Sure, it’s hard not to draw some parallels when you create a character who’s also a novelist, but I will say Rose has more discipline than I have. She writes gritty procedurals, a kind of thing that requires massive amounts of research (and Rose loves research!). Me? That’s a lot of work, and I’m not a huge fan of spending days on end researching police procedure. I will say, however, this is my first book to feature a point of view from a detective, so perhaps I was indeed a little inspired by Rose.

The Yates house is larger than life. It’s almost a character unto itself. What made you decide to ground the narrative in this setting?

There’s a bit of a “haunted house” element to the story that I wanted to explore. I liked the idea that the Yates family had dark secrets, and those secrets involved an event that happened in the house itself. In a way, that makes the house a co-conspirator. Once I started thinking along those lines, I knew the house had to be large and looming, gorgeous but chilling, with an unmistakably malevolent energy.

This story forces readers to confront some difficult questions about what people will do to protect their own. How did you approach these moral quandaries?

Nearly all my characters have moral boundaries they’re willing to trespass given the right circumstances, and I find that compelling to write because it’s so human. But those boundaries are different for each person, and Cora’s line is set very far apart from Rose’s. I try to take each character and set a breaking point for them, then start throwing adversity at them to see how they react. Sometimes I’m surprised by the result, and Logan Yates is a good example of this. Although no one would call him moral in a traditional sense, some of the most terrible things he’s done in his life was out of love for his children (twisted as that love may be).

What books are on your bedside table right now?

Stephen King’s If It Bleeds and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Rather disparate reads, I’d wager.

We don’t know if Rose and Max get away at the end of the book. Do you know what happens to them, or did you purposely choose to leave their story open-ended, even to yourself?

Yes, I have a pretty good idea what happens to them, which may very well be the foundation for a future story. I did want to leave it a bit fuzzy at the end, which I know can frustrate some readers, but I’m a big fan of ambiguity. I’m the person who liked the endings of The Sopranos and Inception.

Acknowledgments

So here I am, writing these acknowledgments in June 2020, and the world is blowing up. This book won’t come out until 2021, and God only knows what the cultural and physical landscapes will look like then. All I know is what’s happening now, and I’d like to thank all the nurses, doctors, and everyone else putting themselves at risk to help those who are sick and suffering. Also to the peaceful protesters out there who are making themselves heard, and to those who are listening, perhaps for the first time.