Lately, I’ve been traveling the world. Tasting the different cuisines and being mesmerized by the different sites, sounds, and cultures—all from my cozy little corner at home. Books do that for me. They allow me to feel the pulse of a foreign nation while not being bogged down in the political turmoil of today’s world. And it’s not as costly as the price of a holiday abroad.
In my search for something different and intriguing, I stumbled across Susanna Shore, a multifaceted talent who has mastered the art of writing a spectacular mystery in English—not her native language. To say that I adore her new series, The Reed Files, isn’t doing my attachment justice. I am one hundred percent hooked—and I know you will be too!
Kym Roberts: Hi Susanna, welcome to the Cozy Corner!
Susanna Shore: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.
Kym: You are a Finnish author who chose to write/publish in English. Do you publish in other languages as well?
Susanna: Not currently, no. Back when I chose to self-publish, a decade ago, Amazon only allowed English and Spanish books. I haven’t checked if Finnish is supported by now, or if it’s available on other publishing platforms. I’m too busy writing in English. However, I once wrote an UF (urban fantasy) in Finnish that my sisters liked (they like everything I write), so … maybe?
Kym: An urban fantasy would be awesome to see from you! I have total faith in your world building. I love your new series, The Reed Files where you took a mafia tough guy from your P.I. Tracy Hayes mysteries and transformed him into a white knight—sorta;) Why did you choose to cloak him in a different guise instead of just creating a new character for this series?
Susanna: Thank you, I’m glad you like it. Johnny Moreira, Eliot’s original self, began as a side character that grew too large for the P.I. Tracy Hayes series. He either needed to get an equal role, which there wasn’t room for (they’re short books), or he had to go.
But I didn’t want to kill him. I like him and Tracy definitely likes him, so I decided to give him his own series. The series is built for him, not the other way round. That he needed to start a new life worked well for my purposes. I could recreate him, and he already had a good backstory to build on. And now that he’s no longer in the original series, I can rethink that too and refresh it.
Kym: Brilliant! I love your creativity! I often ask an author if they pictured someone in their character’s role. So if Eliot Reed was a real person, who would he be?
Susanna: This is actually a difficult question for me. I never base my characters on real people, and I seldom imagine who would portray them on screen. They’d be mixtures of several actors: body from one, a face from another, mannerisms from a third, and so on.
Johnny Moreira is maybe a less handsome version of Joe Manganiello, with younger and more fit Steven Segal thrown in for bulk and that Italian mafia vibe. Eliot would perhaps be a bit like Tom Ellis as Lucifer (or anything, really) or Juan Diego Botto as the assassin in Good Behavior, mixed with any suave and debonair actor out there (Tom Hiddleston, maybe) with some other actors and models for eyes and hair. At least for now. I’ll probably change my mind later.
Kym: I’m thinking those are great combinations of yum! Eliot Reed is a normal guy whose gone through a radical physical change to go with his new identity. He’s a very complicated character with an even more complex background, yet you wrote his debut novel, The Perfect Scam, in a manner that made it easy for the reader to follow. How difficult was his transformation for you as the writer, or was his good guy heart inside dying to come out the entire time?
Susanna: I’m not very good at writing bad guys. I tend to like my characters too much, especially if they’re recurring, so they get more likable characteristics as they go on. Johnny Moreira was supposed to be much worse than he turned out to be in P.I. Tracy Hayes series. You can see some of that (intent) in the first book, but that soon went away.
Now that I had a chance to explore him deeper, I intended to show the reader that he’d done some truly questionable stuff in his past. But I like him, so again I ended up making him nicer than I meant to. He isn’t a boy scout though, and I hope that that shows when he has to choose between what’s good and what’s easy.
Kym: I like your not-so-much-of-a-boy-scout hero;) The heroine, Ada, is also a multifaceted character living a double life. Neither character is a bad person, but both grew up with bad influences in their lives that have led them into lives of crime. Why did you choose to write your hero and heroine in that fashion?
Susanna: I have enough characters that are (mostly) good and moral. I found it interesting to write something different. It was especially interesting to figure out how they would approach solving a murder.
Eliot starts as a recovering criminal who’s more used to hiding the bodies. He’s supposed to stay on straight and narrow, and for the most part, I think he managed it in this book. I won’t make promises for the rest of the series.
I originally planned Ada to be a very strict cop who would hunt Eliot to the edge of the world to catch him. But that’s been done a million times before and I didn’t find it interesting enough to write a whole book about, let alone a series. Moreover, I wanted to add some romance, and I didn’t want her to have to compromise her principles for him.
So I took a different approach. I asked, what kind of woman would Eliot love. And the answer was, someone he didn’t have to pretend with and hide from. Which meant that she needed to have a high-stakes secret too. So I made her a criminal. Then I made her a cop for the sake of the murder investigation, to give easy access to it. But I immediately liked the possibilities it offered for the character. Neither of them is good or bad as such, and both will make unpredictable choices because of it.
Kym: It’s original and the perfect love affair. I love the way Eliot and Ada come together, risking exposure of their true identities and completely untrusting of the other, to solve a murder. Have you ever had to put blind trust in another person that you didn’t know when so much was on the line?
Susanna: I’m happy to say, no. Also, I’ve never been in a situation where so much would be at stake, even with people I know and trust.
Kym: You’ve skillfully entwined multiple subplots of your story in the same fashion as author Kōtarō Isak did in the Japanese novel, Maria Bītoru (Maria Beetle), which was turned into the movie Bullet Train starring Brad Pitt. Please tell me you plot out your novels prior to writing them, and how long did it take you to write this book?
