Guest post written by author Elle Cosimano
Elle Cosimano is the award-winning author of the acclaimed young adult novels Nearly Gone, Holding Smoke, The Suffering Tree, and Seasons of the Storm. Her debut novel for adults, Finlay Donovan Is Killing It, will kick off a witty, fast-paced contemporary mystery series on February 2, 2021 (Minotaur Books).
Elle’s debut, Nearly Gone, was a 2015 Edgar Award finalist, winner of the International Thriller Award, and has been nominated for multiple state book awards. Her more recent young adult thriller, Holding Smoke, was an International Thriller Award nominee and a Bram Stoker Award finalist. In addition to writing novels for teens and adults, her essays have appeared in The Huffington Post and TIME. Elle lives with her husband and two sons in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Central Virginia.
Someone had to die. Someone important.
Yet the question of how and when required meticulous planning and forethought. One misstep could derail the carefully constructed narrative I’d already put in place, and like every time I’d eliminated someone before, I didn’t feel equipped to make these decisions alone. There were only two people in this world I trusted enough to help me pull off the perfect murder.
“This death has can’t be painless,” I mused between bites of my salad. “I have to get rid of a key player. Someone people will miss.” The college-aged student at the next table darted glances at us over his laptop. The Panera Bread was packed and we’d barely managed to secure three open chairs in the middle of the sea of tiny tables. Normally, we tried to find a quiet booth someplace a little more private.
“Who are your options?” Ashley asked between sips of sweet tea.
Megan pitched her voice low. “Whose loss would give you the biggest payoff without making anyone want to throw the book at you?”
Ashley and Megan had been my critique partners for seven years. Our annual writing retreats were a sacred escape for me. We were all professional authors, mothers to school-age children and rowdy teens. Our writing time was stolen, our deadlines tackled between carpool runs, parent-teacher conferences, and trips to the pediatrician. Our retreats were for working, unwinding, and reconnecting. Daylight hours were spent hammering out words in companionable silence. Evenings were spent catching up on each other’s lives at the hotel bar.
But mealtimes? Mealtimes were for plotting.
I rattled off the names of a few potential victims. Stabbing thoughtfully at my salad, I said, “Woody has to die.” I didn’t want to kill him. I liked Woody. But Megan was right. His death would result in the biggest emotional payoff, propelling my story to its climax, but it would also be forgivable—a necessary sacrifice.
I tossed my napkin on my tray, too absorbed in my own machinations to notice the growing unease of the woman at the table beside us. “What about the body? His corpse isn’t going to magically disappear.”
“Why can’t it?” Ashley asked. She had a point. The story was still in manuscript form, the rules of the fantasy world I was creating still bendable. If I wanted the blood to disappear by way of magic, what was stopping me?
I shook my head. “It’s too neat. His death needs to be dark, visceral. It needs to break the ones he leaves behind.” I sat back in my chair, my mind working through possibilities. “I’ll take him out on the side of the highway with a knife. Burn his body in the desert.”
A tray bumped my elbow as the woman beside me rose from her seat, wide-eyed and pale, carrying her half-eaten food with her. I wouldn’t think of her again until hours later, over dinner at Ashley’s aunt’s house, as we regaled her relatives with the stories we’d been plotting, recalling the people who’d given us odd looks while we’d brainstormed over lunch.
“Wouldn’t it have been hilarious if those people in Panera thought you were contract killers?” one of Ashley’s cousins asked.
Laughter burst through the room. The idea was absurd. We were all mothers! I spent days on end in my pajamas, making up stories. And yet, as I reflected back on our conversation about contracts and payoffs and the disposal of bodies, suddenly the notion didn’t feel so far-fetched.
That seed planted itself in my mind during dinner. It grew through the evening, digging in and taking root. By the time we got back to our hotel, I was consumed with it.
“I have an idea for a book,” I blurted as the elevator doors closed around us, “about a writer who gets mistaken for a hired gun.” Ashley and Megan listened as I rambled. Then, just as they have with every book I’ve ever written, they jumped into my whirlwind brainstorm.
By the end of the night, while eating candy and drinking in our pajamas, the three of us had come up with a character named Finlay Donovan: a beleaguered, single mother of two, recently divorced after she caught her husband cheating, her meager advance on an overdue book already spent just to keep the lights on in her house. With bills piling up and her ex-husband flexing for a custody fight, Finlay’s life had already run off the rails when she was overheard discussing the plot of her new book with her agent over lunch in a busy Panera and a desperate woman at the next table slipped Finlay a note, promising fifty thousand in cash to dispose of her problem husband. Exactly how far was Finlay willing to go to hold on to her family?
A terrified thrill rolled through me as I pondered that. This story was completely different than anything I’d written before. Too different. There was a high probability I would fail, but Ashley and Megan insisted that this story needed to be told and that I was the one who needed to tell it. After a few more drinks and a long pep talk, this started to feel like a novel I could write. All my character needed was a ride-or-die accomplice. Someone who knew Finlay’s odds and believed in her in spite of them. I named her Vero, and like my own partners in crime, she made everything possible.
Fast forward three years from that cold February day in Panera.
Poor Woody is dead, stabbed on the side of a desert highway, his body burned to ash somewhere in chapter thirty-eight of my fifth published novel.
And Finlay?
She and Vero are hitting US shelves on February 2nd. Their mystery’s slightly meta, both thrilling and humorous, with a dedication that reads: For Ashley and Megan, because I would bury a body with either of you.
And now ending with a funny story . . . I was texting with Ashley and Megan, telling them my finished books are in and we were waxing nostalgic about our retreats together. Ashley remembered that the day we came up with the idea of FINLAY (THE SAME DAY WE WENT TO PANERA FOR LUNCH!) was Feb 2 (release day) EXACTLY three years ago! Here is the pic we took on our way to dinner that night and check out her caption on the picture!
