BREAKING IN
Samantha Downing
1 My Lovely Wife (thriller, March, Berkley)
“Dexter” meets Mr. and Mrs. Smith in this dark thriller about a couple in a wealthy Florida town who, in order to break up the monotony of married life, select people to kidnap and murder together.
New Orleans. I saw a documentary about a couple who kidnapped a woman and locked her up for years. The wife [eventually] let her go. All crimes like this are led by a man. I wanted to write about a woman who instigated the It took me six and a half months to write and revise the book. I wrote the first chapter while sitting in the Milwaukee airport in September 2016. The chapter remains almost the same in the final version. I found my agent, Barbara Poelle, through another agent named Farley Chase. My friend knows someone who went to school with Chase, and because of her the book ended up in his hands. He referred me to Barbara. I didn’t realize how long the process takes. A lot is going on behind the scenes that you don’t see, and it can seem like nothing is happening. Learn and practice the craft. is my 12th novel. I’ve spent 20 years writing and I joined a critique group a couple of years ago. Without doing those two, it wouldn’t have mattered who saw my manuscript. I would’ve joined a critique group sooner. For years, I wrote in a void and would have benefitted from [it]. Write because you love it, not because you want to be published. I am working on my next thriller.
