Alice Blanchard’s macabre, engrossing mystery Trace of Evil follows homicide detective Natalie Lockhart as she investigates three possibly interconnected crimes in her spooky little town of Burning Lake, which has a gruesome history of killing supposed witches. We talked to Blanchard about her childhood experiences in Salem, Massachusetts, how her work in group homes informed her new novel and whether she believes in the supernatural.

Witchcraft plays a large role in this novel. I remember going through my own Wiccan phase in high school. Why do you think Wicca/witchcraft appeals to teenage girls?
Personally, I was at my most confused when I was a teenager—naive and cynical, still a child and yet perched on the brink of adulthood. As I saw it, the adult world was full of status seeking, compromise, emotional bartering and hypocrisy. My uncertain future fed into a sense of absolute powerlessness. So it makes sense that teenage girls will turn to witchcraft as a way of gaining some measure of control over their chaotic lives. It’s a coping mechanism. My coping mechanism became writing.

Did you base the town of Burning Lake on a specific place?
Burning Lake, New York, is a mashup of Salem, sheer imagination and the town where I grew up. My hometown has an abandoned asylum that looks haunted, deep sprawling forests and its own hidden history. There’s a Back to the Future feel to the old clock in the town square, the chipped art deco redbrick buildings and the struggling businesses. You can love a place for its failures, as well as its successes.

"Burning Lake, New York, is a mashup of Salem, sheer imagination and the town where I grew up."

Burning Lake has a history similar to Salem: teenage girls accuse others of witchcraft, which is a pretty significant subversion of their power within the community. Were you inspired by the Salem witch trials, and what role do you think those accusers played in their community?
When I was 13, my family visited Salem, Massachusetts, and I fell in love with the ancient cemeteries and Victorian boutiques selling everything from Tarot cards to witch hats to Ouija boards. I was delighted. Halloween seemed to be a year-round event. The merchants were dressed up like monsters, and the police cars had witches on broomsticks painted on their doors. Who could ask for anything more?

But after a visit to the Witch Museum, which explained how 19 innocent people were falsely accused of witchcraft and executed 300 years ago, everything changed. We found Gallows Hill and stood in the spot where the witches were hanged. It was a rocky promontory overlooking a Walgreens pharmacy. Such an ordinary place for such an extraordinary event.

I took a deep unease home with me that day and tried to imagine what it would be like to live in such a town. Years later, it became part of the inspiration for Trace of Evil.

Natalie is investigating a cold case in which nine homeless people have disappeared. People who are homeless don’t often get the same attention as others who go missing. Was there a reason you chose to focus on this community?
As Trace of Evil opens, BLPD detectives are trying to solve the case of the Missing Nine, forgotten individuals whom their families, friends and government-services personnel have lost track of or given up on. What the police need is a fresh pair of eyes. So they pass the case along to the rookie, Detective Natalie Lockhart.

In the past, I’ve worked in group homes, and I’ve seen people recoil from these kindhearted, imaginative and generous individuals. Sometimes they use gestures or even songs they invent as a form of communication. I’ve seen people laugh at them as they try to express their emotional needs. They need to be understood, not ridiculed. They need to be remembered, not forgotten.

In Trace of Evil, Natalie befriends a homeless woman named Bunny, who knows that Burning Lake was built on terrible secrets that won’t stay buried for long.

There’s some ambiguity in the book about whether people can be influenced by the occult or if it’s really madness or peer pressure. Do you believe that supernatural evil exists and can influence people to do harm?
I used to play with a Ouija board when I was little, and I’d never do it again. I grew up in a haunted house, but whether it was haunted by ghosts or my imagination is unknowable.

If you’re asking whether I believe in the supernatural, the answer is—yes. However, what the supernatural is is anybody’s guess. If you’re asking whether evil exists and can influence people to do harm—human beings can be loving, brave and heroic, but they can also be territorial, jealous, spiteful and self-destructive. The potential for evil exists. Good versus evil is at the heart of great literature.

"I grew up in a haunted house, but whether it was haunted by ghosts or my imagination is unknowable."

With three mysteries unfolding simultaneously, how did you keep track of everything during your writing process?
I usually do an outline, but I tend to keep it loose. I don’t want to answer every question before I begin, since that would take all the fun out of it. I let my subconscious lead the way. It’s a mysterious process I don’t quite understand and probably never will.

There’s a focus on sisterhood, whether by blood or friendship, in this novel. What inspired you to write about these female bonds?
Sisterhood is rich soil for fiction. Female relationships are deliciously complicated.

Can you talk a little about the symbolism of crows in this book?
I was walking with my husband one winter day, and we witnessed a “murder of crows” in the park. That’s what they call a flock of crows—a “murder.” And I suddenly understood why. There were hundreds of them, all crying out loudly and swarming menacingly from tree to tree. They covered the bare branches with their jet-black silhouettes and dominated the landscape with their presence. That inspired me to include them in Trace of Evil as metaphorical messengers of impending catastrophe.

What’s in store for Natalie Lockhart as this series progresses?
Natalie will unearth ever darker stories involving black magic and betrayal deep in the woods of Burning Lake. Midnight trysts and invocations. Whispers of bizarre rituals. Dueling loyalties and deadly turf wars. Human monsters attracted to the town’s troubled history. Once she starts to peel away secrets, more deadly truths will reveal themselves to her.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Trace of Evil.

Cool new city (San Francisco), fun new apartment (converted cable car), impressive new job (medical examiner): On paper, Dr. Jessie Teska’s got a lot to look forward to. But in reality, she’s still struggling to move past the painful breakup that prompted her to leave L.A.—and it’s not long before her challenging and interesting new job plops her right in the path of murderous criminals.

Married co-authors Dr. Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell first partnered on the New York Times bestselling memoir Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner. Now, they’re back with First Cut, which kicks off a new thriller series. We talked with the duo about how they work together, what makes medical examiners so fascinating and how to maintain a sense of humor while working an extraordinarily tough job.

You’re married, have three children, co-wrote a New York Times bestselling memoir about Dr. Melinek’s training at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City—and now, you’re launching a new thriller series. Congratulations! How do you best work together? Do you, say, collaborate via email, or sit together and take turns talking and typing, or etc.? Can you share a bit about how you get into writerly sync?
We collaborate in a variety of ways. Our first book, the memoir Working Stiff, was nonfiction, and the process of writing it helped us find our voice as co-authors of the detective novel series we are launching with First Cut. Other than that, though, the process of writing that book was entirely different from the process we have adopted when working together on medical-examiner fiction.

