This look's like Carol's kind of event!

[BarryP]

https://www.banksquarebooks.com/event...

[Carol/Bonadie]

Already got my ticket, Barry! Care to join me? Sherry, are tickets still available? (Sherry had to bow out.)

[Ann]

What a panel! I hope you all enjoy it!

[BarryP]

Sorry, already booked, otherwise would have loved to.

[Louise]

Carol how was the event?

[Carol/Bonadie]

Louise, it was fab. I took notes and as soon as I have the time I will write them up and post.

[Carol/Bonadie]

Okay, here's my writeup on the event. Settle in everybody...

First of all, Ocean House in Westerly, RI, is the most gorgeous venue for a book event that you can imagine. It’s an historic resort on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean and has a spectacular view of the ocean, and beautiful grounds and beach. It’s also spectacularly expensive, LOL. So the only way I will get there is for an event like the Thriller Panel.

OH hosts an author series from spring to fall sponsored by bookstores including the one Sherry works for (right Sherry?) and is organized and moderated by local author Deborah Royce Goodrich.

Note to Ann: any of these (except for The Kind Worth Saving, which we’ve already read) might be put on our Group Reads list--they all sounded great!

The panel consisted of:

Wendy Walker What Remains
Megan Collins Thicker Than Water
Rea Frey The Other Year
Kathy Reichs (yes, THAT Kathy Reichs) The Bone Hacker
Peter Swanson The Kind Worth Saving
Vanessa Lillie Blood Sisters

Wendy Walker: What Remains
This is a dual timeline thriller. It’s described as gritty and fast, a dark, twisty, and highly addictive psychological thriller. Detective Elise Sutton is a forensic expert who solves cold cases. A crisis at a local department store has her wondering if she did the right thing in saving a man’s life. She is steeped in guilt and sets off to find the man who can shed light on this--which starts a cat-and-mouse game that threatens Elise and her family.

Panel Notes:
Walker was inspired by a real life shooting at a Colorado grocery store. She watched the first interviews of bystanders whose voices were compelling but who were never heard from again, never followed up with because they weren’t connected to the victims. She wondered about trauma and how it impacts people.

Megan Collins Thicker Than Water
The main characters are two sisters-in-law who are best friends. The brother of one and husband of the other is seriously injured in a car accident after which he is put into an induced coma. Police find evidence that connects him with the recent murder of his boss. Each SIL sets out to clear his name but come to different conclusions about his innocence along the way, which causes a rift.

Panel Notes:
Collins talked about the challenge and intrigue of writing about an incident that begins with the person at the center being rendered unconscious and can't shed any light on the crime. Will he wake up? What will he say if he does?

Rea Frey The Other Year
Frey says she doesn’t write thrillers and didn't know why she was invited to be on this panel, although the plot of this book comes close IMO. The main character takes her 9 year old daughter to the beach, watches her as she swims out and then disappears under the waves. The story then divides into two parallel stories.. one in which the daughter emerges from the waves and survives, and one in which she doesn’t.

Panel Notes: Frey wrote this because she watched her own daughter in the same situation and wondered what would have happened if she had succumbed to the waves. She was also inspired by the movie "Sliding Doors" (note to self--look for this) with its “what if” plot line.

Kathy ReichsThe Bone Hacker
Temperance Brennan is called in to investigate the remains of someone thought to have been struck by lightning. It expands to a much larger case involving the disappearance of young men in Turks and Caicos. Seven years earlier a corpse was discovered with the left hand severed--hence the double meaning of the book’s title.

Panel Notes:
This is Reichs’ 23rd(!!!) novel featuring Tempe Brennan. I stopped reading them a while ago and I can’t remember why, but the discussion of this one made me want to pick them up again. Part of the reason is because Kathy Reichs was dynamic in talking about the series and the resulting TV show, and partly because she is very funny.
Reichs began writing as a full professor with kids entering college. She had a colleague who wrote western romances. She read one and said “I can do this!” and did since she needed to earn more money.
Reichs loved her experience with the series “Bones.” She was heavily involved throughout, one of 7 writers, she co-wrote and produced the show. Each writer wrote an episode. She loved the main actors, Emily Deschanel is a lovely person, David Boreanaz “has his issues” but she loved him as well.

Vanessa Lillie Blood Sisters
“A visceral and compelling mystery about a Cherokee archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs who is summoned to rural Oklahoma to investigate the disappearance of two women…one of them her sister.”

Panel Notes:
Lillie is Cherokee and her family is connected to the Trail of Tears tragedy which forced them to relocate to Oklahoma. She explores trauma and likes characters who are driven. She also builds social justice themes into her books for obvious reasons.

Peter Swanson The Kind Worth Saving
This is a sequel to The Kind Worth Killing, bringing back Lily Kintner and Henry Kimball. A woman named Joan walks into Kimball’s office (he’s now a PI) to ask him to locate her missing husband. Kimball remembers her from his days as a HS teacher, and she creeped him out then. Something is not right here...

