Author R&R with Alexa Donne

 Alexa Donne is the Edgar nominated author of Pretty Dead Queens, The Ivies, and The Bitter End, young adult thrillers featuring terrible teens and big twists. She loves exploring themes of class and wealth, toxic friendships (especially between young women), and the double-edged sword of trying to keep up with the Joneses in the era of social media and toxic capitalism. By day, she lives in Los Angeles and works in television marketing. The rest of the time, she contemplates creative motives for murder and takes too many pictures of her cats.

Alexa’s latest young adult thriller, The Bitter End, follows eight students of LA’s elite Warner Prep, who can’t wait for their Senior Excursion—five days of Instagrammable adventure in one of the world’s most exclusive locations. But they can’t believe their bad luck when they end up on a digital detox in an isolated Colorado ski chalet. Their epic trip is panning out to be an epic bore . . . until their classmates start dropping in a series of disturbing deaths. The message is clear: this trip is no accident. And when a blizzard strikes, secrets are revealed, betrayals are exposed, and survival is at stake in a race to the bitter end.

Alexa stops by In Reference to Murder to talk some Author R&R about writing and researching the book:

I LOVE isolation trope mysteries. LOVE. In movies, on TV, but especially in books. A ticking clock, no escape, and a limited pool of suspects—the tension in these stories is so high, and the dynamics at play so fun. 

Writing The Bitter End, I challenged myself to set a cast of teens loose on this beloved genre trope. I wanted to see how I could fit the constraints of YA world (there has to be some kind of adult supervision… at least to start) into an adult genre, while also bringing something fresh and exciting to the conceit so that it might surprise and delight seasoned adult readers.

The closed circle mystery is essentially a balancing act: a large cast size, a number of inevitable deaths, and of course the big reveal. It’s a game of teetering precariously to build and sustain suspense as I work to hide the true killer’s identity while not giving short shrift to characters who are not part of the narrative for long. Ultimately, I landed on eight teens rather than the Christie classic ten, and a minimum body count (though I won’t spoil the exact number!). It felt important to have enough personalities to stir up trouble while also not leaving the suspect pool too large at the end.

I chose multi-POV and multi-timeline, in part to stretch myself with a different thriller format, as well as to play with themes of friendship, appearances, and perspective, all of which change over time. I work backwards to construct my thrillers, so I started with a motive. Then built out a cast of spoiled Los Angeles prep school teens to kick the plot mechanics into motion.

But for an isolation trope to work, I needed to figure out how to get my new cast away from their parents and in a remote location. I knew the group should be somewhat disparate to create a lot of conflict and intrigue. They are not all friends, which ruled out a besties Spring Break trip or a post-Prom retreat. Authenticity is important to me in any thriller, but especially YA—it should feel feasible at its heart.

The solution to my problem came at a lunch with some fellow writer friends, including one who’d attended a Los Angeles prep school. She blew my mind when she talked about a program for seniors where for one week they’d get to go on a grand excursion—and real examples from her school included Alaskan dog-sledding and a Hollywood directing workshop! It was so fantastic and sparked my imagination—which is why those real examples are in the book!—and provided the perfect jumping off point for my isolation mystery.

And since I’m an East Coaster who sincerely misses weather (after fifteen years in Southern California), I knew I wanted a mountainous/forest setting with heavy rain or snow. I settled on Colorado for two reasons: first, the state and its glorious 14,000 feet peaks came up in several of the 20+ high-altitude mountaineering tomes I’d read, and second, I had several friends who were either native Coloradans or who had moved there.

And with my setting locked in, I now got to contend with several high-altitude, mountain, and snow-related elements that required some honestly pretty fun, if morbid and mildly terrifying, research. Some highlights:

High altitude sickness

The prep school teens in the book end up stranded in a ski chalet on top of a Colorado mountain of significantly high elevation. The copious amounts of non-fiction and memoir written by and about mountaineers who climb 8,000 meter peaks inevitably all touch upon high altitude sickness and its varying complications, including high-altitude cerebral edema (HACE), and high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), hypoxia, and their symptoms. My made-up mountain isn’t quite that high, but altitude sickness is likely to strike an Angelino at high elevation for the first time.

