About The Dark Library: Suspenseful and unsettling but ultimately triumphant, The Dark Library by acclaimed author Mary Anna Evans is a compelling tale of mystery, family secrets, and the quest for truth.

“I’m a writer and, therefore, automatically a suspicious character.”  ― Alfred Hitchcock

“Where do you get your ideas?”

It has been more than twenty years since my first book came out. Even after all this time, the question I’m asked most often has never wavered. People want to know how a book comes to be, and they are particularly interested in the first step in the process. So where do those ideas come from?

I always try to answer seriously, because a flip answer—“I find them lying in ditches by the side of the road”—disrespects the person who is asking a serious and valid question, despite the fact that my “roadside ditches” joke has some basis in fact. The germs of the plots of my first two books came to me while I was making boring interstate drives that I’d made many times before. At such times, the mind wanders, and sometimes it stumbles over a good idea while it’s roaming around. When you’re a crime novelist, those good ideas often involve murder and darkness. Most importantly, they involve suspense, because it’s the emotion that makes readers turn pages.

In a suspenseful novel, every page promises more excitement to come, and the book is a promise that all this excitement will come to an emotionally satisfying and logical ending. This approach to plot—a logical sequence of promises that lead to a satisfying conclusion—goes back to Aristotle, and it is also true of storytelling that don’t involve pages. In the world of film, Alfred Hitchcock was a master of plotting and suspense, and it was to Hitchcock, not a fellow novelist, that I turned when I was writing The Dark Library. I wanted a story so steeped in foreboding that I didn’t have to tell readers, “This situation is creepy!” They would automatically know.

Nobody working in the past century could instantly signal that sense of dread better than Hitchcock. In the previous century, though, writers of Gothic fiction—many of them women—laid the groundwork for his films. