accepts a job to work on an isolated island off the coast of Delaware with the notoriously erratic director Tony Rees. When she arrives on the set, Dahl doesn’t know much about her new job except that the movie is about a woman who was murdered there two decades ago. But there’s more going on besides a megalomaniacal director and an old unsolved murder.  Rees wants the movie to convey, in graphic detail, the woman’s death; numerous scandals are about to erupt and before long, another woman is found dead. Will she be next, Marissa wonders? 

             Extremely talented Marissa, who has high functioning-like autistic social interactions, is befriended by two completed wired-in teenaged girls when she goes in search of peanut butter. The girls are convinced that there’s more to the local murder than meets the eye. Teaming up they work to solve the mystery.

             Little knows Hollywood. Her husband had many miserable years there working in the business (he’s now getting a degree in social worker) and she’s met her share of outrageous and egotistical directors. That in part is why she wrote this, her second mystery.

             “With Pretty as a Picture, I had known for a couple of months that I wanted to write something about the film business—I live in Los Angeles and am married to an ex-filmmaker, so it was a subject that was very close at hand,” says Little. “I tried writing a few chapters, working out some of the plot lines, but nothing really took root until I realized that my main character was a film editor who was far more comfortable in the company of her favorite movies than in that of real-life people. I wish I could say that inspiration struck suddenly—or even efficiently—but I think I just had to write my way into the realization.”

             Little describes herself as writing in a highly immersive first-person perspective.

             “I want my readers to be in both the heads and the bodies of my narrators, to really feel what they’re feeling,” she says. “And in order to do this, I work really hard to put myself into a place, mentally, where I’m able to credibly conjure up the physical and emotional sensations of my narrators. I don’t just put myself in their shoes, in other words—I put myself in their muscle and sinew and skin. It’s a little extreme at times, to be honest, and I wonder at times if I’m Daniel Day Lewissing it—when I finish a day of work, it can really feel like I’m finally coming up for air.  It’s probably far too pretentious an approach for a thriller writer, but it seems, so far, to be working for me.”

             Little may not like Hollywood, but she does like Marissa.

    “She’s particularly dear to me because she’s so deeply uncool and sweet and weird,” she says. “She’s vulnerable and awkward and loyal and hilarious and annoying and really, really good at her job. I love her. I hope readers love her, too.”

  • Darling Rose Gold

    Darling Rose Gold

             Poor Patty Watts. She did everything she could for her daughter Rose Gold who was confined to a wheelchair, allergic to everything and struggled with an unbelievable number of health issues beginning at birth. Patty couldn’t work because she devoted herself to her daughter’s care. Luckily neighbors were kind, holding fundraisers and helping Patty anyway they could. She was described as a supermom.

             Only she wasn’t. Instead, she was constantly feeding Rose Gold ipecac, making her vomit and manipulating doctors like getting one to put the two-year-old girl on a feeding tube and then not giving her the amount of food she needed. All this was to ensure that Rose Gold would remain gravely ill. When she was discovered, Patty went from a hero to prison, where she spent five years for aggravated child abuse. Rose Gold, in the meantime, had a child and learned to live on her own. Then Patty was released from prison and needed a place to live. Would Rose take her in? And what would happen when she did?

             That’s the question Chicago native Stephanie Wrobel asks in her recently released book, “Darling Rose Gold,” a tense thriller that opens with Rose Gold picking her mother up from prison.

             Wrobel was intrigued by stories told by her best friend, a school psychologist, about Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP).

             “The mother-daughter bond is supposed to be sacred,” says Wrobel, in a phone call from England where she has lived for the last few years. “But that’s not the case in MSBP, a mental health disorder where a caregiver fakes or induces illness in the person they’re taking care of. The more research I did on the subject, the more fascinated and appalled I became. In most cases, the perpetrators are mothers acting out of a need for attention or love from authority figures within the medical community.” 

             Wanting to get into the head of both the victim and the perpetrator, Wrobel tells the story of mother and daughter from both points of view. Patty, it seems, has developed such an impenetrable armor, she’s unable to see the evil she’s done. Rose Gold, tougher now, wants to pay back those who have done her harm. But, as they say, it’s complicated.