Panel Notes:
Peter has written several books since The Kind Worth Killing but he always knew he wanted to return to these two characters if the plot idea presented itself, which it did. He mostly writes standalones because he loves that you can throw anything at the MC, even kill off someone major halfway through the book. You can’t do that in a series or at least people don’t like it if you do. Gone Girl came out when he started and that changed everything in terms of the types of books that were considered desirable. Peter also loves telling stories from several points of view. This also makes it easier to write longer books. Book lengths used to be 40,000 words and now nothing less than 80,000 will do. This makes it harder to tell a simple story, there need to be complications.
The moderator asked Peter why he liked noir and he defined noir and then mentioned the movie “Body Heat” which he calls the perfect noir, he rewatches it once a year. Even though the story has been told before (The Postman Always Rings Twice) he thinks it’s better, a tightly written thriller.

********
A word about the moderator, Deborah Royce Goodrich. She’s a local (to RI) author and former soap opera actress. I’ve seen her a few times interviewing authors one-on-one and she was fine, but she really shone with this panel. She clearly had read each author’s book and asked excellent and specific questions, made connections that moved things along and made the 90 minutes fly by.

[Ann]

Thanks. Carol, this looks like great fun. Love the recaps.

[Ann]

Carol - What Remains by Wendy Walker and Blood Sisters by Vanessa Lillie both look very interesting.
I read the last two or three Kathy Reichs books, The Bone Hacker is very good. I have an unread gap in the middle of the series. ;)

[Sherry]

carol- excellent write up. next best thing to being there in person. this is the first thriller panel i’ve missed and i was really disappointed not to be there.

and yes, my bookstore- bank square books- provides the books and event staff for all the ocean house events. used to be savoy until savoy closed but then transferred over to bank square.

deborah royce is not only an author in her own right and has written 3 mystery/t books and is working on a 4th, but she and her husband chuck own and restored the ocean house, as well as many other properties in the area and other locations (CT and NY, and probably others too that i can’t recall).

and given how many movies you watch, i can’t believe you haven’t seen sliding doors!

i’m a fan of Wendy Walker’s books- my first author event that i hosted was with her. we’ve also hosted her many other times, in person, and virtually. she has a new book coming out on 10/17 called american girl (no link because i wrote a long post and got to add the link when goodreads erased my whole post. typing this in notes and will copy/paste it to the board.

[Sherry]

megan collins moderated one of the previous thriller panels at the ocean house. also a fan of her books.
vanessa lille has also participated previously.
glad that peter was there ( i told deborah she had to have him there!)
he just wrote a christmas novella that was a fast holiday read.

[Louise]

Hi! So impressed with the thoroughness of this write up, it’s almost as good as being there in person!

[Carol/Bonadie]

Ann wrote: "Carol - What Remains by Wendy Walker and Blood Sisters by Vanessa Lillie both look very interesting.
I read the last two or three ..."

Ann, I agree! Thicker Than Water also called to me. Let's see what others think. I've got a ways to go to catch up with Kathy Reichs, don't know if I'll get there, but good for you for ROOO-ing ;-)

[Carol/Bonadie]

Sherry wrote: "carol- excellent write up. next best thing to being there in person. this is the first thriller panel i’ve missed and i was really disappointed not to be there.

and yes, my bookstore- bank square ..."

Sherry, it wasn't the same without you, but I managed to enjoy myself nonetheless!

I'm not sure why I didn't see Sliding Doors. Although I do see a lot of movies, 95% of them are in the theater--I rarely watch at home. Too many TV series to keep up with!

In Audible American Girl is listed as an Audible Original (audiobook) released 12.16.21. I wonder what that's about?

[Carol/Bonadie]

Sherry wrote: "megan collins moderated one of the previous thriller panels at the ocean house. also a fan of her books.
vanessa lille has also participated previously.
glad that peter was there ( i told deborah ..."

The Megan Collins book is tempting but I'm not always in the mood for a thriller like that so we'll see.

I've got to track down Peter's Christmas story. I was hoping they would have it at the event but they only had The Kind Worth Saving. Which I decided to get (included in admission) before the event because I was undecided about the rest of the books at that point, didn't want them to run out (do they?), and figured since I already have a copy I would donate it to my library.

Yes, you are the reason Peter was there! He said he really enjoyed it. We were trying to figure out where the Taylor Swift house was but he was seated at the signing table and we couldn't really see it from there.

Kathy Reichs' line for signing was like three times as long as any of the other authors. Understandable I guess. A few people had an armload of books for her to sign!

[Carol/Bonadie]

Louise wrote: "Hi! So impressed with the thoroughness of this write up, it’s almost as good as being there in person!"

Thanks, Louise! Are you moved to request any of them from the library?

[Louise]

Carol/Bonadie wrote: "Louise wrote: "Hi! So impressed with the thoroughness of this write up, it’s almost as good as being there in person!"

Thanks, Louise! Are you moved to request any of them from the library?"

Yes! I love Kathy Reichs so I might start reading her stuff again