Guest post written by No One Was Supposed to Die at This Wedding author Catherine Mack
Catherine Mack (she/her) is the pseudonym for the USA Today and Globe & Mail bestselling author Catherine McKenzie. Her books are approaching two million copies sold worldwide and have been translated into multiple languages. Television rights to Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies and its sequels sold in a major auction to Fox TV for development into a series. A dual Canadian and US citizen, she splits her time between Canada and various warmer locations in the United States.
About No One Was Supposed to Die at This Wedding: The second in a witty, USA Today bestselling series following author Eleanor Dash as she goes from wedding guest to murder mystery investigator at her best friend’s wedding on Catalina Island.
When I sat down to write the second book in the Vacation Mysteries series, NO ONE WAS SUPPOSED TO DIE AT THIS WEDDING, I knew I wanted to set it on an island. A wedding, an island, a storm … a perfect mix for a fun book about murder, right? But where? The first book in the series, EVERY TIME I GO ON VACATION, SOMEONE DIES, was set in Italy, and I knew I wanted each book in the series to be in a vacation setting. Or my publisher did—same, same!
I quickly settled on Catalina Island, an island off the coast of Los Angeles. Given that my main character, Eleanor Dash, was based in Venice Beach, it seemed perfect. The catch? I’d never been there. But no matter, there was plenty of time between when I had to turn in the book and when I started writing it to get in a research trip.
I started writing. I did some online research. I looked at maps, photos, and videos, and began planning my trip there with my sister and nephews. A fun, family vacation where I’d be thinking about how to kill people off. What could go wrong?
I should know better by now than to ask questions like that. Because life sometimes imitates art, and art sometimes imitates life. The catch is, you don’t always know which one you’re in.
Part of the book’s conceit is that the wedding party was going to be cut off by a hurricane. The problem with that? A gap in my research. Hurricanes are much rarer in the Pacific than in the Atlantic (historically, anyway, all bets are off these days where the weather is concerned). Hurricanes that make landfall on the West Coast and require evacuations are even scarcer. And a hurricane hitting Catalina Island? Well, I’m not going to say it’s never happened, but it’s rare, okay? Like super-duper rare.
Not that I knew that at the time. But remember back there when I said I was going to Catalina Island? Well, I booked my trip for the end of August, 2023. If that date doesn’t ring a bell for you, it’s when a little (ha!) Category 4 hurricane formed in the Pacific and dumped torrential rain on Baja California, Southern California, and Nevada. They called it Hurricane Hilary, which I thought was a bit rude to all the Hilary’s out there, and yep, you guessed it—Catalina Island was evacuated (I swear for the first time ever), and our trip was cancelled.
This was both good news and bad news. The good news—I got to track in real time how all that would go down. When the evacuation order would be issued, who’d leave, who’d stay, and what it would be like there during the storm. It also meant that the whole concept of a hurricane threatening a wedding on that island was much more realistic. Turns out I hadn’t gotten that quite right in my first draft. Oops! Plenty of time to fix it.
But the bad news was, I still hadn’t made it to Catalina. And I live in Montreal and don’t have an unlimited budget or time for travel, even for book research travel. Given the whole hurricane screw up, I was a bit worried that I was missing some essential flavor of Catalina in the book.
So what’s an author to do?
Well, this author asked herself one central question: what makes a better story? I went to Catalina and did my research or I never made it to Catalina because the hurricane I was writing about materialized and canceled my trip?
I think you know which one. I mean, I’m writing this, aren’t I?
And I like posing rhetorical questions in my titles.[1]
Thank God for the internet.
[1] I like footnotes too. Yep, the book has them!
