Florida author Sharon Potts' debut suspense novel, In Their Blood, is in stores September 8. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls the book "a red-hot suspense novel." Entertainment Weekly says In Their Blood is, "a worthy addition to the mystery genre from a first-time author who looks like she plans to stick around for a while."
Potts was kind enough to answer a few questions for us:
Tell us about your protagonist, Jeremy Stroeb.
Jeremy is a twenty-two-year-old kid who, like many young people on the cusp of adulthood, is terrified of responsibility. He isn't ready to make decisions that will affect the rest of his life, so he cuts out. Drops out of college and backpacks around Europe. And then he gets the news. His mother and father have been murdered. Killed in their own home. The last thing he had told his parents was that he wanted nothing to do with them and their conventional lives. And now they're dead and Jeremy is forced to deal with precisely those issues he'd been trying so hard to avoid. He returns home, assumes guardianship of his sixteen-year old sister, and makes up his mind to find his parents' murderer by getting on the inside of their lives. But in doing so, Jeremy discovers his parents weren't the people he had believed them to be--and neither is he.
What was your inspiration for In Their Blood?
Several years ago, my family and I moved to a lovely house on an island in Miami Beach. One night, the house was burglarized while we were asleep in the upstairs bedrooms. Although no one was hurt, for months after, I was very much shaken. I'd lie awake in bed, imagining footsteps climbing the stairs--the intruder returning to harm me and my family. That family morphed into the Stroebs and my nightmarish fears into In Their Blood.
Why a thriller?
What else could it possibly have been? I was weaned on scary stories by my parents, who seemed to think that fear of ogres, gorillas, and traveling gypsies would inspire me to behave. A parental form of psychological thriller. As a teenager, my favorite books were by the Bronte sisters, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, two early psychological thrillers, and later, I read Du Maurier's Rebecca. When I became a writer, I simply did what I'd always heard. I wrote the book I loved to read.
Why did you choose to write a male protagonist--especially for your first book?
I didn't consciously decide to write a male protagonist. When I originally envisioned it, In Their Blood was about what would happen to an ordinary family shattered by a violent crime. But shortly after I began laying out the story, Jeremy took the lead. Not surprisingly, Jeremy was about the same age as my own son, who was also dealing with the dilemmas and apprehension associated with becoming a responsible adult. My son and I are very close and I often try to understand what he's going through by imagining myself inside his head. So Jeremy came very naturally to me.
In Their Blood is your first published novel. Are there UNpublished novels hiding in your dresser drawers? What was the road to publication like?
Are there ever! I started writing almost nine years ago after I retired from the business world. My first novel was a thriller about an evil staffing company that murdered its temporary employees and used their pituitary glands to make an anti-aging formula. No big surprise that book didn't make it out of my dresser drawer. After that, I tried my hand at writing what I'll call "relationship novels" where I focused a great deal on character development. But I missed the intricacy of plotting and so I returned to psychological thrillers. The result of those years of experimentation with plot and character is In Their Blood. I had completed eight novels before I wrote In Their Blood and the published version was my eighth draft. I had to go out and buy another dresser!
Tell us about the book.
To me, it's all about family. That's probably why I feel so connected to In Their Blood. As my kids were growing up, I couldn't help but ask myself, what if my husband and I were no longer in their lives? How would they get on? Had I taught them enough? Although Jeremy is the protagonist, I envision Rachel, the mom, watching her children from above, silently praying that they will make the right choices.
Will we see more of Jeremy? What are you working on now?
I had never intended Jeremy to be a series character. This past year I began writing several other novels, but nothing connected for me. I missed Jeremy and his world. But I had a problem. Jeremy had already experienced so much personal tragedy that I didn't feel it would be realistic to put him center stage in another catastrophic story. So I did a slight shift and made one of Jeremy's romantic interests, Robbie Ivy, the protagonist in my new novel. It's about a high school girl who disappears with her friend while on spring break in Miami Beach. The girl is Robbie's sister. You'll see many of the same characters, including Detective Judy Lieber and, of course, Jeremy.
Contributing editor Sandra Balzo turned to mystery writing after twenty years in corporate public relations, event management, and publicity. BEAN THERE, DONE THAT, the sequel to her Anthony and Macavity-nominated novels, UNCOMMON GROUNDS and GROUNDS FOR MURDER, received a starred review from Kirkus last year. Her latest is BREWED, CRUDE AND TATTOOED.
