Deborah Grabien

Graceland, the fourth novel in Deborah Grabien's Kinkaid Chronicles, is due out this month.

From author J. Sydney Jones' interview with Grabien about the setting of her series:

What things about San Francisco make it unique and a good physical setting in your books?

SF has been either the number one or in the top 3 destinations for visitors worldwide for something like 50 years. It has the most beautiful natural geography of any American city, but our uniqueness is as much in the sociopolitical and artistic sense as it is in the geophysical sense. We’re uber-lefty, uber-progressive, more so than anywhere in the US. We live on unstable ground, the earth constantly moving under our feet. I’m not sure the Summer of Love or the Beats could have come from any other place.

In terms of the books, the City itself, the fog, the way it looks, the way the water moves under the Golden Gate, the geography, become an integer in my standalone thriller, Still Life With Devils. In that one, a serial killer who may not be completely human uses every inch of the city, every twisty street, every quirk, as a tool and an ally. In the Kinkaid Chronicles, the City is much more benign. JP Kinkaid is a London expat superstar guitarist who falls in love with the City (and, as it happens, with a much younger girl named Bree) on his first trip through, and comes back here to live. He’s the narrator, so we see the City through his eyes, which means I have to write it that way.

Did you consciously set out to use location as a “character” in your books, or did this grow naturally out of the initial story or stories?

Oh, it’s completely....[read on]

Visit Deborah Grabien's website.

The Page 69 Test: While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

The Page 69 Test: Dark's Tale.

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