Welcome to Fresh Fiction, Sophie! Please tell us a little bit about yourself and new book, PERFECT LITTLE CHILDREN?  I’ve been writing psychological thrillers since 2006. This includes my Culver Valley police series and several standalone thrillers – Perfect Little Children is one of those. It’s about an ordinary woman, Beth, whose life takes a sudden, sinister turn when she witnesses a totally baffling scene involving her one-time friend, Flora. It’s been 12 years since their friendship ended. Then one day, unexpectedly, Beth sees Flora with her children, Thomas and Emily, who were five and three years old when Beth last knew them. Inexplicably, the children appear not to have aged at all. They are no taller, no older, and they’re even wearing the exact same clothes that Beth last saw them wearing. Why haven’t they grown? Beth, fearing something dangerous and terrible is going on, sets out to investigate… Beth painfully parted ways with her best friend Flora twelve years ago, but when she’s in Flora’s neighborhood, she can’t help but drive by Flora’s house, which leads to a whole host of other strange things. What inspired this setup?  It was inspired by a real-life situation I found myself…

I don’t know about you, but I love a good book series. When I began writing my debut novel, Inherent Truth, I didn’t originally plan for it to become a series. However, as things progressed and the characters revealed themselves, it became clear–this book was meant to be the kick-starter for a far more complex story than could be told within the confines of one novel. And so, Blood Secrets was born. I’ve thought about that a lot as I’ve navigated this journey, and after talking with some friends I’ve come up with what I consider the top five reasons why we love book series so much. I can’t wait to see if you agree. Reason #1: Characters become friends. Come on, don’t act like you’ve never closed a book and felt like you suddenly lost your best friend. We’ve all been there, and series have a way of roping us in, wrapping us up in these fictional lives so that we begin to feel like family. Most series provide a diverse cast of characters so that almost any reader can find a favorite, providing enough common ground that each turn of the page feels like a chat with a…

1) What’s the name of your latest release?  Losing You.   2) What is it about?  A teenage girl goes missing and her mother has one short and terrifying day to find her. 3) What word best describes your heroine?  Unstoppable. 4) What makes your hero irresistible?  There is no hero. The heroine has to save her daughter by herself. That’s what makes her irresistible: she is like a tigress. 5) Who are the people your main characters turn to when they need help?  Nina turns to the police but the police don’t believe her. One of the themes that repeats in our novels is that people have to save themselves… 6) What do you love about the setting of your book?  Sandling Island is inspired by an island near where we live in South East England. It’s swept by the wind off the north Sea, it’s linked to the mainland by a causeway that is covered by the tide once a day and it produces the best oysters in the world. 7) Are you a plotter (follow an outline) or a pantster (write by the seat of your pants)? Every book is a bit different. But this book is…

I write the Ellie Stone mysteries, a series featuring a young newspaper reporter set in the early 1960s. In the seventh installment, TURN TO STONE (January 21, 2020), Ellie is in Florence, Italy for an academic symposium honoring her late father. But just as she arrives on the banks of the Arno, she learns that her host, Professor Alberto Bondinelli, has been fished out of the river, quite dead. Then a suspected rubella outbreak leaves ten of the symposium participants quarantined in villa outside the city with little to do but tell stories to entertain themselves. Making the best of their confinement, the men and women spin tales and gorge themselves on fine Tuscan food and wine. And as they do, long-buried secrets about Bondinelli and his checkered past rise to the surface, and Ellie must figure out if one or more of her companions is capable of murder. It was great fun—challenging, too—researching and writing about one of my favorite places on earth, Florence. There’s so much history and art to be found, literally, on almost every corner. Ellie, of course, has visited Florence before. In 1946, shortly after the end of the war, she accompanied her father on…

CHAPTER 3 Mamba Kisiwa na Simu ya Dharura—Crocodile Island and an Emergency Call The day’s shooting went well, starting with a morning call at eight. Pero had hired a fishing boat with Honda outboards, and they embarked from the hotel dock and headed two hours up the lake to Crocodile Island. The water was calm in the early morning, crystal clear, birds dipping beaks on the wing to drink. As they approached Crocodile Island, looking down off to the side, Mary spotted a small herd of hippos. Heep filmed them, lowering the waterproof camera as the blue-black, corpulent giants danced along the shallow bottom near the shore of the island. The morning’s planned shoot was filming the crocodile sand nests, the enormous females waiting just offshore, slowly treading water with powerful tails. Mary donned her wet suit, powered up her video camera, and went snorkeling in four to ten feet of water. Heep and the crew remained in shallow water and used the main underwater camera, filming her filming the crocs. The crew soon found themselves standing in five feet of water, as close to fifteen-foot crocs as anyone sane would ever want to be. While Susanna had adjusted her…