Dark Summit by Nick Heil, in particular, went into great detail about a man who survived a near-death experience on Everest. Being able to get inside the mind, with vivid description, of someone experiencing hypoxia and nearly dying from it was invaluable. (Did you know it’s a common phenomenon to hallucinate a person following you/being with you, up high on the mountain? This is stuff made for the thriller genre!)

Cell phone emergency access 

It’s the lynchpin of the modern-day thriller, isn’t it: How to deal with technology? Especially in a closed circle mystery with an isolation trope, the key is to get characters AWAY from technology and any hope of help from the outside world. I’m fascinated by wild, out of the way places and all the terrible things that can happen to you there. The Cold Vanish by Jon Billman reinforced that there are many places in the United States where it’s easy to fall to the elements with ZERO recourse. Often, those searching for you may simply never know what happened.

My editor wanted to be double triple sure these students couldn’t seek help. “Surely they’d just call 9-1-1?” she said. Cellphones have an emergency call function. This led both me and her down a rabbit hole of cell phones and emergency communications in 2024, as technology is constantly evolving and mystery authors must tear their hair out to make their plots work.

Multiple Colorado friends confirmed that there are many spots in the mountains where cell coverage is so spotty to the point that it is nonexistent. I did a deep dive to double confirm: emergency calls require a cell tower within a certain distance to work. But then a wrench in the works, at pass pages, no less: newer models of iPhones and now Androids have emergency satellite texting systems.

Here’s where all those books on mountaineering came in handy—they all have passages on satellite phones. How they work, when they work, and, helpful for me, when they don’t. Satellite phone may not work under heavy cloud cover or during storms. Luckily, I already had a blizzard at play, and used my creative license as the author to make things that much trickier for my poor cast of characters trying to survive a killer.

Sadly, I can’t share some of the juicier bits of research without spoilers! But I can relay one anecdote whose lesson is: sometimes you’ll blank on the silliest thing despite meticulous planning, and it’s important to be scrappy with your edits! With all my planning and research into cell signals and plot mechanics to deprive my cast of their phones, Internet access, and eventually power… I still managed to write an entire plot thread in the first draft that hinged on the characters looking through people’s Instagram DMs.

Then, my editor pointed out to me “but they have no Internet, so how could they check Instagram?” Reader, I died. You have to laugh about it though! I had to get creative in terms of keeping the information gleaned while tossing out most of what I’d written for that subplot. On the plus side—it made the back half of act 2 much tighter! Do the best you can, but you can’t do it alone—and some of your best work will happen in editing (and with your editor!).

 

You can learn more about Alexa Donne via her website and also follow her on Instagram, Goodreads, and YouTube. The Bitter End is now available via Random House Books and all major booksellers.

Author R&R with Mel Harrison

 After graduating from the University of Maryland with a degree in Economics, Mel Harrison joined the US Department of State, spending the majority of his career in the Diplomatic Security Service, winning the State Department Award for Valor and its worldwide Regional Security Officer of the Year Award. Following government retirement, Mel spent ten years in corporate security and consulting work with assignments often taking him throughout Latin America and the Middle East, before turning his hand to writing. He’s penned six books in the series featuring Alex Boyd, a State Department special agent and regional security officer with the Diplomatic Security Service, including the latest installment in that series, Crescent City Carnage.

In Crescent City Carnage, Alex Boyd and Rachel Smith are only a day into their long-awaited vacation in New Orleans to join their good friend and colleague, Simone Ardoin, when she is brutally murdered. Simone’s well-connected parents, long-time residents of New Orleans, are devastated by the tragedy and implore both Alex and Rachel to work with the New Orleans Police Department to find her killer. The city is infamous for its laissez-faire attitude, as well as its corruption. Nevertheless, Alex must work with the city's cops to break the case, also drawing support from State Department special agents. Identifying the killer is one thing but locating him proves more complicated than anticipated—Is the killer just lucky or does he have an inside source who is helping him stay one step ahead of the cops? The more Alex and Rachel delve into the case, the more they discover that New Orleans is a unique city full of its own traditions, family ties, and way of life. But the clock is ticking, and they need to capture the killer before he disappears forever.

