Claire Lombardo

Claire Lombardo earned her MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois. The Most Fun We Ever Had is her debut novel.

From Lombardo's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: In a review in The Guardian, Hannah Beckerman wrote, "If ever there were to be a literary love child of Jonathan Franzen and Anne Tyler, then Claire Lombardo’s outstanding debut, which ranges from ebullience to despair by way of caustic but intense familial bonds, would be a worthy offspring." What do you think of that assessment?

A: I’m a huge fan of both, so I’m entirely star-struck and flattered beyond compare! Both Franzen and Tyler write the kind of fiction I’ve always aspired to—character driven, patient, and generous, with healthy doses of dark humor and earnestness.

One of my favorite Anne Tyler novels is The Amateur Marriage, and while the central relationship in that book is very different than the marriage at the center of Most Fun, it does so beautifully the thing I’m constantly striving for as a writer—it gives the reader the sensation of existing within another family, privy to the conflicting thoughts and egos and perceptions and insecurities and grudges of its members.

And The Corrections is really just...[read on]

Visit Claire Lombardo's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Most Fun We Ever Had.

Writers Read: Claire Lombardo.

--Marshal Zeringue

Louisa Treger

Louisa Treger's new novel is The Dragon Lady.

From her Q&A with Barbara at Women Writers, Women's Books:

What inspired you to write The Dragon Lady? How much research was involved?

The Dragon Lady began with a question from a friend. ‘Have you seen Zimbabwe’s secret Monet?’ The painting was allegedly hidden in the vaults of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe to keep it safe from Robert Mugabe, who was then President.

My mother was born in South Africa, so I have strong roots in that part of the world, and on a trip to Harare I managed to access a few of the ‘secret’ paintings. There was no Monet, but I did see works by Rembrandt and Durer, donated to the Gallery by Sir Stephen Courtauld and his wife, Virginia [Lady Virginia ‘Ginie’ Courtauld AKA "The Dragon Lady"]. My curiosity was well and truly piqued and I began to research them. The more I found out, the more I became convinced that theirs was a fascinating untold story.

Quite a lot of research was involved, including a trip to the Courtaulds’ house in Zimbabwe, where I slept in Virginia’s room and discovered a ghost on the...[read on]

Visit Louisa Treger's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Lodger.

My Book, The Movie: The Lodger.

Writers Read: Louisa Treger (December 2014).

Coffee with a Canine: Louisa Treger & Monty.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lisa Grunwald

Lisa Grunwald is the author of the novels The Irresistible Henry House, Whatever Makes You Happy, New Year’s Eve, The Theory of Everything, Summer, and the newly released Time After Time. Along with her husband, Reuters Editor-in-Chief Stephen J. Adler, she has edited the bestselling anthologies Women’s Letters and Letters of the Century. Grunwald is a former contributing editor to Life and a former features editor of Esquire. She and Adler live in New York City.

From Grunwald's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: What was the inspiration for Time After Time, and for your characters Joe and Nora?

A: This novel started with a story I found in another book, specifically a book called Grand Central, which was written in 1946. There was a ghost story in there—a fairly classic ghost story, as it turned out. But I’d never heard it before.

A young woman shows up at the gold clock in Grand Central early in the morning, lost and confused. A gateman offers to walk her home, but she disappears on the way. Worried about what’s happened to her, he continues to the address she’d given him and rings the doorbell. An old woman answers and says “This happens every year. That was my niece. She died in a gas explosion 35 years ago.”

I was working on something else at the time, but I couldn’t get this story out of my head, and I started to wonder what it would be like to write about a ghost in Grand Central.

Then I had lunch with a friend of mine, an architect and historian named James Sanders. He remembered the book Grand Central, and specifically a passage that described what sunrise was like inside the terminal on several special days of the year. He proceeded to explain Manhattanhenge to me...[read on]

Visit Lisa Grunwald's website.

The Page 69 Test: Time After Time.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cara Black

Cara Black's newest novel featuring private investigator Aimée Leduc is Murder in Bel-Air.

From Black's interview with Molly Odintz at CrimeReads:

Aimée Leduc’s mother was absent for much of the series; in your latest, she’s now returned to Paris to form a relationship with her daughter and granddaughter, but still struggles with domesticity. What’s your inspiration for her character, and what needs to happen (without giving anything away) to repair Aimee and her mother’s fraught connection?

Aimée and her mother, an American who may or may not have ties to the CIA and left Aimée’s father to raise her by himself, have a fragile relationship. Aimée doesn’t really know her, so this is new territory for both of them.

I was afraid readers might think my mother had been a spy–she’d turn in her grave if that happened—so I wrote a reader’s note as a way to explanation that Sidney Leduc is not based on my own mother. It’s funny what conclusions people will come to! Aimée’s mother Sydney is a woman who, for Aimée’s safety, left her in the care of her father when she was put in prison and stayed out of her life to protect her. Aimée has a hard time accepting that so...[read on]

The Page 69 Test: Murder at the Lanterne Rouge.