I absolutely love mysteries and thrillers—books, movies, TV shows—I binge them all. I am also inspired by them. In fact, my newest novel, In The Dark, is an homage to author Agatha Christie and one of her most iconic stories And Then There Were None. In my novel, Christie’s story actually becomes a plot device, a psychological tool, that the villain uses to instill fear in the victims that are trapped. The victims know what transpired in And Then There Were None, which has them anticipating that the same will happen to them. Some of my other favorite mystery writers include Daphne DuMaurier and Patricia Highsmith. Also, at the moment I’m loving Lisa Jewell’s voice and her domestic suspense—I’ve been on a Lisa Jewell glom. In this vein, I love Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard and enjoyed Helen Fitzgerald’s The Cry, and Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen’s The Wife Between Us. Liane Moriarty, too. Off the top of my head, my favorite thriller movies include The Bone Collector, The Thomas Crowne Affair (for the romantic tension), and The Debt (pure tension plus love triangle!) And finally, let’s not forget great TV shows in this genre. I think that the television series adaptation of The Cry is just fabulous. I am hooked on Big Little Lies. I’m also a…

Welcome to Fresh Fiction, Nalini! Can you tell us a little bit about your latest novel, A MADNESS OF SUNSHINE?  A MADNESS OF SUNSHINE is my debut thriller. Set in an isolated town on New Zealand’s rugged and stunningly beautiful West Coast, it’s about all the different faces people wear, all the secrets we keep, and how well we ever know one another. The New Zealand landscape is an integral character in the book, a place that’ll take your breath away…and a place so wild and empty that bodies could disappear without a trace. A MADNESS OF SUNSHINE marks a change of genre for you! What inspired this change to write a thriller? Did you find anything surprisingly different than writing paranormal romance? I’ve always enjoyed mysteries and thrillers, and many of my paranormal romances have a mystery element or subplot. So it wasn’t a huge shift to write a pure mystery – it was more a case of having the right story and the right setting. Anahera Rawiri left her small New Zealand hometown of Golden Cove eight years ago, but returns to find things similar, but with some frustrating differences. What does her return home mean to Anahera?…

October is the month when it’s fun to be scared! Halloween movies play on the tv stations, while readers turn to Halloween, creepy or paranormal themed books to get into the mood for October 31. For me, October is always the time to pull out a Stephen King book as his stories set the perfect atmosphere for an eerie October night. I’ve also discovered a few other reads this October that are perfect for the season. Here are some of my recommendations for creepy October reads this Halloween season: DIABHAL by Kathleen Kaufman is a deliciously dark occult thriller focusing on a matriarchal cult called The Society. Things go awry when 10-year-old Ceit Robertson’s mother is attacked by restless spirits called Sluagh and she’s placed in a foster home called MacLaren Hall. While the story itself is fictional, MacLaren Hall isn’t and has a disturbing history that only serves to heighten the creepy atmosphere Kathleen Kaufman creates.  DIABHAL is the kind of book that you can’t put down even as you wonder what will happen next- it’s classic horror at its finest! A.J. Hackwith puts a whole new diabolical spin on libraries in THE LIBRARY OF THE UNWRITTEN! Claire is…

Ask any marriage counselor and they’ll tell you the top three reasons couples fight are money, mothers-in-law, and what to watch on movie night. Okay, I totally made that up, but those topics are up there, right? Let me spare you a few arguments with the infographic below. Even better, these are all double features. So, if you and your spouse are not into staying up super late, this list might be good for ten movie nights. Here’s a little context: I love spy movies, and I love heist movies. This came out in spades in my latest thriller, The Gryphon Heist. Review after review has called it a mashup of “Mission Impossible” and “Ocean’s Eleven,” and you don’t see me complaining. In fact, I decided to take the idea a step further. This infographic pairs ten of my personal favorites–five heist movies and five spy movies–into epic double features. As a bonus, each comes with a mashup–the movie we might have seen if the film canister contents got all jumbled up. Take a break from the movie argument, pop some corn, and enjoy. . . *** THE GRYPHON HEIST by James R. Hannibal Talia Inger is a rookie CIA…

Four words into my new novel, Valley of Shadows, I drop my first f-bomb. Nine words later I drop my second f-bomb. That’s two f-bombs in a hyper-short paragraph. Don’t say you haven’t been warned. Rip the bandage off, say it upfront, and get it out of the way. I realize that one f-bomb is enough to stop some readers; two f-bombs will prompt some people to return my book to the shelf. My books are not for those people. I respect those people. But I’m not writing for those people. When I create my stories, I try to develop characters who reflect the true human condition, whose lives–their loves, their losses, their joys, their strife, their conflicts, and their celebrations–are uncensored. The human condition is uncensored. Our lives are uncensored. And, thus, so are the words in the worlds I create. I write police procedural murder mysteries. I’m a former news reporter. I’ve done ride-alongs with cops. I’ve spent endless hours with them on crime scenes. I have yet to meet a cop who doesn’t curse. In fact, in researching Valley of Shadows, I did my typical fact-checking exercise by visiting the Homicide bureau at a local law enforcement…