Shelf Life

Tag: Mystery-Thriller

  • Amateur detective hopes to make a difference

    Amateur detective hopes to make a difference

    Lisa Gardner

    No one believed Frankie Elkin when she said Lana Whitehorse was at the bottom of the lake, and for a moment, as Frankie swam through the cloudy waters, oxygen almost gone and unable see the truck Lana had been driving on the night she disappeared, she wondered if maybe they’d been right.

    But no, there were the remains of Lana, her truck upside down in the muck, her blonde hair floating in the water.

    Now that Frankie has found Lana, a deed she did without expectation of pay, she returns to the internet looking for another missing person. She has no training, no detective license and no connection to the person she is looking for. She doesn’t even have a home or friends. Her next choice is Angelique Lovelie Badeau, a Haitian teenager who lived with brother and aunt in Mattapan, a crime-ridden neighborhood in Boston.

    One day, Angelique, a sweet girl and good student, didn’t come home. Later her school bag and cell phone were found hidden in the bushes outside of her school. Her family hopes she’ll be home soon but that was almost a year ago.

    Frankie hopes if she locates Angelique the ending will turn out differently than it has with the other 16 people she has found — all of whom were dead.

    “There are people out there like Frankie who spend their time looking for missing people,” said Lisa Gardner, author of “Before She Disappeared” (Dutton 2021; $27). “There are dog handlers who volunteer to have their dogs search for missing people for free, pilots who fly their planes over areas where someone has gone missing, and those who use their computer and social media skills to help — all for free.”

    Gardner, a New York Times best selling crime novelist, goes deep on the web when looking for true crime plots on which to base her mysteries.

    “I like to think of it as research, not procrastination,” said Gardner, who has written more than 30 novels, four of which have been made into movies.

    This time, instead of choosing a criminal case to turn into fiction, Gardner’s inspiration came about after reading about Lissa Yellowbird-Chase, who grew frustrated by the number of women going missing on tribal lands and the lack of resources, or even interest, in finding them. Yellowbird-Chase founded the citizen-led Sahnish Scouts, which is dedicated to finding justice for missing people and their families.

    “The idea that one person, without any special training or background, can make such a difference amazed me,” she said. “And it’s what brings recovering alcoholic Frankie Elkin to Mattapan, where a Haitian girl went missing 11 months ago. I had no idea the surveillance that goes on in a big city, so 11 months later I realized what this is was almost a closed room case: How does anyone disappear in a city?”

    Gardner said she is not a plotter, instead she introduces her characters and then as she writes their personalities take over to tell the story. It was trying to determine what made Frankie tick that got her out of bed each morning to start the day’s writing.

    “Before She Disappeared” is Gardner’s first standalone novel in more than 20 years.

    “But I’ve failed at writing standalone,” she said, “because I’m already writing the next book about Frankie.”

  • One by One: Ruth Ware’s Locked Door Mystery

    One by One: Ruth Ware’s Locked Door Mystery

            It sounds idyllic–a lovely ski chalet with stunning views of the French Alps, a highly rated chef preparing all the meals, a full-service housekeeper, heated swimming pool, and a week away from the London office. Sure, it’s a corporate retreat for the eight employees of Snoop and that means tedious brainstorming sessions and a rather bitter debate about the future of the company but then there’s bonding on the ski slopes and sitting in front of a cozy fire after a delicious dinner.

    Ruth Ware.

     Snoop, a trendy start up that anonymously connects someone for brief periods of time to their favorite celebrities by being able to tune into what music they’re listening to at the time, is all about cool. So really what’s there not to like even after an avalanche closes off any chance of leaving the chalet until the roads are cleared.

            After all, there’s the wine, food, and luxurious lodging, even if its starting to get a little cold since the electricity has been cut off.  But there’s worse to come, this being a Ruth Ware novel after all. One by One Gallery/Scout Press 2020; $16.14 Amazon price), combines the classic locked door mysteries made famous by Agatha Christie and the latest in social media and our willingness to turn over large amounts of information to our apps and how we use them to snoop on others, a subject Ware finds fascinating and what led to her creation of Snoop and the people who work there.

