The Healer’s Daughters blog tour: Locks, Hooks and Books review and guest post
“The Healer’s Daughters gets a well deserved five plus stars from me. I would give it one hundred stars if I could.”
Enthusiastic (much appreciated) review at Locks, Hooks and Books. Plus a guest post on why I write thrillers.
Six of the twelve books I’ve written have been thrillers. When I first began writing stories, I realized I had neither the breadth of experience nor the depth of insight into the human condition to write literary fiction. I was reading a lot of Graham Greene, who divided his own stories into serious literary fiction and what he called entertainments. I understood that even his entertainments had some interesting things to say about what’s going on here—and that the genre might be one I could handle.
I also realized that I was too young to write about what I knew but that I very much liked looking into things I wanted to know. My first thriller focused on the sinking in the North Sea of a British cruiser, HMS Edinburgh, during World War Two. The questions I entertained were What If the Edinburgh’s cargo wasn’t what it was purported to be? What if fifty years later the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States still all had reasons to make sure that cargo was never salvaged, never recovered?
I’ve been taken by these What If questions ever since. What if controversial documents concerning the origins of Christianity are unearthed? What if the only child of the most famous athlete in the country is kidnapped? What if vast Spanish treasure is discovered in the Florida Keys? What if a deadly virus is about to be loosed on Las Vegas? In the case of The Healer’s Daughters, What are the extended consequences of a deadly terrorist attack? What if local people are complicit in that terrorist attack? What if the attack is even more cynical and evil than it appears?
I was also taken by the form of thrillers. By definition, there has to be rising action, complications, intrigue, danger. Things have to happen; events have to lead to some sort of climax. Characters have to make difficult choices and impactful decisions, have to decide what is the best thing to do, the right thing to do. This is the form of all good stories, of course, but thrillers, it seems to me, naturally do this. And, as with Graham Greene’s entertainments, there are still plenty of opportunities for a writer to include some insights about the human condition and provide commentary about what it is that we’re all doing here.
