Tessa Wegert is a journalist and former digital media strategist. Her business and marketing articles have appeared in such publications as Forbes, The Huffington Post, Adweek, and The Economist. She grew up in Quebec near the border of Vermont and now lives with her husband and children in Coastal Connecticut, where she writes while studying martial arts and dance. Tessa is also the author of the Shana Merchant series of mysteries, beginning with Death in the Family. The latest installment in that series is Dead Wind.
In Dead Wind, a body is discovered on Wolfe Island under the shadow of an enormous wind turbine. Senior Investigator, Shana Merchant, arriving on the scene with fellow investigator, Tim Wellington, can’t shake the feeling that she knows the victim—and the subsequent identification sends shockwaves through their community in the Thousand Islands of Upstate New York.
Politics, power, passion...there are dark undercurrents in Shana’s new home, and finding the killer means dredging up her new friends and neighbors’ old grudges and long-kept secrets. That is, if the killer is from the community at all. For Shana’s keeping a terrible secret of her own: eighteen months ago she escaped from serial killer Bram Blake’s clutches. But has he followed her...to kill again?
Tessa stopped by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about researching and writing her books:
Like most authors, I have a folder of story ideas that I refer to – even if those “ideas” are nothing more than a few overheard words or abstract lines – but for me, the writing process often starts with setting. That was the case with Death in the Family, the first book in the Shana Merchant series. I knew I wanted to write a mystery that paid homage to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and the Golden Age detective fiction I had always loved. I’d been visiting the Thousand Islands in Upstate New York for years, and setting a mystery on one of those islands, in a grand historic home, just made sense.
Setting inspired my new crime novel, Dead Wind, as well. A few years ago, prior to starting the series, I visited Wolfe Island in Ontario, Canada. It’s a small, flat, sparsely-populated island that houses a wind farm, and the turbines are absolutely massive. I was there on a day when a storm was rolling in, and a story unfolded right in front of me: a body found at the base of one of those towering turbines, the local police rushing to collect evidence before the rain, and a female investigator wondering whether the crime could be linked to the serial murderer who’d been terrorizing the community for months. When I sat down to write the book, which is the third in my series, I returned to the photos and videos I had taken that day, and I was off to the races.
I think that for mysteries in particular, a strong sense of place helps to pull the reader into the story and keep them invested. Setting can also help to shape the plot. In the Thousand Islands, where Dead Wind is set, there’s a big class divide – you have the year-round locals, many of them in the hospitality and restaurant trades, living alongside tourists from cities across the Northeast and the uber-wealthy owners of the area’s many private islands. In reality, everyone gets along beautifully, but when it comes to writing crime fiction, there’s no limit to the number of stories an environment like that can produce.
You can find out more about Tessa and her books via her website and follow her on Facebook and Twitter. Dead Wind is available in ebook and print formats from all major booksellers.
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