Sweet Deception: 5 Fun Facts with Heather Snow

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Sweet Deception: 5 Fun Facts with Heather Snow

Heather Snow knows the science of love. With a degree in chemistry, she’s the brilliant, highly creative author of the popular Veiled Seduction novels, in which mystery, danger, spies, headstrong heroines, dark heroes and sexual tension sizzle off the pages! Heather’s also a really sweet, fun person–I can’t wait to see her in Kansas City, where she lives, when we both attend the 2013 RT Book Lovers’ Convention!

I think what Heather said about writing historical romance on her website is so clever, I’m going to cut and paste it right here for you to enjoy:

One of Heather’s favorite quotes is from Carl Jung, who said, “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” Her background in chemistry prepared her for writing romance better than one might think: There are rules to follow, and some you can break when you want to experiment. Historical romance, like science, requires careful research. Most chemical reactions require a catalyst to drive them, just like characters require motivation to drive the story forward. And finally, both chemistry and writing, if done well, involve a precise mixture of elements and careful manipulation to achieve that perfect reaction that makes you want to sigh with satisfaction.

Isn’t that cool? Heather’s 5 Fun Facts are all so fascinating, too. And the excerpt from Sweet Deception rocks! Welcome, Heather. We’re so glad you’re here! And don’t forget, awesome readers, to leave a comment to be entered to win a copy of Heather’s book, Sweet Enemy!

SWEET DECEPTION

A Veiled Seduction Novel

Book 2

Signet

August 7, 2012

In the dark, the greatest lover can become the most dangerous conspirator…

Lady criminologist, Miss Emma Wallingford, unknowingly finds herself tangled in the dangerous final mission of Lord Derick Aveline, a spy who also happens to be her long lost first love. But when deception, however sweet, is the name of the game, no one can be trusted. And every love—and every life—is at risk.

5 Fun Facts About SWEET DECEPTION:

1. My heroine, Emma Wallingford, was inspired by the characters of Professor Charlie Epps, from the crime show, NUMB3RS and Professor Temperance Brennan, from the crime show, Bones. (Is it any surprise, then, that throughout most of Sweet Deception, Emma is hunting a killer?) In the first draft of Sweet Deception, Emma was a little more emotionally closed off, approaching mild Asperger’s (which I found terribly interesting!), but my publisher asked me to warm her up a bit. Luckily, I still found her terribly interesting when I was done. I hope you do, too!

2. I put a bit of my real life in the scene where Emma lures Derick out to the creek by the caves for a picnic. My husband notoriously filches food from my plate when I’m not looking, claiming ill-gotten gains taste all the sweeter (which Derick does). Also, I spent hours and hours playing the game Emma forced Derick to play as children at the lake where I spent my summers growing up—oh, and I can be a bit imperious while I’m playing it.

3. The original idea for this story centered around a missing maid that led to the discovery of other missing women. It did feature the crude geographical profiling that Emma does in the book, but it had her hunting a serial killer instead of a traitor. However, as characters are sometimes wont to do, Derick showed up on the page and insisted this was his story as much as it was Emma’s, and that he was a traitor hunter, thank you very much. He hadn’t spent 14 years behind enemy lines to just show up at his family home and get drawn into someone else’s murder investigation. He wanted to be there for his own reasons. He was all fine and good with letting Emma work out most of the crime, but he fully intended on bringing his expertise to bear, as well. Therefore, they would be hunting a traitor—end of story. Pesky characters. Still, I was able to put most of the research I had already done to use…I just had to come up with a different set of bodies for them to find—rather than missing women, they were now looking for missing couriers and War Department agents, etc.

4. The geographical profiling methods Emma attempts to catch the killer with are ones she could have devised at the time and also ones that could have worked. In fact, simple as they are, police forces still use the methods depicted in Sweet Deception, though their accuracy leaves something to be desired. Nowadays, of course, we have much more sophisticated equations—the most famous being the Rossmo formula, which you may have seen employed to catch killers in a couple of episodes of the television series, NUMB3RS. This incredibly complex equation, run by computers, takes in account everything we know about how killers operate, derived from nearly two centuries of crime analysis.

5. Derick’s title is Viscount Scarsdale, a name I chose for him in the previous book, Sweet Enemy (in which he plays a small part), simply because I liked the sound of it. I knew nothing else about him at the time, not where his family home was, etc. When it came time to write Sweet Deception, I chose the Peak District and Derbyshire for reasons important to the story. Only later did I learn that there really was a Viscount Scarsdale in the County of Derby, only his title wasn’t created until 1911.

Thank you so much for having me, Kieran! I’d be happy to give away a copy of my debut, Sweet Enemy, today!

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Leave a comment to be entered to win a copy of SWEET ENEMY by Heather Snow and a signed copy of IF YOU GIVE A GIRL A VISCOUNT. Giveaway open to US/CA. Ends 12/21.

If you’ve found this post on Kieran’s Goodreads page, click here to leave a comment.

Heather Snow is a historical romance author with a degree in Chemistry who discovered she much preferred creating chemistry on the page, rather than in the lab. She lives in the Midwest with her husband, two rambunctious boys and one very put upon cat.