With over thirty novels under her belt, three-time RITA Award nominee, nine-time Romantic Times Award nominee and 2006 RT Award winner, Leslie Kelly decided to change tack and write a new, darker series under the pseudonym Leslie Parrish. "I adore reading suspense and horror," she says. "So despite how odd it might have seemed to others--considering I'd always written light and sexy romantic comedies--to me it was a natural progression to go from straight romance to dark romantic thrillers. I came up with the idea for a team of FBI agents investigating Internet-related murders when I read an article about a woman who lost her life savings because of one of those Nigerian 419 e-mail scams. It stunned me that people fell for those things, and got me wondering about the criminals who prey on such gullible victims. How their minds work...how far they might go." That snippet of an idea led her to write a few chapters of PITCH BLACK, which ended up at her publisher's request as book two of the Black CATs trilogy. NAL bought the entire series based on those chapters and a few paragraphs of a book about a man auctioning off "means-of-death" at a sick cyber playground, which became book one, FADE to BLACK. "Compelling, hold-your-breath romantic suspense with one of the most chillingly evil villains I've ever read, FADE TO BLACK crackles with dark, edgy danger from page one," says New York Times bestselling author JoAnn Ross.
The secret of creating a really chilling villain rests on his motivation. "Whether the villain's motivation makes sense to anyone else or not, it has to make sense to him," says Leslie. "Writing a pure sociopath who randomly strikes out like Michael Myers in a Halloween mask might work in a darkened movie theater, but those thrills don't translate well to the written word. Developing the psychology of the killer, showing his view of the world and his reasons for what he's doing make him much more compelling...and much more frightening."Since Leslie wasn't a cyber expert, a lot of research went into FADE TO BLACK. "I researched everything from how the FBI is organized--yes, Cyber Action Teams (CATs) are real--to the "lingo" and how certain crimes could conceivably be committed. Luckily, I made contact with an expert who runs a great website (www.ask-leo.com.) For a year Leo answered questions, ran scenarios, and made suggestions to ensure I wasn't writing something that could never actually happen."
When she's not writing novels. Leslie thinks about writing. "Seriously, my husband often opines that my writer brain just never shuts off. We can be walking through a store and something might catch my attention, spark an idea, and suddenly my mind has followed a string leading to an entire story."
Leslie Parrish lives in a small, western Maryland town that's just too nice and quaint not to have some dark, twisted secrets. Visit her website at http://www.authorleslieparrish.com.
Contributing editor Sibylle Barrasso is the author of Dark Waters. She was a finalist in the "St. Martins Press Best First Private Eye Novel Contest," received an award from Sue Grafton at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, and was a contributing author of Bad Boys and Bad Girls in the Badlands, a critical anthology about mysteries set in the Southwest.