  • My Lovely Wife

    My Lovely Wife

             Sure, any marriage can—and probably will–hit a few lows here and there. Solutions to these hard times can vary—a romantic weekend away, couples therapy or long, long talks and walks. But for Millicent and her husband of 15 years who live in a posh Central Florida suburb with their two children, the spark comes from embarking upon a shared hobby—murder.

    Samantha Downing

             “It didn’t start off as a murder,” says Samantha Downing, whose bestselling first novel My Lovely Wife (Berkley Trade 2020, $16) was recently released in paperback. “The first death was accidental but not the second.”

             Downing’s inspiration came from a documentary about a couple who kidnapped a woman and held her captive for years.

              “Finally, the wife let her go and ended up testifying against her husband,” says Downing, who has been nominated for Best First Novel in the 2020 Edgar Awards.

    .        “I thought you never hear about women being the instigator in these kind of situations. It made me wonder if she was, what would she be like?”

             Her answer, she says, was an extreme version of the woman who has to be and do everything—a superwoman type.

             “Millicent is very controlled with a crazy outlet to relieve stress,” says Downing, who grew up reading psychological and legal thrillers.

             My Lovely Wife, as the title implies, is told in the voice of the unnamed husband.

             “Our love story is simple,” he says by way of introduction. “I met a gorgeous woman. We fell in love. We had kids. We moved to the suburbs. We told each other our biggest dreams, and our darkest secrets. And then we got bored.”

             It isn’t long before the husband longs for a return to boredom, but Millicent is on a roll and he’s along for the ride. But there are complications. When a second woman disappears, their community starts to wonder and worry. Their gilded suburb is on edge and suspicions arise. Maybe all these murders weren’t such a good idea after all.

             Though the subject is edgy, surprising the story isn’t bloody or  violent.

             “Though the subject matter is certainly dark, it’s not gory, there’s no sex, nothing graphic,” says Downing. “I didn’t want the book to be bleak, I like satire, I wanted this to be darkly comedic and for people to enjoy the story.”

             Downing seems to have her mark. Amazon Studios acquired the rights to the book and are partnering on the film version with Nicole Kidman’s Blossom Films.

  • The Girl in White Gloves: A Novel of Grace Kelly

    The Girl in White Gloves: A Novel of Grace Kelly

    The surprising–and unprecedented–news that Harry and Meghan have withdrawn from the Royal Family last month stunned the globe and spurred conversations about individual pursuits versus familial and sovereign duty. It makes one wonder what if Grace Kelly had been able to break away from royal life and pursue her own dreams once she became disillusioned with her life as a Princess? The comparison is apt. Both Meghan Markle and Grace Kelly, two American actresses who made headlines when they married international Princes and gave up their careers and financial independence to serve their royal subjects.

    That’s why the timing could not be more perfect for the release of THE GIRL IN WHITE GLOVES (Berkley 2020) by Kerri Maher). The novel is a vivid reimagining of the exhilarating and sensationalized life of Princess Grace of Monaco from the acclaimed best selling author of The Kennedy Debutante. Maher takes us into the inner life of an almost mythical female historical figure. Luminescent with golden hair and blue eyes, Golden Globe- and Oscar-winning actress, Princess—and fiction’s newest “it-girl”—Grace Kelly. was the favorite of many directors including Alfred Hitchcock. She was also the epitome of class.

    The picture of perfection on paper, in the history books and from the public’s perspective, Grace Kelly’s life appeared as pure fantasy. A spectacular beauty from a prominent Philadelphia family, her dreams of becoming an accomplished actress came true and she was a star in many mediums—stage, television, and film.

    But Kelly gave it all up when she assumed the role of a real life princess after marrying Prince Ranier of Monaco in a magnificent wedding ceremony. Becoming a Princess may be every young girl’s fantasy., but neither fame nor royalty (as Meghan Markle might have discovered) is as charming as it seems, and Kerri Maher takes a closer look at the woman behind the headlines in THE GIRL IN WHITE GLOVES.  This compelling novel provides insight into this real-life Cinderella story: the good, the bad, and the not-so-happily-ever-after.

