How often do you get the chance to marry your love of murder and mayhem with the great poets? I've done just that in my debut novel, ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS. It was many years in the making: the first bit of an idea began to germinate when I was working in the White House, going to graduate school at night and dating my husband. We used to spend date nights watching a great show called THE PROFILER. The idea that psychology could be used to predict deviant behavior got under my skin, where it lay dormant for ten long years. An exit from the political world coupled with a marathon read of John Sandford books and one whopping bad nightmare made the idea rear its ugly head and demand: Write Me.
So at long last, I did.
ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS is the story of a reluctant serial killer who grows to love his chosen profession and terrorizes the Southeastern United States with Nashville Homicide Lieutenant Taylor Jackson and FBI profiler Dr. John Baldwin hot on his trail. The Southern Strangler leaves presents at his crime scenes, love poems by the greats—Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Yeats—and the previous victim's severed hand. When he passes through Nashville, leaving behind a body, hand and poem, Taylor Jackson catches the case, and the chase is on.
Developing Taylor Jackson was easier than I expected. I've always seen her as Athena, the warrior Goddess of Nashville, the sage protector who will keep us all from rack and ruin. Truth be told, she's an embodiment of my own hero complex, the kind of woman who runs toward danger, headlong, in many instances. She's tall and blond, her voice a low, smoky drawl, she carries a gun—really, how can you not love her? More importantly, she's trying to escape her tonied upbringing as a Belle Meade debutant and do something that matters.
Taylor is a hero, plain and simple, a hero faced with a madman on the loose, a serial rapist resurrected, and the small issue of finding herself in love with the man she's working with on the cases, FBI Profiler Dr. John Baldwin. The story is set against the backdrop of Nashville, Tennessee, the real Nashville, where crime and corruption balance against the genteel and seemly. We are a city of great dichotomies, which I love to explore.
One of my biggest challenges as a new writer comes from balancing the intensity of a thriller, a story compressed into a short time frame with a known enemy at the gates, with the evolution of characters over the course of the book, all while not victimizing my victims. It's a delicate job. I also had no police experience, and ended up doing a series of
ride-alongs with the Metro Nashville Police-both homicide and street patrol. I've served warrants—hiding behind a post as guns were drawn, interviewed prostitutes—taking physical descriptions so they could be identified when they were found dead, been first on the scene of a stabbing. I spoke at length with the lead profiler in Quantico about the choices serial killers make. The research was illuminating, frightening, heartbreaking, and all those emotions spilled into the novel.
But of all the lessons learned writing my debut, I think the most important was the realization that I had the power to give justice to the victims, something that so rarely happens in the real world. It drives me, this lesson, and as I begin the foray into my second Taylor Jackson novel, I'll apply it again, knowing in my heart that the heroes will vanquish evil, and all will be right in the world.
All the Pretty Girls is published by Mira