Mel Harrison stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R today about writing the book:

Toward the end of my twenty-eight year career in the Foreign Service, serving as either a special agent with Diplomatic Security or as an economic officer, I realized that I had experienced a number of adventures in my lifetime that could be turned into intriguing action thrillers. After State Department retirement, I worked another ten years for corporate security, accumulating even more experiences. Finally, in complete retirement, it was time to challenge myself and start the writing process.

I have always enjoyed the action-adventure/thriller genre for my own reading, and so began my writing journey. I decided to write about what I knew and where I had served or visited, rather than struggling with unfamiliar territory. My six novels are based upon my personal experiences, albeit, with embellished characters and scenes to excite the audience. While the books and characters are fiction, they are often composites from real life, either experienced by me, or drawn from situations of which I am aware.

Many of the location settings, such as Rome, London, or Paris, I have visited again and again. Additional places, like Cairo or Islamabad, I also worked there and visited in retirement, even if less frequently than the former set of locations. As an avid photographer, I can research details of sites that my memory is vague on. Also, I use the internet to research technical details on everything from weapons to foreign police structures to plants and vegetation. Finally, nothing beats firsthand knowledge, so I have sought out subject matter experts, as needed.

While most people will say that thrillers are plot-driven, I love to create memorable characters as well. Just as the stories are fictional, so are my characters. Yet, I have drawn on people I have known, put them in different settings than where we met, and added features to their personality or appearance to make the reader feel that they can visualize the character or understand his or her motivation.

Equally important, I always think a long time about how to create villains. Reading how other authors handle this issue can be instructive. No one who buys a book wants to read about cardboard characters, and this includes the bad guys. The villains may be evil or demented, but they also have families and friends. Therefore, they need to be three dimensional and realistic. The reader needs to understand the villain’s motivation. Without excellent villains, the author doesn’t have an interesting story to tell.

I must note that I have a lot of restaurant scenes in my six books. Okay, I admit it, my wife and I are foodies. Here is a tidbit readers should know. Every restaurant in every book is real, and what my protagonist, Alex Boyd, and his wife, Rachel, are eating, my own wife and I have eaten at that very restaurant.

When I began creating my stories, I knew I wanted to put my protagonist, Alex Boyd, in harm’s way. Since he is a trained special agent, I needed to have him carry a firearm. For me, the best solution was the simplest. He either uses the real weapons issued by the Diplomatic Security Service, or in the one book, Moving Target, where is working in the private sector, I gave him a weapon that I personally owned and fired many times. Sometimes authors who are not familiar with guns get tripped up trying to write firearms scenes that just would not work in the real world.

An area that can be difficult to write about involves the sexual relationship of my two main characters, Alex Boyd and Rachel Smith. When they first meet in Death in Pakistan, there is an immediate attraction, both physically and intellectually. The question is how far an author should describe this relationship. I took the view that the reader must believe their love for each other is deep and real. It must be based on something more than a casual handshake. Therefore, sex is part of that relationship and needs to be presented to the reader without going over-the-top into pornographic description. Since Rachel is put in harm’s way several times in my novels, the feelings Alex and Rachel have for each other must be based upon the full spectrum of emotions.

I will close with a final point about politics. I try to leave politics out of my books as much as possible. Readers buy novels to escape everyday life. They want to be entertained, not lectured too. Of course, Alex and his colleagues occasionally mock a specific Washington policy as wrong-headed, but that is different than the author taking gratuitous shots at either political party. When I worked in the Foreign Service, the internet had not yet been created. Therefore, there was no social media or even cable TV channels. I honestly did not know the politics of my fellow Foreign Service officer. It wasn’t important to getting the job done or to protecting employees from terrorists, kidnappers, spies, or criminals.

 

You can follow Mel Harrison on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Goodreads. Crescent City Carnage is now available via all major booksellers.

