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Interview with Karen Ann Hopkins, Author of Beware of Wendigos

What's the story behind the story? What inspired you to write this book?

After spending a lot of time in the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee, I decided the rugged and gritty Appalachian hills would be the perfect backdrop for the fictional town of Possum Gap. Sadie Mills is the town's sheriff. Her down-to-earth personality is combined with compassion, common sense, and a practical nature. Being tough as nails is a bonus. In a lawless town that has seen better days, Sadie joins the town's Yankee coroner, Ray Russo, and a colorful cast of mountain folk to solve terrifying crimes.

What's your favorite genre to read? Is it the same as your favorite genre to write?

Since I'm currently writing two crime fiction/murder mystery series, I like to escape from that genre for my personal reading. Anything with dragons, magical realms, and dangerous quests will do.

What books are on your TBR pile right now?

My adult son, Cole Hopkins, wrote a series called The Queen's Reaper Saga. It’s an epic and gripping fantasy series that I’m thoroughly enjoying. I’m midway through the third book and will be reading his draft of the fourth book soon after. I’m also rereading Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern books, and there are a lot of them.

What scene in your book was your favorite to write?

Since it’s a murder mystery, I don’t want to give too much away, but I always enjoy writing the scenes with horses in them, and Beware of Wendigos has several tension-filled moments on horseback. I’ve spent most of my life as a riding coach and caregiver for numerous horses. It’s fun to infuse some of that experiential knowledge in casual ways in my books. Surrounded by Amish farms here in Kentucky, where I live, it’s also fun to sprinkle their unique culture within the pages as well.

Do you have any quirky writing habits? (lucky mugs, cats on laps, etc.)

Not really, unless having a few rescue dogs and cats always by my side while writing counts.

Do you have a motto, quote or philosophy you live by?

Whenever things get tough, I remember The Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.” A few important phrases in my life as a dog and cat rescuer are: “Adopt, don’t shop,” “Fostering Saves Lives,” and “Spay & Neuter Your Pets!!”

If you could choose one thing for readers to remember after reading your book, what would it be?

I try to make an impression with the little things and hope readers feel like they personally know the characters when they reach the end.

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Karen Ann Hopkins is the author of the new book Beware of Wendigos (A Possum Gap Novel Book 8)

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Interview with Albert York, Author of The Deputy

What's the story behind the story? What inspired you to write this book?

In the story, a rookie deputy sheriff encounters a white supremacist gang that engages in human trafficking. The concept came from my experience as a technical writer, when I researched and wrote grants for several nonprofit organizations working to fight human trafficking. That experience taught me the heinous nature of human trafficking. Thus, the story of a young deputy challenging a gang of human traffickers.

What's your favorite genre to read? Is it the same as your favorite genre to write?

Mysteries and Thrillers.

What books are on your TBR pile right now?

Citizen Soldiers by Stephen Ambrose and The Whistler by John Grisham.

What scene in your book was your favorite to write?

The fight scene at the end of the book.

Do you have any quirky writing habits? (lucky mugs, cats on laps, etc.)

Other than procrastination, none.

Do you have a motto, quote or philosophy you live by?

See justice, love mercy, walk humbly.

If you could choose one thing for readers to remember after reading your book, what would it be?

The terrible nature of human trafficking.

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Albert York is the author of the new book The Deputy (A Dannie Bauer Thriller Series Book 2)

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The Deputy (A Dannie Bauer Thriller Series Book 2)

Interview with Kohōpeh, Author of Lotus, Mud, Blade

What's the story behind the story? What inspired you to write this book?

I was hunting through Thai oral folklore for a shape-shifter character and landed on the Thai hog badger: stubborn, underestimated, and possessed of a distinctive snout. That snout led me, by a logic only a writer would follow, straight back to Cyrano de Bergerac. Transplanting Rostand's tragicomedy to the 16th-century Siamese-Khmer borderlands, gender-swapping the leads while keeping the most famous set pieces—the nose, the duel, the verbal brilliance, the impossible love—the connection felt inevitable.

