Chadwick Ginther of McNally Robinson Bookstore in Winnipeg asks: Even before you wrote Every Secret Thing, many of your historical novels also featured a mystery element. What made you decide to fully enter the genre pond?
I was already writing suspense novels with an historical element and a romantic thread and Something Strange going on in the background (which gives all my publishers headaches when they try to market my books since I never fit tidily into one genre). But when I got the idea for Every Secret Thing, I knew I’d have to take a slightly different approach to it, making it move a bit faster because it is really one big long extended chase, so I went back to the thrillers I’d loved as a teenager, pitting an ordinary woman against hardened spies: Catherine Gaskin’s The File on Devlin, Evelyn Anthony’s The Tamarind Seed, and Anne Armstrong Thompson’s Message from Absalom, books like that, and I looked at the structure they’d used for their stories, and I thought I’d try my own hand at it, see how it worked, since it seemed the best fit for the story I wanted to tell. To read Chadwick’s entire interview with me, click here.
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