    “All those people snooping their neighbor’s houses via property websites, or exploring strange neighborhoods with Google Earth, or using social media to stalk exes,” says Ware, author of bestsellers such as The Woman in Cabin 10 and The Lying Game.  “An app that lets you snoop on the listening habits of its users, both random stranger and celebrities—the quid pro quo being that in order to snoop on others, you must make your own listening public too. Snoop promises “voyeurism for your ears” which seemed to tick all the boxes.”

    But Snoop isn’t harmless voyeurism. It leads to death.

            The first to go missing is Eva who may be laying under a ton of  huge boulders dislodged by the force of the sweeping snow. But even before the avalanche, there was a growing divisiveness, It seems each Snooper (as the Snoop workers call themselves) has a secret or two they don’t want revealed and close proximity is making it difficult keep them hidden. Adding to the tension, the missing Eva, one of the partners, was in favor of selling Snoop and scooping up her part of the millions being offered.  Topher, the other partner, wants to keep control and take the company public. The stock divisions owned by the remaining Snoopers are equally divided between those favoring either Eva or Topher. So the focus then is on Liz, a quiet woman who sees herself as weak and demeans herself for letting others take advantage of her. During the early days of the start-up she was paid in shares instead of cash and now has the controlling vote.

            As the deaths pile up, we find out more about the people who work for Snoop through the voices of both Erin, the housekeeper, and Liz.

    “Crime and psychology are inseparable really,” says Ware, explaining the motivations behind her characters’ actions. “Readers have to understand why someone would do something as extreme as killing another person, something that’s totally foreign to most of us, no matter what the stakes. For the novel to work, we readers have to be persuaded that that’s plausible, and in their character, without that aspect sticking out like a sore thumb from page one.”

            For more about Ruth Ware and future virtual author vents, visit www.ruthware.com 

  • Thriller writer channels anger into her books

    Thriller writer channels anger into her books

    Layne Fargo

    Scarlet Clark, the lead character in Layne Fargo’s newest psychological thriller, “They Never Learn,” is not your typical English professor. While she takes her studies and students seriously, for 16 years she’s also been on a mission, to eliminate men at Gorman University she considers to be bad guys. By planning carefully and keeping the murder rate down to one a year, she’s managed to avoid discovery.

    That is until her last killing — the poisoning of a star football player accused of rape — doesn’t go so well. She posted a suicide note on the guy’s Instagram account, but it turns out you can’t kill a star athlete without some ramifications.

    Suddenly, the other suicide notes written by Scarlet are under review and her current project — dispatching a lewd department head who also is her competitor for a fellowship she desperately wants (not all of Scarlet’s killings are devoid of self interest). Trying to forestall discovery, Scarlet insinuates herself into the police investigation while under pressure to get away with this next kill.

    But it’s even more complex than this. After all, it is a Fargo book, and the Chicago author who wrote the well-received “Temper” likes the complexities and power struggles inherent in relationships.

    In this case, adding to the drama is the transformation of Carly Schiller, a freshman who has escaped an abusive home life and now immerses herself in studies as a way of avoiding life. But when Allison, her self-assured roommate, is sexually assaulted at a party, Carly dreams of revenge.

    Fargo, vice president of the Chicagoland chapter of Sisters in Crime and the cocreator of the podcast Unlikeable Female Characters, has a little bad girl in her too.

    “I love the sinister title of ‘They Never Learn,’” she said, adding that this, her second thriller, has everything she loves in a book — sexy women, Shakespeare references and the stabbing of men who “deserve” it.

    Fargo was enraged at what she saw as the injustice of the appointment of a man accused of rape into a high position.

    “I channeled that all-consuming anger into a story where men like that are stripped of their power, where they get exactly what they deserve,” she said.

    This are article also ran in the Books section of the Northwest Indiana Times.

  • They Never Learn

    They Never Learn

                  Scarlet Clark, the lead character in Layne Fargo’s newest psychological thriller, They Never Learn, is not your typical English professor. While she takes her studies and students seriously, for 16 years she’s also been on a mission, to eliminate men at Gorman University she considers to be bad guys. By planning carefully and keeping the murder rate down to one a year, she’s managed to avoid discovery. That is until her last killing—the poisoning of a star football player accused of rape—doesn’t go so well.