    As for Grace, she knew what people saw. She was the Cinderella story. An icon of glamor and elegance frozen in dazzling Technicolor. The picture of perfection. The girl in white gloves.

    But behind the lens, beyond the panoramic views of glistening Mediterranean azure, she knows the truth. The sacrifices it takes for an unappreciated girl from Philadelphia to defy her family and become the reigning queen of the screen. The heartbreaking reasons she trades Hollywood for a crown. The loneliness of being a princess in a fairy tale kingdom that is all too real.

    Hardest of all for her adoring fans and loyal subjects to comprehend, is the harsh reality that to be the most envied woman in the world does not mean she is the happiest. Starved for affection and purpose, facing a labyrinth of romantic and social expectations with more twists and turns than Monaco’s infamous winding roads, Grace must find her own way to fulfillment. But what she risks—her art, her family, her marriage—she may never get back.

    Kerri Maher is the author of The Kennedy Debutante, which People magazine described as “a riveting reimagining of a true tale of forbidden love,” and This Is Not a Writing Manual: Notes for the Young Writer in the Real World under the name Kerri Majors. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and founded YARN, an award-winning literary journal of short-form YA writing. A writing professor for many years, she now writes full time and lives with her daughter and dog in a leafy suburb west of Boston, Massachusetts.

    Praise for THE GIRL IN WHITE GLOVES

    “The stunning and very human story of a beloved icon…. Full of nuance and poignancy—this novel is gorgeous.”— Allison Pataki, New York Times bestselling author of The Queen’s Fortune
     
    “[A] fascinating, deeply researched novel of the extraordinary Grace Kelly … establishes Maher as a true force in biographical fiction.”—Beatriz Williams, New York Times bestselling author of The Golden Hour

  • The Other Mrs.

    The Other Mrs.

             After staying up late reading The Other Mrs. by Chicago author Mary Kubica, I have a word of advice for women out there. If you’re husband’s sister commits suicide and her home on a remote island off the coast of Maine is yours if you agree to live there and take care of her defiant teen-aged daughter, just say no.

    An isolated island, a frayed marriage and a spooky house where the last owner died in the attic--so what could possible go wrong? Everything in this new suspense-thriller from Mary Kubica.

             But unfortunately, Sadie, a Chicago physician didn’t do that. Instead, after a brief lapse in consciousness where she walked out of an operating room and was later found on the edge of a roof, she and her husband Will—a charming and handsome man with an eye for ladies—take the offer. Sadie was about to lose her job and her license and besides, she’s just found out that Will was having an affair. So the couple pack up their children and move into Alice’s home. It’s the kind of place where doors squeak at night, the wind howls outside and the frayed rope Alice used to hang herself still swings from the rafter in the attic. Then, things take even more sinister of a turn when Morgan, a nearby neighbor is found murdered in her home.

             Obviously, the move was a bad choice and to make it worse, Sadie, working as a doctor in a clinic, still finds herself losing track of time and what she is doing. Add to that, she also worries about Will, a stay-at-home dad for their two sons, and his friendships with pretty mothers whose children play with theirs. If he cheated once, will he do so again, she wonders. Even worse, though Sadie never met Morgan, an elderly couple claim they saw her tear out a chunk of her hair during a fight in the days before her murder.

             This is Kubica’s sixth novel and her last five have made the New York Times and USA Today best seller list.

             “I love to work under the surface with people—there really is so much we don’t know about people,” says Kubica, a former high school history teacher who starts with a premise for her plots and then let’s her writing—and her characters—take her along for a ride so to speak. “My characters really drive what I write. I can start off in one direction and then the book can go a different way.”

             Kubica seems to live a normal life. That is until after her teenaged children go to school, then spends her days in this dark, psychologically twisted world of sublevels and secrets. Two of her favorite authors are Megan Abbott and Paula Hawkins who also write about women in peril who are often unreliable narrators—causing readers to wonder if they can believe their stories. It all adds to the suspense. But readers should understand, Kubica is often just as surprised as they are.

