Q&A: Ashley Winstead, Author of 'This Book Will Bury Me'

We chat with author Ashley Winstead about This Book Will Bury Me, which is a chilling, compulsive story of five amateur sleuths, whose hunt for an elusive killer catapults them into danger as the world watches. PLUS we have an excerpt to share with you at the end of the interview!

Hi, Ashley! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?

Hi, and thanks for having me! I’m an author who writes across multiple genres, but most notably thrillers. All of my books center on complicated women who are in pursuit of great, big, epic goals, and I’m always interested in exploring moments of emotional and intellectual transcendence. I have a PhD in Literature, so I’ve been in nerd training for years, and live in Houston with my smokeshow husband and three adorable cats.

When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?

One of my earliest academic memories is getting a homework assignment in elementary school to write a creative paragraph describing a ship sailing across the ocean. I took the assignment so seriously, pacing around my bedroom with my hands behind my back, trying out different sentences, wanting to get the musicality of the words to mimic the sound of waves hitting a hull. I think I’ve been in love with language from the beginning, though earlier in my career I wanted to be a poet.

Quick lightning round! Tell us:

The first book you ever remember reading: It’s a tie between the Sweet Valley High series and the Babysitter’s Club series, as long as by “book” you mean “stack of books.” I used to fly home from the library with at least seven of those books stacked under my chin and race through them.
The one that made you want to become an author: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood – what she can do with language is a marvel. I read this at twenty-one and knew I wanted to reach for those heights.
The one that you can’t stop thinking about: Right now, Layne Fargo’s The Favorites, a recently-published gem.

**Your latest novel, This Book Will Bury Me, is out March 25^th! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?**

“the secret house of death” – William Shakespeare

What can readers expect?

This Book Will Bury Me is a roman a clef (a fictional work partly based on real life), and centers on a young woman named Jane Sharp, who becomes obsessed with true crime and amateur sleuthing after her father passes away and she’s left with a lot of grief and unanswered questions.

Jane falls in with an elite group of armchair detectives, and together they get really good at solving crimes before the police—but then they’re confronted with a high-profile case that has the whole world watching, a case where the families of the victims are asking for sleuths to get involved (this is loosely based on the real-life University of Idaho case). They’re determined to be the ones to solve it, and they get in way over their heads. It’s a book about grief, the human need for answers no matter the consequences, the detective living inside all of us, and the allure and ethics of true crime.

**Where did the inspiration for This Book Will Bury Me come from?**

As I mentioned, Bury Me is a roman a clef. I was at a book festival in early 2023, out to dinner with other writers and librarians, when the topic of true crime came up. Specifically, the popularity of true crime. Someone posed the question, “Why do you think people are so attracted to something so grisly?”

I just so happened to have fallen down the rabbit hole of true crime myself right around that time. My father passed away unexpectedly in August 2022, and when the University of Idaho case made the news in November 2022, I tracked it obsessively and read what sleuths had to say. I didn’t know why, exactly, I developed such an emotional connection to the case, only that it had to do with my own grief for my father and my unanswered questions related to him. The act of tracking the case and doing research, trying to put the pieces together, gave me the illusion that I could control and contribute to something.

So all of that crystallized for me in that moment at dinner, and I knew I wanted to write a book that was a love letter to sleuths and grieving families and really anyone who’s lost someone, while at the same time exploring the ethics of true crime from an insider’s perspective.

Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?

I really enjoyed coming up with the four other sleuths Jane becomes close to. I modelled them after a nuclear family—there’s a father figure, a maternal figure, a brother figure, and a love interest, and as the new kid, so to speak, Jane often plays the role of little sister.

Q&A: Erin A. Craig, Author of ‘House of Salt and Sorrows’

After months spent researching in true crime forums, I really wanted to capture the archetypes of people you find there, so GeorgeLightly, SleuthMistress, LordGoku, and CitizenNight each represent an amalgamation of common figures in the amateur sleuthing world. And of course, I had a lot of fun with their handles and writing their interactions. There’s obviously something very freeing about being an anonymous username on an internet forum, so they all feel a license to be very direct with each other. There’s a lot of giving each other a hard time, and I love writing banter.

Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?

I wanted this book to be a little closer to literary journalism than any I’ve written before, which is why I chose to write the first half as a roman a clef drawn from elements of my life. That required not only vulnerability but the clearheadedness to write about my life as if I was an outsider looking in, to sift through the minutiae of every day and see the story in it, and to relay the truth of that story without flinching. It was ultimately cathartic, but there were a lot of moments while I was drafting that I had to remind myself to take a moment and just breathe.

What’s next for you?

Continuing my track record of moving between genres with every project, my next book is called Future Saints and comes out in January 2026 from Atria. It’s about a grief-stricken, self-destructive indie rock singer whose last performance unexpectedly catapults her band to fame. (And the ghost who haunts her.)

Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up this year?

We’re in a banner year for books, so I’m hotly anticipating Stacy Willingham’s Forget Me Not, Katabasis by RF Kuang, and A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna, among many others. Upcoming books I’ve already read so I know they’re good: The Ghostwriter by Julie Clark, Parents’ Weekend by Alex Finlay, and The Last Session by Julia Bartz.