Susanna: I’m an unabashed pantser. I never plot anything in advance. I spend time with the setting and the main characters before I start, and I know where I want the story to go (e.g. happily ever after or the murder solved) and how long it should take, but getting there is always a discovery. With mysteries, I never decide on the killer beforehand. If I’m surprised, the reader is too.
I’ve been surprised by a dead body or two when the pacing of the book calls for a twist, which I then have to find a way to explain. Sometimes it goes easily, occasionally it requires heavy rewriting to keep things logical. But I get there in the end, one way or another.
I think the book took about three months to write, though I started thinking about it much earlier, three Tracy Hayes books ago when I first hinted at his departure. I’ve published several books this year, and there’s only so much time I can spend writing each. It stalled at some point while I tried to figure out what was going on, but after that, it went fairly smoothly.
Kym: I am soooo envious of your ability to write of the fly! While working on this interview, I’m suddenly hungry. What is your go-to snack while writing?
Susanna: Chocolate, though I don’t even have to be hungry to indulge.
Kym: LOL, does anyone need to be hungry for chocolate? 😉 Eliot transformed himself from who he was in your P.I. Tracy Hayes series. For our readers who aren’t familiar with your Tracy Hayes mysteries, can you tell us a little bit about her and what makes her series so special?
Susanna: Tracy is in her late twenties and lives in Brooklyn, NY. She divorced after her husband cheated on her and has supported herself as a waitress ever since. Having been fired once again, she decides to become an apprentice to a private investigator.
She’s the youngest of four and a college dropout, whereas her older siblings are successful, a lawyer, a doctor, and a homicide detective. But she’s a daughter of a cop, so she’s not entirely clueless about crime solving and she has a lot of common sense and grit, which she uses to solve the cases.
I think the books are a good blend of murder mysteries, family life, and a little bit of romance with her boss, Jackson Dean, with Johnny Moreira (Eliot) and her ex-husband mixing things up a little. They’re not purely cozy mysteries, they’re more like light crime. I was inspired by Stephanie Plum series, but with more continuity between the books and less crazy shenanigans.
Kym: You’ve also written the House of Magic cosy mystery series, several thrillers and paranormal romances. What drives you to write so many different genres and will you continue to cross the street to another realm with your writing?
Susanna: I started with the romances, paranormal and contemporary. A decade ago, they interested me the most. The paranormal romance series still continues, but I haven’t felt like writing a contemporary romance for a long time, although I have a couple of series planned and even partly written.
I like trying new genres. They keep my imagination fresh. I self-publish, so no one tells me what I’m allowed to do. I have a lot of ideas for books, and while most of them aren’t good enough to dedicate time to, some of them stick. Tracy Hayes books felt good from the start, and I wrote three in a row. The same with the House of Magic. I paused everything to write Hexing the Ex. The thrillers were experiments to see if I can write something grittier. I’m not entirely sure I can, for the aforementioned inability to write bad guys, so I haven’t written more.
I have dozens of ideas and half-written books that haven’t seen the light of day. Some will be published though, and there are new genres to come too. I have a steampunk series in the works, and a dark academy type of fantasy, to name just a couple of them. But the current series keep me busy for quite a while still, so it’ll take a few years before I’ll seriously start with those.
Kym: I have no doubt they will be just as entertaining. If you were trapped on a deserted island with one of your characters, who would it be and why? Going along with that theme, if there was a third character on the island with you two, who would it be and who would you sacrifice if assassins landed on the island and said they were going to eliminate one of you? (Choose wisely, you never know when there will be a twist in the story!)
Susanna: This is a tough one. I have characters who have excellent survival skills, like the vampires and wolf-shifters of my Two-Natured London paranormal romance series. They have magic too, so we’d likely survive, even if assassins came. They’re a bit high-strung though, so if I chose one for companionship, I’d have to go with someone else. Maybe Jackson Dean from Tracy Hayes series. He’s a former Marine, so he’d have the survival skills, and he’s kind of easy to be around.
Who to sacrifice though… Maybe one of the billionaires from my contemporary romances. They’d likely be useless anyway.
Kym: Hahaha! I love that! What are you working on now?
Susanna: I’m writing book number eight in the Two-Natured London series called Beloved Warrior. It should come out at the end of October. On the side, I’m writing the fourth book in the House of Magic series. That one doesn’t have a title or publication date yet. After that, there will be the next Reed Files book called The Perfect Hoax. That’ll come out sometime in March, maybe.
Kym: Where can our readers find you on-line?
Susanna: I have a website where all my books are in one place with sample chapters. I hang out daily (European time) on Twitter. I also have a Facebook page, and an Instagram account, but I don’t post there often, mostly photos and such. And if you like book reviews, I review regularly on my blog susannashore.blogspot.com. All the links can be found on my webpage too.
Kym: Thank you for joining us at the Cozy Corner!
Susanna: Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
Thanks to the Susanna and Netgalley for an advanced copy of The Scam. Until next month, get cozy and read on!
About Kym Roberts
Kym Roberts writes by day and is a pro-surfer in her dreams by night. Her humor is often raunchy, her jokes are often bad, but her hunger for a story keeps the adventures coming fast. Experience the thrill & catch the wave of passion, mystery, and suspense with her at kymroberts.com, on Facebook @KymRobertsAuthor911, and on Twitter @kymroberts911.
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