When we first start shaping the story for a novel, we go on a lot of walks together and talk out what we know has already happened, what’s going to happen and how we can get there. When it comes time to put things on paper, we sit down together and brainstorm into a long, messy outline.

Then we divide roles for a while. Judy continues her day job as a forensic pathologist, performing autopsy death investigation in the real world, while T.J. molds our story into the beats, scenes and acts that form a detective novel. When he gets stuck, we brainstorm again—at that point, often by email or text. Once the rough draft is on paper, Judy will read it out loud and we will both make changes based on what we hear. Our books are written from a first-person point of view and our protagonist, Dr. Jessie Teska, has a strong personality that is best explored out loud while we’re composing the manuscript.

Dr. Melinek, you’re the forensics expert, and T.J., you’ve worked in the film business as a writer and editor. Do you essentially divide your authorial duties along those lines, too? How would you say your work informs your writing, or vice versa? Do either of you get veto power over particular aspects of character or story?
As co-authors—and married ones—we’re fortunate in this way: We have no overlapping skill set. Judy has, in her 20 years of experience as a forensic pathologist, seen it all. She has the stories about deaths we can fictionalize in the frame of our detective novels. The science you read in our books is real. Dr. Jessie Teska’s investigative methods are as close as you will find in a mystery or thriller to the way real medical examiners work with cops, district attorneys, clinical physicians, lab professionals and the whole range of specialists and experts in the death-investigation system.

Writing fiction is T.J.’s domain. He loves to sit in a room and wrestle with words all day. He loves to agonize over commas. He really does. Judy has the stories and T.J. has the time and the drive to craft them. That’s how we collaborate as co-authors.

Neither of us steps on the other’s toes all that often; not in a way we can’t resolve. When we do come to a storytelling impasse, Judy might declare a veto over a scientific or investigative method, or T.J. might declare one over a structural element of the narrative. Honestly, though, these vetoes are rare.

One of Jessie’s colleagues reminds her that they work within a legal system, not a justice system. It’s a poignant truth that, alas, not every criminal will be jailed, let alone caught or prosecuted. But Jessie tries her hardest, sometimes at great personal cost. Is that something that’s meaningful to you—exploring the conflict that can arise between wanting to excel at a job vs. doing what feels right, or between longing for closure vs. accepting it’s not in the cards?
Jessie’s watchword is integrity. She is a noir detective of the old school, one who pursues the truth about the cases she investigates with a doggedness that steps over into recklessness. The word autopsy means “see for yourself,” and that’s exactly what Dr. Jessie Teska does, no matter the consequences to herself.

But when the consequences of her unrelenting search for the truth start to affect other people in her life? Well, that’s when things get dirty and hard. That’s what we’re here, as storytellers, to give you!

“The real world of forensic pathology can be, at times, fully absurd.”

There’s plenty of funny stuff in your book, not least a memorably and hilariously gross weapon used in a physical fight. It’s got to be a delicate balance—everyone needs humor to cope with the vagaries of work life, but not everyone is doing such difficult work while being held accountable to so many. Did your own personal experience with that push-pull inform your desire/decision to explore it in your novel?
The real world of forensic pathology can be, at times, fully absurd. The truth surely is stranger than fiction, and sometimes the awful, weird and unexpected circumstances of an unforeseen death can be so dark as to become, yes, funny. One thing we hope we never do in the course of our books, though, is the one thing that Dr. Melinek and her colleagues assiduously do not do: We do not mock the dead. The gallows humor you see in TV dramas does not represent the attitude that the best forensic professionals take toward their job in the morgue.

San Francisco serves as the backdrop to Jessie’s new life: She’s got to adjust to the persistent fog, make a home in a converted cable car and go on work calls all over the city. What is it about San Francisco (besides, perhaps, excellent taco places) that made you choose it as the setting for First Cut?
Write what you know! T.J. comes from Nahant, Massachusetts, a fishing town north of Boston (and next door to Lynn, our protagonist’s hometown), and Judy is an immigrant to the United States who grew up in the Bronx. We moved together to California for work a long time ago, and have lived in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond District for 15 years. We fell immediately and passionately in love with the city. Judy held Jessie’s job as an assistant medical examiner at the San Francisco Office of Chief Medical Examiner for nine years, and today works in an adjacent county. Her description of the morgue in the basement of the Hall of Justice at 850 Bryant Street is taken from her own experience. That morgue isn’t there anymore—there’s a brand new facility that forms the backdrop of Dr. Teska’s adventures in the next book in the series, Cross Cut. We’ve fictionalized here and there, but, for the most part, the facilities where Dr. Teska performs death investigation are just like the ones where Dr. Melinek did the same.

Female medical examiners have been the stars of popular book and TV series with beloved characters like Kay Scarpetta, Temperance Brennan, Maura Isles, Jordan Cavanaugh and more. Why, do you think, this particular profession makes for such enduringly appealing material for storytelling? Are there any persistent tropes that you wanted to upend, or have fun with, in First Cut?
Judy has a popular blog post at PathologyExpert.com called 7 CSI Fails. Among them: Don’t wear high heels (Louboutins?!) to a crime scene. Lab tests take time. Someone turn on the lights!

Now, Dr. Teska is not Dr. Melinek. Jessie makes some bad choices that Judy definitely would not, and Judy’s life is nowhere near as convoluted as Jessie’s. We enjoy taking Judy’s real experiences in her work life and twisting them, just enough, to have fun on the page.

The equipment in Jessie’s lab is frustratingly vintage, but your Bitcoin-centric subplot is decidedly of our cultural moment. What about Bitcoin caught your fancy, in terms of making it an element of your novel?
That’s a theme in the book: the disconnect between the high-tech ecosystem of Silicon Valley and the disconcertingly low-tech city morgue. Our fictional medical examiner employs many of the same tools as her professional forebears did a century ago. Like Dr. Melinek, Dr. Teska uses scalpels to slice through tissue, kitchen knives to bread loaf organs and hardware store tree loppers to cut ribs. Modern forensic pathology may require DNA and advanced toxicologic analysis to ensure convictions, but the process starts with basic medicine and very basic tools.