Author R&R with Michael Cohen

 

Since his retirement from University teaching, Michael Cohen has been writing personal essays about his family, about lifelong pursuits such as golf and birding, about newer interests in flying and amateur astronomy, and above all about six decades of reading. His essays—collected in A Place to Read (2014, IP Press, Brisbane) and And Other Essays (2020, IP Press)—have appeared in Harvard Review, Birding, The Humanist, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, and dozens of other venues. He is the author of six other books, including an introductory poetry text, The Poem in Question (Harcourt Brace, 1983) and an award-winning book on Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Georgia, 1989). Michael Cohen lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Tucson, Arizona. His most recent book is The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries: A Mystery Guide and Finding List (Genius Books, 2024)

In 1891, a new London magazine, The Strand, decided to publish short mysteries in connected series. Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories about Sherlock Holmes nearly doubled the magazine’s circulation, and Doyle became rich. Other magazines searched for tales with the same kind of appeal, and dozens of men and women began to write detective stories in the series format of the Holmes Adventures. Michael Cohen’s The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries is a guide to this trove of stories that fascinated readers a century and a quarter ago. In clear and crisp prose, Cohen takes you through the variety of stories with brief descriptions, and he shows you where to find the stories online in their original, illustrated magazine versions. Here you’ll find names you knew such as Chesterton’s Father Brown, and less well-known ones such as Ernest Bramah’s blind detective Max Carrados, Anna Katherine Green’s debutante detective Violet Strange, and Gelett Burgess’s "Seer of Secrets," Astro.

Michael Cohen stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about the book:    

The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries was my Covid book. During the year between the first lockdowns until I was fully vaccinated the following spring, I did a lot of reading, and most of it was detective short stories published from the 1890s to the first decade of the twentieth century in England, the United States, and Europe. These stories were not easily available twenty years earlier, when I wrote my first book on mysteries, Murder Most Fair: The Appeal of Mystery Fiction (Associated University Presses, 2000). The stories first appeared in newspapers and magazines, and most had not been reprinted; a good big library might have a few of the periodicals, but if the stories appeared in New Zealand’s North Otago Times or the English Newcastle Weekly Courant, for example, I wasn’t going to find them.

But in the ensuing twenty years, these periodicals had all been digitized and made available through Gutenberg, Google Books, Hathi Trust, and a score of other internet archives. The stories that entertained our great-grandparents and their parents could now be read by anyone for free, in their original context between news of the day and quaint advertisements; best of all, they could be read with the engravings and lithographs that illustrated them. Moreover, there were new reprints of the stories in book form published by Coachwhip Press, the Library of Congress Crime Classics, the Mysterious Press Crime Classics Series, and others.

I read through hundreds of detective short stories, and though I started without any clear writing plan, a book idea began to emerge as I took notes on my reading. I really needed to tell two stories about this treasure trove of entertainment from a century and a quarter earlier.

One story was about Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. In 1891, a new London magazine, The Strand, decided to publish short mysteries in connected series. Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories about Sherlock Holmes nearly doubled the magazine’s circulation, and Doyle became rich. Other magazines searched for tales with the same kind of appeal. Dozens of men and women began to write detective stories in the series format of the Holmes Adventures.

The second story was about those other writers who followed Doyle. They created an enormous flowering of this kind of tale, with stories that featured female and male detectives, professionals and amateurs, young and old, aristocrats, gentlefolk, and plain folk. Detectives went rogue and became burglars and conmen. Others developed occult powers. It was a Golden Era of detective fiction, and it lasted for two and a half decades until the First World War. Nothing of its variety had been seen before.

So, The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries: A Mystery Guide and Finding List starts with the story of Doyle’s phenomenal success with the Holmes stories. I look at Doyle’s storytelling in the first ones published, with an eye to his plot construction and the original turns that he gave to situations that had been in the sensational literature repertoire for decades, as well as those that were brand new with him.

Most of the book is taken up with a closer look at the variety of stories written by those who followed Doyle. I give brief descriptions of the mysteries and how they struck out in new directions and created a range of mystery literature of astounding diversity. Finally, I provide a guide for finding the stories in their original, illustrated magazines. Here you’ll find names you knew such as Chesterton’s Father Brown, and less well-known ones such as Ernest Bramah’s blind detective Max Carrados, Anna Katherine Green’s debutante detective Violet Strange, and Gelett Burgess’s “Seer of Secrets,” Astro.

Once I sat down with the story lines in mind and my notes at hand, the book took only a few months to write, and it was a pleasure to revisit all those tales of detectives at work.

Michael Cohen's book, The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries (Genius Book Publishing, 2024), is available from Amazon and from the publisher. His earlier collections of essays, A Place to Read (Interactive Press, 2014) and And Other Essays (Glass House Books, 2020), are available in print or audiobook form.