Book Title: A COLD HIGHLAND WIND Character Name: Lady Emily Hargreaves   How would you describe your family or your childhood? My older twin brothers died of influenza when they were thirteen, leaving me alone with my parents. My father, Earl Bromley, is descended from Vikings and indulged my love of reading. My mother indulged me not in the slightest; I agreed to marry my first husband primarily to escape her household. One can only tolerate having one’s waist measured and criticized so many times. In my case, that was once.   What was your greatest talent? I have an affinity for translating ancient Greek texts.   Significant other? I married Colin Hargreaves more than a decade ago. The beginning of our relationship was somewhat dodgy. First, he was my late first husband’s best friend, a fact that still gives me pangs of guilt. Second, I thought he’d murdered said late first husband. Fortunately, I was wrong. Colin is as classically handsome as a Praxiteles sculpture, believes women to be as capable as their male counterparts, and does discreet, confidential work for the Crown.  The latter occasionally proves problematic.   Where do you live? When in London, I can be…

1–What is the title of your latest release? SECRETS OF THE NILE 2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book? Emily and her husband, Colin Hargreaves, have joined his formidable mother on a holiday to visit the exotic treasures of Egypt. Their host, Lord Bertram Deeley, is a renowned amateur British collector of antiquities, who has invited his closest friends on a lavish cruise up the Nile to his home at Luxor. But on the first night of their journey, he suddenly collapses after offering a welcome toast, a victim of cyanide poisoning. Who amongst this group of his nearest and dearest would want to kill their generous host? 3–How did you decide where your book was going to take place? Egypt has fascinated me since I was a little girl, and my parents took me to the Tutankhamun exhibit at Chicago’s Field Museum. It was also an enormously popular destination for Edwardian travelers, so it made perfect sense to send Emily there. 4–Would you hang out with your sleuth in real life? Absolutely! We’d sit around eating Stilton and drinking port. 5–What are three words that describe your sleuth? Intelligent, elegant, loyal 6–What’s something you learned while writing this…

When I sat down to begin the fifth installment in my Lady Emily series, I thought very seriously about where to set the book. Location is an essential tool when writing about continuing characters, not only because it provides the opportunity to introduce readers to another place, but also because it gives the author a chance to drop her creations into a new environment, one that exposes them to a broader, different world. A world that can be difficult, but one that in the end allows them to grow. Because in Dangerous to Know, Emily is recovering from the ghastly wounds inflicted upon her at the end of Tears of Pearl, I wanted to send her somewhere idyllic and beautiful. But I also wanted it to be a place where terrible secrets could be hidden. Normandy proved the perfect choice. Its sweeping landscapes look straight out of an Impressionist painting, and dotted throughout I found the ruins of châteaux, crumbling medieval abbeys, and rambling houses that screamed for ghosts. I spent a good portion of last summer researching and writing there, getting to know the area, the people, and the food. It was Author Heaven (especially if, like me, you’re…

Being a historical novelist has its perks and pitfalls. The perks? Being able to work in pajamas is probably my favorite. I love the travel that comes with the job–whether it’s when I’m on the road meeting readers or embarking on a research trip. I love being to stay up till four in the morning writing and getting to sleep late (mornings have never been good for me; I’m much more coherent in the middle of the night). And I love the reading my work requires–poring over diaries and letters written by Victorian woman, studying the history of the time. It’s this perk that leads to a pitfall–a pitfall that is one of the hardest things to deal with when writing historical fiction. Often, when you study history, you find that the actual truth does not always match with modern ideas of what the past was like. We like to think we know the Victorians–how they were prudes who never let any female out of the house without a chaperone and admonished their daughters to lie back and think of England. None of which is quite true. According to Michael Mason’s fantastic book, The Making of Victorian Sexuality, in the…

When I first started writing, I hardly dared to dream. I banged away on a semi-decrepit laptop in my attic apartment in New Haven, Connecticut (yes, really, an attic…servants’ quarters, actually; I kept looking with no success for the butler…), working on my debut novel, And Only to Deceive, with only the briefest someday-maybe-if-I’m-good-and-lucky-this-will-get-published thoughts. I’d chosen the location for the novel carefully—wanted to use settings familiar to me. Places I’d actually been. I studied abroad in college, living in London, and that seemed an easy starting point. Two trips to Paris had cemented the city in my soul, and a recent visit to Greece had wholly seduced me. I was confident I could capture the essentials of each location. But what next? I’d joked for a long time that my writing career was a thinly veiled attempt to justify my travel plans, but I’d never really let myself believe that someday, just maybe, I could be an author and jet about the world on research trips. I kept those thoughts far from my brain, focusing instead on writing. It’s the best thing an aspiring author can do—nothing is more important than crafting the best books possible—while all the while…