             “I have no idea what to expect,” she says. “But it’s fun.”

  • How Quickly She Disappears

    How Quickly She Disappears

                Intrigued by the tales his grandparents told of living in Tanacross, a small Alaskan village back in the late 1930s, Indiana author Raymond Fleischmann has woven a mystery set in that time frame and location.

                “I grew up hearing their stories about Alaska, the cold, the isolation, the long days and the long nights,” says Fleischmann, the author of the just released How Quickly She Disappears.  “So, the setting is very real though my characters are fictional and not based on my grandparents at all who were very much in love and married for over 60 years.”

                That part is probably good as Fleischmann’s novel is about Elisabeth Pfautz who is living in Alaska with her husband and young daughter. The marriage is joyless, but her daughter is her delight and, more forebodingly, a reminder and connection with her twin sister, Jacqueline, who when she was eleven, disappeared. No one has seen or knows what happened to her since then.

                  Haunted by her lost sister, experiencing reoccurring dreams of 1921 and the circumstances of the disappearance and saddened by the state of her marriage, Elisabeth is drawn to Alfred, a substitute mail pilot who lands in Tanacross. Elisabeth, who grew up a small German community in Pennsylvania, feels a kinship of sorts with Alfred, who is also of German heritage. But then things turn distinctly weird and terrifying. Albert murders another man, apparently in cold blood. But he also knows, he tells Elisabeth, what happened to her sister, something he will reveal to her at a cost.

                Fleischmann says he’s always been drawn to novels that are propelled by relatively simple, often violent acts, but do so in a way that’s careful, human, and deeply examined. From Alaska in 1941, Fleischmann takes us back to 1921 where we meet Jacqueline as well.

                “I thought it was important for people to know about her as well,” says Fleischmann, who earned an MFA from Ohio State University, “To me, at the time of her disappearance, Jacqueline is a lonely and somewhat stunted child who is having difficulty navigating the transition from adolescent to adult, just like many of us. So is Elisabeth and Jacqueline’s disappearance has left a big void in her life. As an adult she still feels very much alone without her sister and appears to suffer in many dysfunctional ways.”

                All this makes her vulnerable to Alfred’s cat and mouse game as does the voice she seems to hear, that of Jacqueline urging her to “come and find me.”

  • THE CHRISTMAS SPIRITS ON TRADD STREET

    THE CHRISTMAS SPIRITS ON TRADD STREET

    New York Times bestselling author Karen White’s iconic series about a quirky psychic realtor (yes, you read that right!), set in historic Charleston, continues this winter. A long-anticipated gift to her fans, this holiday season White released her first ever Christmas novel.

    Jane Ammeson, who writes the Shelf Life column for The Times of Northwest Indiana and shelflife.blog, interviewed Karen about THE CHRISTMAS SPIRITS ON TRADD STREET, the sixth book in her Tradd Street Series,

    With each new release, Karen’s national platform grows. Her previous installment in the series, The Guests on South Battery (2017), was a New York Times hardcover bestseller. Her books have been featured on Southern Living, Reese Witherspoon’s Draper James blog, Late Night with Seth Meyers, and more. The author of over twenty books and 12 New York Times bestsellers, she has almost two million books in print in fifteen different languages.

     JA: Since you’re not a realtor and you’re not seeing ghosts (we don’t think so, anyway!), do you have much in common with Melanie—like are you super-organized with lots of charts and spread sheets, etc.?

    KW: Let’s just say that people who know me who have also read the Tradd Street series seem to think that Melanie _is_ me.  I’m going to neither confirm nor deny, but let’s just say that I do love to be organized and I also adore sweets (although Melanie’s metabolism is simply something I aspire to).  She and I are both ABBA fans and neither of us can text without many alarming typos.

    JA: You grew up all over the world but started off in the south and think of yourself as a Southern girl. Why did you choose historic Charleston for the setting of your series?