In addition to the outdated equipment, Jessie’s office also suffers from understaffing, underfunding and a lack of oversight. This, of course, increases stress and pressure, opportunities for error, etc. In your experience, are these problems common at M.E. facilities? Over your years in and writing about the forensics field, have you seen potential for improvement, facilities that’ve employed new approaches to temper these issues, that sort of thing?
The understaffing and underfunding of medical examiner and coroner systems is a nationwide problem. Currently only around 1 percent of medical students go into the field of pathology, and fewer still take the additional year of fellowship training to become forensic pathologists. There are only around 500 board-certified forensic pathologists like Dr. Teska in the United States. That’s half the number we need to cover our country’s current death-investigation workload, and that workload is growing.

Funding for forensic services is done on a county level, and the county’s dead don’t vote. So forensic labs and morgues are frequently the victims of government cutbacks during lean times, and rarely the recipient of financial investment in a good economy. In Dr. Melinek’s career she has not seen much improvement in this cycle. Our fiction reflects this funding crisis and its consequences—as bent through a noir lens.

“. . . when your heroine is a medical examiner, your books are chock full of corpses.”

With the intricacies of Jessie’s job and relationships, the complexity of the various crimes and the countless medical details that feel so natural in First Cut, there must’ve been so, so much to keep track of as you created. Did you plan out the story, maybe even the series, before the writing began, or do you employ a more free-flowing approach?
When we start out, we riff—and then we outline. The impetus for First Cut came from a real case that Dr. Melinek investigated in San Francisco. A man is sitting in a cyber café with his laptop in front of him. Another man comes through the door (this is all captured on security cameras), looks around, and then grabs that laptop and runs for the door. The laptop’s owner pulls out a gun and starts shooting while he chases the thief. He corners him, kills him, takes the laptop back . . . and walks away.

When Dr. Melinek arrived at this scene as the on-call medical examiner and was told this story by the investigating homicide detectives while she stood over the dead body, the first thing she thought was, “What the hell is on that laptop that’s worth murdering somebody over?” That was the kernel for our story, the death that sets everything in motion.

In a gripping detective story, that motion necessarily includes a lot of parts. Once we had the rough idea of what the story was and where it would go, we worked up a series of auxiliary documents—a structural outline, a timeline, a character list. These are typical for any novelist. Less typical is our document called Dead Bodies Timeline. We need this last one because, when your heroine is a medical examiner, your books are chock full of corpses. Some of them are central to the mystery, some are incidental and some might even be diversionary. Gotta keep ’em straight!

We do have ideas for a series arc, but it’s highly flexible. That’s one of the perks of working in the death investigation field in real life: There’s no shortage of stories to explore in the realm of fiction.

Can you share anything about what’s coming up next for Jessie and her colleagues (and Bea the beagle)? And what’s coming up next for the two of you?
The second book in the series, Cross Cut is well underway, and will be coming to bookshelves and glow-screens and earphones in 2021. We don’t want to reveal too much, of course. We can tell you that Bea gets to go digging; that we get to listen in to a comically stilted phone call between Jessie and her mother; and that, along the way, people die.

It’s all in a day’s work.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of First Cut.

Author photo © Amal Bisharat.

Malcolm “Mal” Kershaw’s days are steeped in mystery. He’s a constant reader and recommender of the genre and, after many years as a bookseller, now co-owns Old Devils Bookstore along with a mystery author. Mal’s home is austere, his routines simple, his days mostly ordinary. 

But then: FBI agent Gwen Mulvey shows up at the store to ask about three homicides reminiscent of those in Agatha Christie’s The A.B.C. Murders. Years ago, Mal wrote a blog post about “the cleverest, the most ingenious, the most foolproof . . . murders in crime fiction history,” a post that now seems to be serving as a checklist for a murderer whom Gwen must stop before he strikes again.

Like Mal, author Peter Swanson has a nigh encyclopedic knowledge of mysteries, thanks to his own years spent working in bookstores. “I loved being a bookseller!” he says. “I’ve definitely had a lifelong love of reading, and I was always doing a little writing on the side. . . . I didn’t try my hand at a novel until I was deep into my 30s and didn’t get an agent until I was in my 40s, for the fourth book I’d written.”

That was The Girl With a Clock for a Heart, published in 2014. Eight Perfect Murders is his sixth book (and he’s got a couple more in the works). Thus far, all of Swanson’s books have been set in New England, where he grew up, went to college and now lives. When conjuring up Eight Perfect Murders, Swanson says he instantly gravitated toward Beacon Hill, “the beautiful section of Boston I live in. . . . It’s got narrow streets, high hills, cobblestones—that gothic mystery feel. Plus, I like my books to have seasons.”

Read our review of Before She Knew Him by Peter Swanson.

Mal’s life is in a decidedly wintry season. There’s wind and snow and a truly chilling feeling of impending doom taking root in his heart. He’s flattered that an FBI agent would seek his help, but also increasingly worried that she’ll find out he’s keeping secrets or, even worse, decide he’s a suspect. He maintains his evening rituals (music, beer, poetry) and daytime duties (managing staff, reshelving, feeding the bookstore cat) as he rereads the mysteries from his original blog post in search of clues. As the days pass and the pages turn, he becomes ever more paranoid; everyone he encounters seems a reasonable suspect, every plotline a complex yet viable real-life scenario.

Swanson says the idea for the book and its titular list bubbled up to the surface when he was walking around Walden Pond, not far from his home. “I’m a full-time writer,” he explains, “and I spend half my day writing and the other half taking a long walk somewhere. I was working out a short story and thinking, what are clever murder ideas in books, really clever ways to disguise what actually happened? I was thinking of this list, and then the book was just there. What if someone wrote it down and used it to commit real murders?”

“My own work is sort of Hitchcockian, with ordinary people who wind up in crime scenarios.”

Nearly the entire book was in Swanson’s head by walk’s end, which “was exciting, but also horrifying,” he says. “Now I’ve got to sit down and go sentence to sentence!” But before hitting the keyboard, Swanson dove into his list of books. “I wasn’t picking what I think are the best murder mysteries; I was thinking about clever crimes that disguised the murderer’s intent.”

The books he chose—and that Mal explores in his literary-detective adventures—include Patricia Highsmith’s classic Strangers on a Train, Donna Tartt’s blockbuster The Secret History and The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne, who’s best known as the creator of the adorable, nonmurderous Winnie-the-Pooh. 

“I love reading across the genre. And I think, even though I read procedurals that are steeped in forensic evidence, I don’t tend to gravitate toward writing them,” Swanson says. “My own work is sort of Hitchcockian, with ordinary people who wind up in crime scenarios. I’m much more interested in people who are in the gray area between criminal and noncriminal, murderer and nonmurderer, and how people get from one to the other.”

Fortunately, crafting such macabre tales while immersing himself in murderers’ minds hasn’t adversely affected Swanson’s psyche. “Generally, I’m fine!” he says, laughing. “I gravitate toward dark stuff, whether it’s movies, TV or what I write, but it doesn’t really affect me.”

As a reader, he’s been interested in the scarier stuff since childhood. “I don’t know why I was attracted to creepier books as a kid, but I was just like Malcolm was. I was probably 11 or 12, and my parents had beach books around the house, like Coma and Jaws. Once I read them, I was like, ‘This is what I want to read!’ I was hooked.” 

Readers are sure to be hooked on Eight Perfect Murders, too. It’s a thrill to discover how Swanson braids the various books’ plots together as Malcolm grows ever more uneasy, the murderer ever bolder and the FBI ever more suspicious. And then there’s the story’s fulsome bibliophilia, from its book-loving characters to Malcolm’s expert and thoughtful literary musings—the perfect murder list itself is a ready-made TBR, with more titles and authors mentioned as the action unfolds. Because clever crimes and tension aside, Eight Perfect Murders is really about the joys (and dangers) of being a reader.

Author photo © Jim Ferguson.

Millers Kill is a picturesque small town in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York. But as any mystery aficionado knows, even lovely leafy settings have a dark side—like two unsolved murders, one in 1952, the other in 1972. And then, in the present, Millers Kill Police Chief Russ van Alstyne learns it’s happened again. There is yet another murder with the same confounding characteristics: The victim is a beautiful young woman wearing a new dress, her purse and ID are missing and there are no bodily indications of what caused her untimely demise.

We talked to author Julia Spencer-Fleming about Hid From Our Eyes, her newest novel featuring Russ and his wife, Episcopalian priest Clare Fergusson, in which secrets from the past taint the future, politics and money loom large and the MKPD is racing to solve the crime before the police department is defunded and the killer gets away with it—again.

Congratulations on your new book! It’s been about nine years since your last Clare-and-Russ novel, Through the Evil Days. Did you revisit your previous books, delve into your notes, etc., to get yourself back into the mindset of your characters and their community?
I did all of those to reacquaint myself with Clare and Russ and the people of Millers Kill! One thing that helped a lot was relistening to the audiobooks with their wonderful narrator, Suzanne Toren. There’s something about listening rather than reading that allows me to experience the words in a fresh way, which in turn enables me to tune in to aspects of the characters that I might let my eye skip over if I was reading on paper.

In creating Millers Kill, you did such a wonderful job evoking the feeling of the Adirondacks, from the mountainous backdrop to the use of the word “camp” to refer to what’s often quite a large house. What is it about the area that made it feel like the ideal setting for your stories? Do you visit often as a refresher, or is the area vivid in your mind?
Although I’ve lived in Maine for 30 (mumble) years now, I’m originally from that part of New York, and having spent many of my growing-up years there, certain aspects are so deeply embedded I could probably write convincingly about the area even if I moved to Paris and never came back again! However, I do go back regularly to keep the sights and sounds and smells at the front of my brain. In addition to visiting, I try to keep a hand in with research and current events, so I’m not accidentally describing places as they were in 1979. Writing about Saratoga, for instance, requires me to update my memories, because the town has changed almost beyond recognition from when I was a girl.

I enjoy digging up the answers to questions and reading histories, so that part’s not hard, but the real pinch comes in knowing what you don’t know.

The goings-on in the book take place across decades, and while key aspects of police work (analyzing clues, following leads, conducting interviews) remain the same, medicine and technology have advanced in so many ways. Was it difficult to keep track of all of your characters while also remaining true to each era? Did you do lots of research about the specifics, perhaps with a police chief, medical examiner or the like on speed-dial?
I was fortunate enough to be able to call on a detective, a doctor and a pharmacist with specific questions for Hid From Our Eyes, and I did a lot of research into the details of life in the early 1950s and 1970s. I enjoy digging up the answers to questions and reading histories, so that part’s not hard, but the real pinch comes in knowing what you don’t know. I have friends like Rhys Bowen who exclusively write historical fiction, and I am in awe of their ability to nail the research and turn in books on time!

Tracking the changes of various characters as they grew older was much easier for me, in part because I tend to have fairly detailed biographies of major characters at the ready. So I knew a lot about Russ and his mother Margy, and about police chiefs Jack Liddle and Harry McNeil, who appeared in an earlier book in the series.

You went to college for art and acting, and you also have your J.D. Did you work as a lawyer before you became an author? What made you want to transition to the writing life? Do you think your studies in the arts and the law influence how and what you write?
I used to joke that law school taught me what NOT to write, but that’s not really fair. Despite centuries of jokes, good legal writing requires the “ABCs”—accuracy, brevity and clarity. Those aren’t bad habits for a novelist to pick up. Acting and theater, interestingly, have continued to prove useful, as the same techniques I learned for creating characters on stage are the ones I use for creating characters on the page. As for why I left the law to become a full-time writer? The money, obviously.

People interacting with them tended to stop at the uniform—a badge for him, a collar for her—and not see the real human underneath.

Both Russ and Clare are veterans who have experienced PTSD, and they’ve both chosen professions that require discretion and dignity. Do you think that’s a big part of what makes them work so well together as a couple and as parents?
The similarities of their professions are definitely what initially drew them together. People interacting with them tended to stop at the uniform—a badge for him, a collar for her—and not see the real human underneath. And, of course, they did see each other as fully human from the start.