My Book, the Movie: Murder at the Lanterne Rouge.

The Page 69 Test: Murder below Montparnasse.

The Page 69 Test: Murder in Pigalle.

My Book, The Movie: Murder in Pigalle.

My Book, The Movie: Murder on the Champ de Mars.

Writers Read: Cara Black (June 2018).

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Benedict

Laura Benedict is the Edgar- and ITW Thriller Award- nominated author of seven novels of suspense, including the recently released The Stranger Inside. On the lighter side of mystery, Benedict wrote Small Town Trouble, a cozy crime novel, for the Familiar Legacy series. Her Bliss House gothic trilogy includes: The Abandoned Heart, Charlotte’s Story (Booklist starred review), and Bliss House. Her short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and in numerous anthologies like Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads, The Lineup: 20 Provocative Women Writers, and St. Louis Noir. A native of Cincinnati, she lives in Southern Illinois with her family.

From Benedict's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Stranger Inside, and for your character Kimber?

The Stranger Inside came from several places: my frequent nightmares about strangers trying to get into my house (occasional zombies, too), my general paranoia, and so many news stories about people whose houses end up being occupied by strangers while they're on vacation, in the hospital, or have listed an unoccupied house for sale. It's often difficult to evict these criminals, which is one of the reasons Kimber's story gets complicated.

I love complex characters. A protagonist who is a good person with only slight or non-tragic flaws is dull to write, which is why my novels often challenge readers' expectations of a protagonist's assumed righteousness. Kimber isn't just a victim of a random crime. She's something more. The book is as much about her as...[read on]

Visit Laura Benedict's website.

The Page 69 Test: Bliss House.

The Page 69 Test: The Abandoned Heart.

The Page 69 Test: The Stranger Inside.

Writers Read: Laura Benedict (February 2019).

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Lippman

Laura Lippman was a reporter for twenty years, including twelve years at The (Baltimore) Sun. She began writing novels while working full-time and published seven books about “accidental PI” Tess Monaghan before leaving daily journalism in 2001.

Her work has been awarded the Edgar ®, the Anthony, the Agatha, the Shamus, the Nero Wolfe, Gumshoe and Barry awards.

Lippman's new novel is Lady in the Lake.

From her Q&A with Eva Jurczyk for The Rumpus:

Rumpus: Do you think there’s fear of writing female characters who are unlikable?

Lippman: I think the trick is that you want to create human characters but you don’t want to fall into these patriarchal traps of the woman as a nag, the woman as a bitch, the woman as bossy. I think the smartest female writers I know are trying to figure out that middle path between the perfect character and the character who has flaws in this old-fashioned, sitcom kind of way. Gillian Flynn really threw down the gauntlet when she created Amy in Gone Girl. That’s a pretty hard character. There’s nothing to like about her. But she’s full, and she’s complete, and she’s interesting, and she very much owns her agenda and what she’s doing. I think that raised the bar a lot. A lot of women who were working in crime fiction, didn’t go out necessarily and create characters in the vein of Amy but they’re like, if my character can’t have blood on her hands, if my character can’t make mistakes, if my character is the perfect person who daintily steps through the plot and ties everything together and makes everyone feel good about themselves, is that the kind of book I want to be writing?

Speaking only for myself, that’s really uninteresting to me. When I wrote series fiction about Tess Monaghan, who still pops up here and there, she was always really imperfect. And not imperfect in that fake way, you know the fake imperfection you sometimes find in female characters. They’re like, “Oh I forgot to put my lipstick on before I left the house.” She was truly imperfect. She was impulsive. She was cranky. She wasn’t always kind to people. And she could be quite tactless. And that was always very...[read on]

Visit Laura Lippman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Another Thing to Fall.

The Page 69 Test: What the Dead Know.

The Page 69 Test/Page 99 Test: Life Sentences.

The Page 69 Test: I'd Know You Anywhere.

The Page 69 Test: The Most Dangerous Thing.

The Page 69 Test: Hush Hush.

The Page 69 Test: Wilde Lake.

My Book, the Movie: Wilde Lake.

The Page 69 Test: Sunburn.

The Page 69 Test: Lady in the Lake.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan Richards Shreve

Susan Richards Shreve's newest book is More News Tomorrow.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for More News Tomorrow, and for your cast of characters?

A: One early morning, I was in our attic looking through my mother’s photographs and came upon a lovely one of my grandparents whom I never knew. They are sitting in a rowboat on a lake in front of the boys’ camp which my grandfather owned in northern Wisconsin. On the back of the picture, my mother had written Ollie and Helen, Camp Minnie HaHa, 1909. By the time I went downstairs to make coffee, a story was emerging in my head about a boys’ camp director in northern Wisconsin who confesses to murdering his wife at a camping site. He is sent to state prison, leaving their only child who is four years old.