    She’d posted a suicide note on the guy’s Instagram account, but it turns out you can’t kill a star athlete without some ramifications. Suddenly, the other suicide notes written by Scarlet are under review and her current project—dispatching a lewd department head who also (not all of Scarlet’s killings are devoid of self-interest) is her competitor for a fellowship she desperately wants.  

    Trying to forestall discovery, Scarlet insinuates herself with the police investigation while under pressure to get away with soon with this next kill.

      But it’s even more complex than this, after all it is a Fargo book and the Chicago author who wrote the well-received Temper, likes the complexities and power struggles inherent in relationships.

     In this case, adding to the drama is the transformation of Carly Schiller, a freshman who has escaped an abusive home life and now immerses herself in studies as a way of avoiding life. But when Allison, her self-assured roommate, is sexually assaulted at a party, Carly dreams of revenge.

    Fargo, Vice President of the Chicagoland chapter of Sisters in Crime, and the cocreator of the podcast Unlikeable Female Characters, has a little bad girl in her too.

    “I love the sinister title of They Never Learn,” she says, adding that this, her second thriller, has everything she loves in a book—sexy women, Shakespeare references and stabbing men who deserve it.

    She was enraged at what she saw as the injustice of the appointment of a man accused of rape into a high position.

     “I channeled that all-consuming anger into a story where men like that are stripped of their power, where they get exactly what they deserve,” she says.

    It’s a timely topic and Fargo is excited that PatMa Productions optioned the TV rights for her book, and she’ll be writing the pilot. 

    That’s a form of sweet revenge.

    Layne Fargo Virtual Book Events

    When: Thursday, October 22; 6 to 7:30 p.m. CT

    What: Layne Fargo in conversation with Allison Dickson, author of The Other Mrs. Miller, to celebrate the release of her new novel, They Never Learn.

    This event is hosted by Gramercy Books in Columbus, Ohio, and will be livestreamed on their Facebook page, with participants able to ask questions of both authors in the latter portion of the program.

    For more information and to stream: https://www.facebook.com/GramercyBooksBexley/events/?ref=page_internal

    When: Sunday, October 25, 1 p.m. EST

    What: Fiction: Witches and Other Bad Heroines by Boston Book Festival

    To register: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/bad-heroines/register

  • The Nesting

    The Nesting

    No one ever listens to me. When I tell the heroine of a spooky movie not to open the cellar door, or a character in a book to avoid the shortcut through the forest, they always do so anyway.

    And so it is in “The Nesting,” by C. J. Cooke, when Lexi Ellis, after losing her job, her boyfriend, and her home, applies for a position to nanny two young girls. Don’t take that job, I try to tell Lexi.

    Why not, you might ask? After all, a job is a good thing and her employer, a noted architect, is building the show-stopping, eco-sensitive home where they’ll be living.

    The negatives, it turns out, are numerous. Lexi is an emotional wreck, having just attempted suicide, the home is in a different country — Norway — so she is far away from those she knows, and even more, it’s totally isolated.

    Oh, and did I mention that Aurelia, the girls’ mother, committed suicide on the property not long ago and that Lexi is pretending to be Sophie Hallerton, the woman who initially applied for the job?

    It doesn’t get better. The young girls are overly energetic, leaving Sophie/Lexi exhausted by the end of the day, and the beauty of their location fades as a sense of eeriness seems to overtake the house as odd things begin happening.

    Cooke, an award-winning poet whose books have been published in 23 languages, also writes scholarly pieces on creative writing interventions for mental health. That fits Lexi, who before moving to Norway found that writing helped her cope with all her troubles.

  • Thriller tracks conspiracy’s twists and turns

    Thriller tracks conspiracy’s twists and turns

    Parental rage at kids’ sporting events is nothing new, but Maggie Russell takes it to a new level when, during her son’s last Little League game before the playoffs, she screams at the coach to give her son some playing time.