One piece of writing has always been in my mind while writing these books: Leonard Cohen’s famous lyric, “There is a crack, a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” Russ and Clare are people who have been broken, they have broken each other, and cherishing their brokenness makes everything about them a little richer and more tender. I love the fact that they both clash with and complement each other. Without that, my novels would be shorter and a lot more dull.

Clare is an Episcopal priest, and your books’ titles are drawn from Episcopalian hymns. What does religion mean to you, in terms of your writing? Was it important to you to create characters who coexist lovingly, even if they have different views on faith?
One of the reasons the starting point for my series was Clare Fergusson was because I wanted to explore questions I had about my own faith. How do we act as believing people in a largely secular world? What does it mean to be the hands and feet of God? How, if you’re called on to love and forgive, do you love the unlovable and forgive the unforgivable? I also wanted to share my view of religion—that it’s OK to be scared, to doubt, to screw up—and, in a time when “Christian” increasingly is defined by narrow-mindedness and exclusion, to show people what my church is like: open minded, radically welcoming, progressive.

At the same time, it was also very important to me to make sure readers of any faith, or none, could connect with my characters. The last thing I wanted to do was preach. So there’s Russ, somewhere on the agnostic/atheist border, and Clare respects and honors his point of view. She doesn’t hide her beliefs, and she never tries to change his. You have Kevin Flynn, who’s probably a lapsed Catholic because he sleeps in on Sunday, and Hadley Knox, who goes to church because she thinks it’s good for her kids. In other words, I try to portray a picture of American religion as it’s actually experienced in a lot of Northern Kingdom/New England small towns.

Relationships between mentors and proteges figure prominently in Hid From Our Eyes. Russ mentors and supports his officers, Clare does the same for her new intern and police chiefs of the past offer wisdom and support to those next in line. Can you share your thoughts on the value of this sort of relationship?
It was something I started thinking about when raising my middle child, my son. I had never really seen a boy growing up before; my brother is nine years younger than I am and I was off to college well before his teen years. I came to realize, seeing my son and his friends, that while girls sort of fall into womanhood on their own, boys have to be taught to be men. They crave that relationship, from fathers or uncles or from mentors. The older and wiser person in the relationship has tremendous power, and I got to explore the use of that power for good and for ill in the book. And of course, there’s an echo of that idea in religion, in the idea of the initiate into sacred mysteries, which is where Clare comes in. All the while she feels she’s flailing around, doing “priesthood” wrong, she’s showing Joni and others, “This is what I do, you can do it too.”

Various characters in Hid From Our Eyes are struggling with difficulties from their past, like policewoman Hadley Knox, whose vindictive ex-husband is trying to cost her her job and custody of their kids, and Russ, who was a person of interest in the 1972 murder. Is this idea, how the past can have a hold on the present, something that intrigues you as you write your books ?
Oh, yes. “The past that won’t stay dead” appears again and again in my books. I used to say it came out of the context; small towns have long memories, and even after all the firsthand participants have passed, stories of memorable happenings and people continue to circulate. That’s still true, obviously, but now I also think it’s rooted in my own sense, as I get older, of just how much the past shapes each of us, and how hard it can be to move forward and break away from the events and individuals that have steered the course of our lives.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Hid From Our Eyes.

You kept your chapters short and your ending a cliffhanger, which definitely amps up the excitement and the page-turning! What’s your favorite kind of book to read? Do you enjoy mystery and suspense when you’re not the one creating it?
I love mysteries and thrillers—and cliffhangers!—and read a lot of it when, as you astutely put it, I’m not creating it. When I’m face down in a manuscript, it’s hard to delve into others’ mysteries; I find I either beat my breast in despair because my writing will never be as good as X’s, or the next day I write in some clever plot twist and then realize, oops! I just read that last night.

My other great love is science fiction. I’m actually a failed SF writer—my first attempt at a novel was a space opera. Terribly derivative and totally not what anyone was reading or selling back in the late ’90s. But the core of the plot was a murder on a space station, so my destiny was already apparent.

In the Bleak Midwinter, your first Russ-and-Clare book, was published in 2002. Has your approach to writing, and to your characters and their fictional world, changed since then? Do you think you’ll be writing about them for years to come?
I always thought the Millers Kill novels would be a five-book series, because the central story question was “Will they, or won’t they?” and how long can you stretch that out? Then I got to the point where I answered that question and discovered I had this large cast of layered, interesting characters to lay with, and wow, there were a LOT more stories I wanted to tell. Right now, I can see myself happy in Millers Kill for many more years.

My approach to writing since (ouch!) 2002? I’ve become a great deal more relaxed. I still plod through the middle of the book and agonize over wrapping up the ending and I’m always ping-ponging between complete conviction that I’m a hack or a genius, but I trust my process and choices much more than I did at the beginning. If I want to take a detour with a character or an event or a setting, I trust it will serve the greater story, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time. And I have an excellent editor, who’ll make me take it out if I’m deluding myself!

Is there anything else you want to share about Hid From Our Eyes, or anything else you may have in the works?
I hope everyone will take a peek at it—you can’t pick it up in a bookstore and thumb through the pages, but there are excerpts at Macmillan.com and at my blog, JungleRedWriters.com. Meanwhile, I’m working on the 10th Clare and Russ book, working title: At Midnight Comes the Cry. I don’t want to make my readers wait another six years to resolve the current cliffhanger!

Author photo by Geoff Green.

A seemingly random encounter in the woods of Northern Georgia between a defense attorney Ama Chaplin and a serial killer quickly explodes into terror in Casey Dunn’s Silence on Cold River. Ama once successfully defended the killer in court, even though she knew he was guilty. Did fate play a hand in bringing the pair together again? And how will fate play a role in how their lives go forward? The questions nag at the minds of each character and will nag at readers as well. We put some of the questions to Dunn to help us sort things out.

You previously wrote a trilogy of fantasy/romance titles (The Hightower trilogy, published under the name Jadie Jones,) but with Silence on Cold River you’ve switched gears into a mystery/thriller. What made you decide to change genres? What was the greatest challenge for you in moving to the thriller genre?
When I first began work on the Hightower trilogy, I was also a new mom, and the world, seemingly overnight, had become a more dangerous place. I felt compelled to create a kind of enemy that did not actually exist—a “big bad” that there was no reason to genuinely fear. In looking back, I was not yet ready to confront how much of a danger one person can be to another, how much of a threat a perfect stranger could be to my new little family. Then, as edits on the final book in the trilogy drew to a close, I realized that the most depraved, horrifying characteristics of my otherworldly villains weren’t supernatural at all, but utterly human, and the curiosity to create and face down a monster of a human began to grow. In writing thrillers, I am forcing my characters to face some of my biggest fears.