    KW: My parents (and extended family) are all from the South—mainly Mississippi—which is where I get my Southern roots.  I went to college in New Orleans (Tulane) and actually planned to set the series there.  However, the year I started writing the first book was 2005, the year Katrina wreaked so much havoc on the city and her citizens.  I knew that in the series I was planning to write that this sort of natural disaster and its repercussions wouldn’t fit.  I would return to New Orleans and the storm for The Beach Trees, but for the series I needed to find another Southern city that had gorgeous architecture, lots of history, and plenty of ghosts.  Charleston was an obvious choice.

    JA: Your Tradd Street series novels seem to require a lot of research into older homes, renovations and history, can you tell us about that?

    KW: Since I was a little girl I’ve been obsessed with old houses.  They didn’t need to be grand or even well-maintained to make me beg my mother to pull the car over to the curb so I could get a better look.  When we moved to London, we were fortunate to live in an Edwardian building on Regent’s Park.  It had leaded glass windows, thick mahogany doors, and ceiling medallions to make a wedding cake envious.  Living in that flat made me believe that I truly could hold a piece of history in my hands.  My obsession continues with my daughter who holds a master’s degree in historic preservation from the College of Charleston and currently works as an architectural historian.  She actually appears in the last two Tradd books (as well as Dreams of Falling) as graduate student Meghan Black.

    JA: Can you give readers who may not have read any of your other books about Melanie and Jack a description of The Christmas Spirits on Tradd Street?

    KW: In this penultimate installment (book #6) in the series, we find OCD Realtor (who also happens to be able to speak with dead people) Melanie Middleton and true crime mystery writer Jack Trenholm happily married and living with their toddler twins and teenage daughter, Nola, in their historic home on Tradd Street. Christmas is approaching and all seems to be going well for them—-except for a few money problems, Jack’s writing career taking a curveball, and an unpleasant specter seen haunting Nola’s bedroom that seems to be connected to the ancient cistern being excavated in their back yard.  Unwilling to burden Jack with one more problem and distract him from his writing despite promises that they wouldn’t hold secrets from each other, Melanie takes it upon herself to attempt to solve the mystery behind the ghostly presence—with unsettling results that Melanie may or may not be able to resolve.

    JA: Are your ghosts based upon real life (if you can call it that when it comes to ghosts) tales of hauntings in Charleston?

    KW: Growing up, my father loved to read true ghost stories to my brothers and me—usually right before bedtime.  I also had a grandmother who always spoke about conversations she’d had with dead relatives.  I suppose that’s the reason why I thought ghosts were like doilies on the backs of chairs—some people had them, some people didn’t.  I continue to enjoy ghost stories (I listen to several podcasts on the subject) and, even though I have never had an experience, my son has three times.  

    When visiting Charleston, I love going on haunted walking tours (especially the graveyard ones) and always pick up fascinating tidbits to be used later in my books.  I’ve never borrowed a ghost story for my books, but tend to pick and choose certain parts of favorites and mix them together to fit into my stories.

    JA: Do you live in an older home?

    KW: Sadly, no.  My husband isn’t a fan of old houses (and in my first book, the derogatory remarks Melanie makes about old houses came right from his litany of why he dislikes old houses—mostly having to do with the expense of heating them).  Every house I’ve lived in since the old Edwardian building in London has been brand new.  I’m hoping my daughter and I can get sway him to our side when it’s time to move again.  Hopefully to Charleston.

    JA: Besides a great story and enjoyable read, are there any other take-aways you’d like for readers to get from The Christmas Spirits on Tradd Street?

    KW: This installment can be read on its own.  However, I do think that readers might enjoy the series more if read in order starting with the first book.  The books each have their own mystery to be solved, but the growing cast of characters and Melanie’s growth through the series is an important element and best understood if readers meet her in book #1.

    JA: Anything else you’d like our readers to know?

    KW:  Yes, there are ghosts and some spooky scenes in all of the books.  But these are not paranormal or thriller type books.  These are character-driven stories centered around Melanie Middleton and her relationships with family and friends and set in the gorgeous and historical city of Charleston, South Carolina.  This is Southern Women’s Fiction—with the added bonus of a few spirits who need Melanie’s help to solve a mystery.