    L.C. Shaw

    Even Agatha, her good friend, thinks Maggie’s gone overboard, but it gets worse in L.C. Shaw’s second novel in her Jack Logan series, “The Silent Conspiracy” (Harper Paperbacks $16, 2020). Grabbing the knife Agatha is using to cut up apples for the team’s snack, Maggie marches down the bleachers and plunges it into the coach’s chest.

    As she watches his body slump to the ground, an inner voice urges her to remedy the situation by turning the knife on herself. And so, she does.

    It’s not your usual Little League confrontation. But to Logan, an investigative reporter, and Taylor Parks, a television producer, this isn’t just an isolated incident. There are news reports from around the country of mild-mannered, highly respected people committing murder and then suicide. It all seems to lead back to a case the couple had two years previously, when they were able to shut down a secret facility set up to brainwash political and media leaders.

    Investigating the murders, Logan and Parks discover that Damon Crosse, the man who tried to kill them two years ago when they stopped his indoctrination plot, may have faked his death and is now planning revenge. But it’s even more complicated than that. The show Park is producing about a class action suit against a national insurance company may also be connected to Damon, the murder/suicides, and his new fiendish plans.

    “’The Secret Conspiracy’ is a stand-alone book even though it ties back to ‘The Network,’ my first Jack Logan book,” said Shaw, the pen name for Lynne Constantine.

    In addition to her own books, she writes with her sister Valerie. The best-selling team writes thrillers under the pseudonym Liv Constantine. Their books include “The Last Mrs. Parrish,” “The Last Time I Saw You” and “The Wife Stalker.”

    The two are a prolific pair. Shaw said she’s just finished her fourth book with her sister and they already are plotting their fifth, while she is also at work on another book on her own.

    “The challenge,” she said, “is to have endings that are inevitable but unexpected. We like to be tricky and to catch readers by surprise but to also have it all make sense in the end.”

    For your information

    L.C. Shaw will be doing a series of virtual events. For a full list, visit her website, lcshawauthor.com/events/

    Here are several that are that are free and upcoming:

    • Fairfield University Bookstore, 6 p.m. Tuesday, http://www.facebook.com/FairfieldUBookstore/events/

    • Westport Public Library, 6 p.m. Wednesday, westportlibrary.org/storyfest-2020

    • Poisoned Pen book store, 1 p.m. Friday, http://www.facebook.com/thepoisonedpenbookstore/live

  • Love and Theft

    Love and Theft

             Starting fast—a motorcycle convoy roars through the lobby of the Wynn Las Vegas, staying only long enough to scoop up millions of dollars’ worth of stones from a classy jewelry store before riding away—Stan Parish’s latest novel “Love and Theft” (Doubleday 2020; $19.49 Amazon price) never slows down.

             Told from multiple points of view, we follow the police as they work to solve the crime as well as the thieves planning their next one last heist and not getting busted. We move with the action from Vegas to Jersey and then to the luxe vacation destination of Tulum, Mexico. Along the way there are weird stops such as one at the home of a doctor who injects willing subjects with a hallucinatory drug that helps them calm down while he and his wife, wearing wired masks, communicate their insights while taking notes.

             It’s all breathless but at the same time human. Neither cops nor bad guys are cartoon characters here. Parish makes them real while juggling the fast-paced plot.

             His interest in mystery-thrillers began when he was around 10 or 11 and pulled a copy of “Dog Soldiers” from his dad’s bookshelf. Parish was ordered to put it back, his father telling him it was full of sex, drugs and violence. Of course, the book only stayed on the shelf until his parents went to bed.

             Inspiration also comes from stories he hears from what he reads and hanging out.

             “In April 2007, two stolen Audi A8s smashed through the glass façade of the Wafi Mall in Dubai,” says Parish. “In a marble rotunda, the white car rammed the secure entrance of Graff Jewelers, while the black car spit out men in masks with automatic weapons.”

             It was the work of a successful gang called the Pink Panthers and became the basis for the opening sequence of “Love and Theft.” But the book is also fueled by what he calls being a diviner though instead of finding water he has “a sixth sense for strange subcultures, suspicious characters, and after-after parties.”

             A few years ago, in Marbella, Spain he was invited to a party at the home of several young bullfighters and during the evening “divined” that some of their income derived from storing drugs for a local cartel. That experience too became a plot point in the novel.

             The former editor-in-chief of The Future of Everything at The Wall Street Journal whose writings have appeared in the New York Times, Esquire and GQ, Parish earned a brown belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and moved to Los Angeles from New York a few years ago. But now he’s living in Europe, waiting for the pandemic to end. He’s dedicated to his craft. Planning on finishing his thriller in Malaga, Spain, he accidentally left his computer, notes and outline behind at JFK International Airport in New York City and while calling lost and found everyday hoping it would turn up, tapped out sections his novel on his cell phone his while riding in cabs late at night. His life, in other words, seems to track his fast-paced novel.

  • 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 #bookstagram #love

  • 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.

  • The Wife Stalker by Liv Constantine

    The Wife Stalker by Liv Constantine

    Lynne and Valerie Constantine

    Well, I have to admit that “The Wife Stalker,” the latest book from Lynne Constantine and Valerie Constantine, two sisters writing under the pen name of Liv Constantine, certainly fooled me. The story is told from two points of view — Piper Reynard, a beautiful and somewhat predatory holistic therapist, and Joanna Drakos, the wife of successful attorney Leo Drakos and mother of the couple’s two young children.

    When Piper meets Leo, she almost immediately decides to snag him. It’s a task made simpler because he’s willing to be snagged. Soon she’s living in the family home, playing parent to his children.

    Joanna, relegated to living with her tiresome and cantankerous mother, is astounded to learn that not only is Piper not her rival’s real name but that she has been married not once but twice before. Both husbands died in accidents when she was with them, and so did her stepdaughter. “Stalking” may be too strong a word, so let’s just say as Joanna gathers information, she quickly learns that husband number two’s ex-wife believes Piper killed both her husband and her daughter while on a sailing trip. And the mother of her first husband has a few concerns about her son’s death as well. Oh, and did we mention that each time a hubby died, Piper inherited a ton of money?

    While Joanna is sleuthing, their youngest son begins complaining of feeling ill while being forced to eat the “wholesome” foods his new stepmother forces on him.

    Is Piper a black widow working on her next set of victims?

    The answer is much trickier than you’d think. I ask the authors how they came up with their surprise ending. It started as a joke during their many brainstorming sessions.

    “But then we immediately looked at each other and said, ‘That’s it,’” said Val, adding that to say more would ruin the ending. “Once that was decided, we discussed who the characters were and began to draw them out together. We do a deep dive into their backgrounds, trauma, difficulties, family relationships, and let them develop organically from there. Lynne has a degree in human development and we both do extensive reading and research on psychology. Additionally, we consult with a friend who is a clinical psychologist to vet our psychological profiles.”

    Though they don’t live close together, the sisters use social media, such as Facebook, to talk every morning about what scenes are next and agree on who is writing what.

    They describe themselves not as plotters or strict pantsers (a writers’ term describing an author who flies by the seat of their pants and who doesn’t plan out much, if anything, beforehand), but instead say they’re plantsers—a combination of plotter and pantsers.

    “So we know the twist, the beginning and the end, but we figure out how to get there along the way,” Lynne said. “The resolution for certain characters is also up in the air, and we wait to see how things are going to play out as the book develops. We both write all characters and we edit each other’s scenes so that by the time the book is finished it isn’t unusual for us to each have written one half of a sentence.”

    Learning how they go about writing their best-selling books is intriguing, but so is how they work together. I asked them if they were the type of sisters who always got along or whether they fought a lot when younger.

    “There are 13 years between us, so we didn’t grow up together, however, when Lynne was around 13, we got very close and have remained so ever since,” Val said. “We have a great time working together as we have very similar senses of humor and truly enjoy each other’s company. Over the past three books, our process has evolved, and it’s almost like a well-oiled machine where we’ve figured out the most efficient and productive way to write together. “