How I Fell in Love with Writing Mystery and Suspense

To answer this question, I need to take you back to the beginning. And when I say beginning, I mean when I was about nine years old and my older sister and I watched the movie, The Omen, when we weren’t supposed to. It was on regular television, but I can tell you that it still scared the bejeebers out of me! To this day, I can’t listen to the theme music.

Fast forward to my teenage years and there was my mom, who read a book every two days or so, horror mostly, and with me asking if I could try one out. Up until that point, I’d read a lot VC Andrews and was growing fond of the darker stories. She gave me a copy of Stephen King’s Christine. Holy cow! For my young mind, that book was awesome and creepy and terrifying. I loved it!

After that, I consumed just about every King book I could get my hands on. Then I turned to Dean Koontz and Thomas Harris a little later on in life.

So with those influences, one would think I would write horror, but the thing is, I just don’t have the right combination of brilliant yet gruesome prose. I kind of wish I did. Instead I opted to write stories that held the best parts of those books; suspense tossed in with mystery, and just a hint of horror to top it off. Sometimes, those can be just as terrifying as reading books filled with blood and guts and things.

With my latest novel, Landslide, I think I’ve managed to write a story with an appropriate blend of suspense and mystery and thriller. I hope readers will want to follow the lead character, Claire McKenna, through the difficult and frightening situations in which she finds herself entangled. It is, I believe, a page-turning and suspenseful story!