Reading
A Childhood Full of Love and Death: On Growing Up With a Father in Forensics
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It wasn’t a surprise to those who knew me as a child that when I start telling stories for a living, they were centered around the forensic and crime investigation world. I started my forensic training almost at birth. My father was a medical examiner for three counties in north Michigan and the coroner’s office…
Vanessa Lillie on Writing a Thriller That Explores Native American Issues and Environmental Injustice
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Vanessa Lillie says she’s “an impatient reader,” a trait that influences her writing: “I really like to create characters who are aggressively seeking justice, even when it puts their lives in danger.” This is a dead-on description of Syd Walker, the courageous protagonist of Lillie’s new novel. Blood Sisters follows Syd, a Cherokee woman and…
A Cultural History of the Erotic Thriller
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The strip mall video rental store was an emporium of illicit dreams. Its doorway in the small town where I came of age, located in between candy store and pharmacy, doubled as a portal into fantasy, dark explorations of human nature, and cheap thrills that looked mightily expensive. Beginning in my early teenage years, I…
James Kennedy: “Storytellers are manipulative cult leaders.”
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I missed my chance to be in a cult. In my twenties, a guy on the street handed me a pamphlet to join a “communal farm”—an obvious cult. Nevertheless, I was intrigued: maybe I could enjoy this farm’s bucolic vibes and free love, while shrewdly avoiding any mass suicide, or baby-eating, or barnyard chores. I…
Sudden Death and the Startlement of Absence
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Sudden Death is a dirty business. It touches you, and there’s no rubbing it off. Scrub until you bleed. No dice—it remains. Maybe that’s why I keep writing about it. A Southern California summer in ‘93. I remember blades of grass on the bottoms of my feet. Morning dew between my toes, and sunshine on…
Love Letters to a Serial Killer: Excerpt and Cover Reveal
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There was a drought in letters from William after I sent him the pictures of myself. I stared at my reflection in the mirror in the mornings and wondered what was so awful about my face that even an incarcerated serial killer didn’t want to talk to me. I looked at the digital versions of…
The Dead Girl and the Survivor Trope
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When I first picked up crime thrillers as a teenager, I remember being fascinated by how many plots begin with the discovery of a dead girl. What was it exactly that I found so intriguing about these novels, considering I was often in the same age demographic as many of their victims, not to mention…
How Unlikeable Characters Freed Me From Perfectionism
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I’m hardly the first author to call herself a perfectionist. In fact, I’m sure many of us were once described as “a pleasure to have in class”—which, for me, meant straight As, crippling social anxiety, and a paralyzing fear of getting in trouble. My literary role models were Nancy Drew, Matilda, and Ella (of Enchanted…