If you had to pick theme songs for the main characters of your book, what would they be?

For Moo Hring: Yuve Yuve Yu by The HU. It is Mongolian heavy metal. It features throat singing over electric instruments and captures exactly the quality I was after: something ancient and brutal that has survived into a modernity that does not quite know what to do with it. For the siege at Meuang Sema, where she is running letters through enemy lines and whistling in the dark to keep the guards sane: that song, at full volume. For the final chapter, when the Prince finally understands, the opening chant from Kenji Kawai's Ghost in the Shell OST score. A medieval Japanese-Bulgarian harmonic that sounds like grief that has nowhere left to go. The chant does not resolve. Neither does Lotus, Mud, Blade.

What's your favorite genre to read? Is it the same as your favorite genre to write?

I read historical fantasy and social science fiction, literary fiction that takes anthropology seriously. Ursula Le Guin's Hainish novels are the benchmark for me, Lois McMaster Bujold's The Sharing Knife series, some of the Corto Maltese albums, which function as literary travel through moral landscapes, Parker-Chan, and Nghi Vo. Non-fiction only as far as the research demands, and not a page further. My inner child remains devoted to 1930s pulp adventures. What I write tends toward the lyrical, romantic, and tragic. The pulp adventure is still a threat. I may yet give in to it.

What books are on your TBR pile right now?

Recently landed: James by Percival Everett and The Last Contract of Isako by Fonda Lee. And two heavy non-fiction tomes: a biography of Rimbaud in Abyssinia and a photographic record of turn-of-the-20th-century Ethiopia. Somewhere beneath these four, there are approximately three hundred and seven other books waiting with the patience of objects that know they will outlast me.

What scene in your book was your favorite to write?

The siege at Meuang Sema. I cried writing the first rough draft, and I cried at every edit after that. On paper, it is a chapter about a starving garrison, mud, and tactical improvisation. What it is actually about is better left to your reading. I will say this plainly: I did not expect to be that affected by a scene I had planned in full before I wrote a word of it. The badger surprised me. Again.

Do you have any quirky writing habits? (lucky mugs, cats on laps, etc.)

I write in the early morning, in a house surrounded by swamps and jungle. Insects, birds, and the occasional confused gecko provide atmosphere and white noise of the raucous variety. The glamorous part ends there. I work in plain text files, track characters and historical continuity in separate flat documents, and use a version control system more commonly associated with software engineers. No Moleskines. No lucky mugs. The notebook on my desk is for the one thought that arrives before the laptop opens, and I have been using the same pen for three years through a mixture of intention and stubbornness.

Do you have a motto, quote or philosophy you live by?

The Buddhist notion is that compassion, karuna, is not the absence of suffering but the willingness to remain present with it. Moo Hring does not escape her grief; she tends it carefully for fifteen years, and it does not diminish her. That quality of being fully present to something painful, without flinching, is what I aspire to.

If you could choose one thing for readers to remember after reading your book, what would it be?

Moo Hring. Not the plot, not the setting, not even the tragedy—her. Her integrity. A woman who is mocked for her face, brilliant in every register the world has decided does not matter, who spends fifteen years ghostwriting the love story for her rival, and who, at the very end, refuses to be anyone other than herself. I hope readers put the book down angry about that. The good kind of angry.

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Kohōpeh is the author of the new book Lotus, Mud, Blade (Myths, Mischief & Mayhem)

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New Mystery and Thriller Books to Read | July 14

Hold on to the edge of your seat as we hunt for clues and solve the case with these exciting new mystery and thriller books for the week! There are so many bestselling authors with new novels for you to dive into this week including Albert York, Karen Ann Hopkins, Lisa Jewell, Elle Gray, Simon Gervais, and more. Enjoy your new mystery, thriller, and suspense novels. Happy reading!