The two biggest differences that I noticed in switching between the genres are pacing and world building. In a fantasy story, a writer has to create a world (or aspects of it) that a reader has never considered before, then fill it with fantastical creatures that are still relatable and believable. World building is a fundamental cornerstone of any fantasy tale, because without it, the entire proverbial castle crumbles. Thrillers are often set in a world a reader understands enough of almost immediately or with very little help, and the story is built instead on the goal of a killer and the efforts of everyone else to survive it and/or stop it from coming to fruition. Pacing is the foundation of a thriller, and it is critical that it is done well.

In coming from a fantasy background, this shift in focus was my greatest challenge. There is no room for thick and heavy descriptions or physical world building beyond what is immediately and vividly sensory when you have a victim in the hands of a dangerous person and the clock is ticking. Is the water warm, cold, clear, dirty . . . ? Who cares when you have a hook through your cheek, and someone somewhere has suddenly began tugging on the other end of the line?

Who are some thriller writers you admire? What is it about their writing that appeals to you and did you try to emulate them in any way with Silence? How do you think you did?
What I admire most in a book in any genre is voice. While action is imperative in a thriller, the voice delivering every blow to the reader’s internal ear is equally important. The voice is what makes me care, and when the voice and the pacing are spot on, the result is a breathtaking ride from start to finish. Thriller writers who have done this to me include Gillian Flynn, A.J. Finn, Paula Hawkins, Gytha Lodge, Wiley Cash and Felicity McLean. Since voice is the primary make-or-break deal for me in the books I read, I tried to keep that goal present in mind in every scene, and it is also how I decided which chapters would be presented from a first-person perspective and which came more naturally and effectively in a third-person perspective. It is not for me to judge in terms of how well I think I did, but I can tell you that I tried my guts out, and I learned a lot along the way.

You were born and raised in Atlanta, but now live on a horse farm in Southern Oregon. What is it about Atlanta that drew you back to setting Silence there, rather than closer to home in Oregon?
I spent most of my life in Georgia and began writing Silence on Cold River soon after moving to Oregon. The small town we moved to is close-knit, and even though this rugged valley felt like home from early on, I felt like the outsider that I was in many ways. What people care about is different in a rural agricultural community than in a big city like Atlanta. The landscape, the weather (it rained for 100 consecutive days our first winter,) the hardships, the goals, the shopping, the culture, the history, the lingo, the politics, you name it. So, to write something that dove deeply into the psyches of all the characters who were experiencing things entirely foreign to me, I needed to build their world somewhere familiar, a place I understood from basement to roof. Now, four years after moving away, returning to the noise and crowds (and traffic) of Atlanta is a shocking experience. The newest work-in-progress in my queue is tentatively set in southern Oregon.

One of the most notable aspects of Silence is how the chapters alternate between your characters. How difficult was it to stay true to each character’s individual mindset, yet blend the overall story so seamlessly together?
In the early stages, I stumbled around through the first draft of the first act, trying to figure out where in the world I was taking the main plot. Then, while writing a conversation between Ama and Michael, a new secondary character appeared from out of nowhere (I hadn’t planned much about the story, but I really hadn’t planned on her) and I realized this story was about to take a hairpin turn. I scrapped everything I had written after the first chapter and started again, focusing on each character’s story as its own stand-alone narrative, moving forward by two or three scenes in one character’s perspective at a time. This way, I could forecast where they were going and what they were up against next, and I could develop their voice more clearly the longer I stayed inside their head. As I uncovered points of intersection with other characters, I would make notes for the other characters’ chapters, past and present, and edit/draft accordingly. Once I had everyone’s stories mostly mapped out, I placed the first page of each chapter on my bedroom floor, and then rearranged them one hundred million times. Once I had an order that felt natural, I tightened timelines and used small details or pieces of symmetry to feed one chapter into the next.

“Silence on Cold River was written one scene at a time on whatever piece of paper I had on hand that day . . .”

I imagine that with a story of this scope and complexity, you must have used a detailed outline or whiteboard to keep everything straight. Did that leave any room for writing on the fly?
If it gives you any idea just how much planning and outlining and organization went into Silence, I read this question out loud to my husband as we stood in the kitchen of our century-old farm house after spending all day tilling ground and sowing seeds for a large vegetable garden. We were covered in dirt and dried sweat, skin pink from an afternoon in the sun. He was pouring a glass of water when I read it to him. He set down the glass, rested both hands on the lip of our big white sink, looked at me out of his peripheral and burst out laughing. An hour later, gathered around the dining room table, I read the same question to my mother. She glanced from me to my husband to my father, who both stared back with wide eyes, lips pressed firmly together. Then she threw her head back and cackled. Paused, drew a breath, tried to look at me and laughed until she cried.

I am, hands down, one of the least organized people I have ever met. From start to finish, Silence on Cold River was written one scene at a time on whatever piece of paper I had on hand that day, which I would transfer to a Word document on my ancient laptop once all my kids were in bed for the night. I had neither a detailed outline nor a whiteboard, but I wish that I had. For months, my purse, my truck, my desk and the kitchen counter were littered with fragments and notes as I brainstormed single conversations or snapshot moments. And I had no solid plan for how Silence was going to end. I had a rough idea for what I thought I wanted to happen (especially to Michael), but when my characters arrived at that penultimate moment on the bank of Cold River, I realized my original inclination was not how it would organically play out. So, I let the chips fall, and I am grateful that I went that route instead.

That giant garden, by the way, is not planted in rows. Or labeled. We’ll all be surprised.

Typically, a first-person narrative is reserved for the protagonist of the story. Readers most want to identify with and sympathize with the protagonist, who in this case is Ama. But in Silence, you’ve written the antagonist, Michael, in first person. Why did you make that choice? Did that make writing this story more challenging?
The opening scene is what inspired the entire story—a teenage boy standing in a courtroom, waiting for the jury foreman to announce a verdict for a serious, yet unspecified, charge, followed by his genuine surprise upon learning that he’s gotten away with what he’s done. While the rest of the story changed multiple times during rewrites and edits, the first chapter remained untouched.

There is a fine line between unfolding an antagonist internally in such a way that adds to the story, and glorifying the villain. Knowing that I would be asking the reader to experience the development of a serial killer through a first-person perspective absolutely made his chapters harder to write. Michael believes in fate, that every moment in his life has led him here, and the only way to walk that path with him was to see it through his eyes. A villain rarely sees themselves as a “bad guy,” and Michael believes himself to be a hero on his own redemption journey. That’s not to say I agree with him, but this perspective gives the reader a full, unflinching picture of what Ama and his other victims are up against. In thrillers, sometimes what the killer is able to pull off seems impossible. By walking with Michael, a reader can see how he has remained hidden all these years, why he sees proof that fate is on his side and why he was found not guilty all those years ago. There is a moment early on where Ama says to Michael, “Tell me your story,” and it is, unbeknownst to him, one of her first successful efforts to regain an inch of control.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Silence on Cold River.

Michael believes much of what transpires in his life can be attributed to fate. Do you share any of these beliefs with him? Or is fate just what we make it?
When I began touring for the Hightower trilogy, I discovered a new, paralyzing phobia of flying, certain I was testing fate each time I stepped on a plane. I had not flown in years, and I could not abide by the idea of my children facing the teeth and claws of this world without me to protect them should the flight go down. Then one day, as I shopped at a consignment store for something to wear to a signing in Oklahoma, I confided my fears to a woman who worked there. She sat down with me, looked me square in the eyes, and said, “Our days are numbered, and only the Lord knows when your last day has come. Getting on the plane, not getting on the plane, it isn’t going to change when your number comes. But for what it’s worth, I have a feeling you’ll be just fine.”

Some people may consider her advice morbid or trite or over-the-top or too reminiscent of Final Destination, but I found a strange sense of comfort in it. That is not to say I believe fate will save me from myself if I throw all caution to the wind. It is our responsibility to determine which risks are worth the cost, and to remember that it often isn’t a cost we pay ourselves, but rather a potential debt we would pass on to those who rely on us if the cards don’t fall in our favor.

Michael’s devotion to the idea of fate is a showcase of what happens when any belief system is taken to the extreme and personal responsibility becomes meaningless. I think we are each a combination of what we are made of and what happens to us along the way. We will go through things in our lifetimes that can fundamentally change the way we value ourselves, our goals and/or the world around us. I believe that we are here on purpose and for a purpose, and it is the desire of our souls to figure out what that something is. Maybe that purpose is a moment, and maybe it is a lifetime. The ripple effect of a single action is something that mystifies me. It is possible that our personalities or patterns require us to face the same trials, conflict or decisions over and over until we learn whatever lesson it is that life has been trying to make us see, which may feel a little bit like fate. I am stubborn to a fault and tend to dig in all the more when I have something to push against, as if the reward will be greater if I had to suffer or work harder to reach it. But I have learned time and time again that sometimes those closed doors or speedbumps or rejections are the universe (or whatever you want to call it) trying to save us from ourselves or from accepting the comfort of a familiar devil, rather than staying open just a little longer to whatever might be coming right over the horizon.

“My father and his siblings all have an incredible talent for music. . . . Music was our peacemaker.”

Michael also obsesses over music quite a bit in this novel. What music moves you? Do you listen to music while you are writing?
My father’s side of the family is what most would refer to as “musical.” My grandmother was a singer and a pianist, even playing for an audience only a few weeks before dying of lung and spinal cancer. My father and his siblings all have an incredible talent for music. When I was a child, holiday dinners tended toward tension when those siblings and their mother gathered around the table, but by the end of the meal, they would all invariably drift toward the piano in the corner of the room, and for an hour or so they could all get along. Music was our peacemaker.

To flip that on its head and have music serve as both the wound and the weapon allowed me to explore this obsession of Michael’s from an emotional place. I still love music, and my preferences are all over the map, although live music from a single instrument will always give me pause (and goosebumps). I will turn on the stereo and crank up the volume when I cook, clean, drive, paint, you name it. But I cannot write a single word if music is on. Music is tied to memories for me, and my brain will jump aboard a familiar song or a good beat and sail away.

Unlike your first books, which were part of a trilogy, Silence is a self-contained story. Will we see any of the characters again? What’s next for you?
It was both satisfying and a little scary to write my first stand-alone story. I knew I had multiple storylines to wrap up in a way that felt honest and natural—doors opening and closing at the same time for multiple characters. I learned a lot about Detective Martin over the course of writing Silence, and he began to understand himself and his past in a different way, too. I am not ready to be done with Martin. He has access to a closet full of cold case files and a childhood in Alaska that I would love to explore. As for the others, I guess I’ll have to see where the next stories take me.

Right now, I am working on a thriller that opens 25 years in the past on a frigid night in rural Tennessee, and am also making notes on scrap pieces of paper about a fatal accident on a winding road in southern Oregon that is a cover-up for much, much more. I should probably invest in that whiteboard. I am going to need it.

Author photo by Stephanie Schlund.

Caritas Fountain is Copenhagen’s oldest fountain, a popular gathering spot for residents and tourists alike. Alas, it is also where Bettina Holte is found murdered: floating, nude, drained of blood, a series of cuts serving as strange and grisly cues. In the next two days, two more bodies are found—also in water, also exsanguinated.

Detective Jeppe Korner and his colleagues (plus Detective Anette Werner, on maternity leave but doing casework on the sly) must find the killer before they can strike again. They work through a large number of plausible suspects connected to a psychiatric facility for teens called The Butterfly House, unearthing terrible secrets and raising more questions along the way. We talked with author Katrine Engberg about her inspirations and motivations, and how she changed careers from a dancer and choreographer to a creator of the darkest of murder mysteries.

Your novels are bestsellers in your native Denmark and are now being published in the U.S. (and many other countries). Congratulations! What has it been like to work with the various new editors and publishers and translators of your books?
To be anything but grateful in my situation would be downright ludicrous. I am blessed to be working with some of the world's finest publishing houses and very best editors. It feels like having an extended work family all over the world, which makes writing a lot less lonely. That said, there is always some insecurity involved with being translated. Essentially, you hand over control of your most personal voice to a stranger, who then interprets your words in their own language. It is bizarre but also a huge privilege—and great fun!

"I never get tired of trying to understand humankind."

Readers first met Jeppe Korner and Anette Werner in your first novel, The Tenant. In The Butterfly House, you separate them and dive more deeply into their individual personal lives, from Jeppe’s recent divorce to Anette’s frustrations with maternity leave. Will you talk a bit about why it was important for you to reveal their inner thoughts and struggles in this way?
To me the key to any good reading experience lies in connecting with the characters. One has to get to know them and care for them, even in crime fiction. Well, especially in crime fiction. The more twisted and far out a criminal plot is, the more I have to believe in the characters and trust them. I find that a major part of the suspense in any book lies in the interaction between and growth of the protagonists, even if the main goal of the story is to find a killer on the loose. People—and all the different ways we tackle divorce and maternity leave and life in general—are essentially interesting. I never get tired of trying to understand humankind.

Your home city of Copenhagen, Denmark, plays a major role in The Butterfly House. Bodies are found in its waters; suspects represent various subcultures; characters move about both above and underground. Was incorporating the city into your books an “of course” for you?
It was more than an "of course"; it was the inspiration for the whole series and a motor for every story. Readers often name Copenhagen as one of my protagonists, and they are right in doing so. I love my city. Being medieval, Copenhagen is not only atmospheric and beautiful but also has layers and layers of history that speak to you as you wander its streets. Secret corners, subcultures, weirdness—Copenhagen has everything. And it's all sitting right next to the loveliness of Tivoli Gardens and the Queen's Castle. I've always been a fan of how Ian Rankin’s books revolve around, and salute, Edinburgh. I hope I can do the same for Copenhagen.

Before becoming an author, you worked as a dancer and choreographer. Did changing careers feel strange to you, perhaps like a culture shock of sorts, or was it a natural transition? How does dance inform and affect your writerly work?
The transition was slow and felt very natural to me. I used to tell stories with actors on a stage, and now I tell stories with words on a page, but to me the process is very similar. I have always written; it is my most fundamental form of expression. I just never used to show my texts to anyone. And I still work just as intuitively as before. I don't plan ahead much, and I don't control my characters and their actions too sternly; each scene has to progress organically and each sentence has to form naturally . . . like music.

Many of the characters in this mystery work in health care with, shall we say, mixed results. A character muses, “Sometimes working in health care felt like renovating a fixer-upper with modeling clay.” What about this often-Sisyphean pursuit appealed to you as a subject?
All authors are drawn to conflict, and unsolvable problems have their specific appeal. The health care industry is a forever intriguing mixture of good intentions, business decisions, flawed legislation and patients and health care workers with all of their individual needs. Denmark prides itself in having some of the best health care in the world. Even so, many patients—especially psychiatric patients—suffer from inadequate care and the shortcomings of the system. I wanted to shine a light on this hypocrisy.

Your characters also raise important questions about how society views mental illness and those who experience it. One points out that “sick” and “healthy” are loaded and ambiguous terms: “You could argue that any deviation from societal normal is pathological. You could also argue the opposite.” What do you hope readers will take from The Butterfly House about this subject?
We tend to keep mental illness at arm’s length because it frightens us so. But, in reality, we all carry the potential for mental illness, and most of us will experience some form of it firsthand at some point in our lives. Anxiety, postpartum depression, stress—living is a tough business, and it doesn't take much of a push to tip the scale and plummet to the bottom. We need to revise our perception of "sick" and "healthy" and, to a greater extent, embrace walking the fine line over the abyss that is the human mind.

Bodily mutilation plays a role in your first novel, The Tenant, wherein a woman had a pattern carved into her face. In The Butterfly House, the victims have mysterious groupings of cuts on their bodies. Is the psychology of bodily mutilation (or modification) especially intriguing to you?
I wish I could say no, because having a morbid fascination is not the most sympathetic trait I can think of. But I do. I would argue that all crime aficionados share this quirk (and, really, maybe all of us in general, come to think of it). We go through life knowing that death is certain but without having any idea what that means. This fear of the unknown becomes a fascination. Poking the fear makes us feel more alive, ironic as it may seem. In a way, reading crime fiction is like riding a roller coaster: comfortingly frightening. On top of that, I have an affinity for ancient medical equipment, and in The Butterfly House I have combined the two—turning an old device meant to heal and soothe into a murder weapon.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Butterfly House.

Being honest and straightforward, however scary or painful it may be, plays an important part in your characters’ relationships. Whether between Jeppe and his mother or Anette and her husband, making the effort to express, rather than bury, feelings can offer hope and reassurance. What made you choose to highlight that aspect of close personal connections, both filial and romantic?
How people interact with each other (and the psychology that lies behind every action) is what interests me the most, in life as well as when I write. This is true not just for my protagonists but for ALL my characters, including the antagonists and secondary characters. WHY do we do what we do? WHY are we so complex and unpredictable when our wants or needs are fundamentally the same? WHY do some people become violent? People interest me, and I would never read a book if I were not drawn to the characters and their inner lives, even if the plot was original and well crafted. I hope that readers will connect with my characters and maybe even identify with their thoughts and struggles.

The notion of the butterfly effect is fascinating to think about. Will you share what it means to you and how it inspired you as you created The Butterfly House?
The notion of evil people—that a person can be born bad—has always seemed strange to me. We all have the potential for good and bad deeds; what determines the balance between the two can be the smallest things. A misunderstanding between friends, a missed text message, a bus that didn't leave on time—small, innocent things can, under the right (or wrong) circumstances, lead to disaster. That is the butterfly effect: The flap of a butterfly wing on one side of the earth can cause a flood on the other. There is a certain degree of surrender in accepting the butterfly effect, an acceptance of how very small we are and how little control we have over life and death. I like that surrender to circumstance, to life, even to fate itself.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with readers about The Butterfly House, and what’s up next for Jeppe and Anette (and you!)?
Just that I hope readers will embrace this second book in the series with the same warmth that they gave The Tenant. I am extremely thankful for the fantastic reception the series has had in the U.S. and Canada.

Author photo by Les Kaner.