The characters emerged slowly but I knew the camp director needed to have a point of view when the event occurs in 1941. The circumstances of the story required that I discover what happens to the child who is left knowing the repercussions of that event would not be known until years later and would likely define the lives of a family.

Then Thomas surfaced, the 13-year-old prescient outsider—who writes a journal of his family’s trip to the site of the crime. I began with...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Kimi Eisele

Kimi Eisele's new novel is The Lightest Object in the Universe.

From the author's Q&A with Caroline Leavitt:

What I so loved about this novel is that even though it’s marked as dystopian, it didn’t really read that way to me. It seemed more real, more ground in human drama, and that was part of my delirious delight in it. Was this your intent?

Before I began the book, we lost a dear family friend to cancer. We visited her husband in New York City from time to time. One evening he excused himself from the table to call to someone in California he’d met through an organization that connected bereaved spouses for phone conversations. I don’t think it was a romantic connection, but I was struck by the intimacy of it, and how he was finding comfort there. Sorrow is solitary but often what keeps us going is human connection.

Also, I had worked with a lot of young activists and recognized their zeal for wanting to make the world more just. I began to wonder what would happen if the chipping away at dominant structures actually worked. What would the activists do if the world they wanted to topple actually toppled? That felt like a personal question as much as a political one.

I was less interested in the mechanism of collapse than I was in how a shared catastrophe might bring make us kinder—or not—towards one another. I thought a lot about the personal losses we experience in life—deaths, of course, but other disappointments and failings also—and wondered how those losses would be re-scaled in the wake of a national or global unraveling. It seemed unlikely that personal grief would dim. But maybe it could expand in some kind of...[read on]

Visit Kimi Eisele's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Annie Ward

Annie Ward has a BA in English Literature from UCLA and a MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute. Her first short screenplay, Strange Habit, starring Adam Scott was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival and the Grand Jury Award winner at the Aspen Film Festival. She has received a Fulbright Scholarship and An Escape to Create Artists residency. She lives in Kansas with her family.

Ward's new novel is Beautiful Bad.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Beautiful Bad, and for your characters Madeline and Ian?

A: It was a long process, sometimes painful. I didn’t come up with the idea for Beautiful Bad--in the form in which it exists today—-until I’d completed several drafts of a very different book.

The original manuscript that I set out to write was a memoir called The British Bodyguard. It was heavily focused on my husband’s experiences working in close protection in the British army. Spending 16 years in places like Rwanda, Bosnia, and Iraq can take quite a toll on a person and I didn’t shy away from depicting the difficulties that came along with being married to a former soldier.

It was pretty raw and candid. My agent suggested I fictionalize it. I didn’t like that idea at the time. I was very personally invested in the memoir. It was heart-breaking but I abandoned the project.

It wasn’t until a few years later that my husband and I were talking about it and he joked, “The problem with the memoir was that everyone was waiting to see which of one of us was going to kill the other first.” It was at that moment that I finally had the idea to turn Beautiful Bad into the dark, domestic drama that eventually hit the shelves.

Maddie and Ian evolved out of characters that were based on me and my husband. I threw in a lot of lies, deceit, and madness and the result was a psychological thriller with...[read on]

Visit Annie Ward's website.

The Page 69 Test: Beautiful Bad.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer

Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer are the authors of Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974.

From their Daily Beast Q&A with Scott Porch:

The last two presidents have been a mixed-race professor with a Muslim name and an openly racist reality TV host. Are we at a point where history doesn’t offer much guidance for what comes next?

KRUSE: We’re historians. Our training is in hindsight. In a lot of ways, Trump does recall past presidential candidates. George Wallace is somebody who always comes to mind when I watch a Trump rally. You can look at what Pat Buchanan’s run did to the Republican Party as a precursor to Trumpism. What’s happening with social media builds on what happened with the internet and with cable TV before that and with talk radio before that.

We’re off the chart in a lot of ways, but we seem to be coming back to topics we’ve seen before. The question of what to do about the many misdeeds of the Trump administration leads back to the impeachment of Bill Clinton and to Watergate before that. I think it’s useful to use the past examples as a guide for what might come next.

A lot of what’s off the chart comes from Donald Trump.

ZELIZER: Even in the things that seem the most remarkable or unprecedented, we are trying in the book to provide some historical foundation for those changes. How do you have a president who breaks with norms and institutions? There are things that are very unique to him, but we have a lot in the book about how the Tea Party generation of Republicans—like government shutdowns—created room in the party for a president who...[read on]

Visit Kevin M. Kruse's website and Julian E. Zelizer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue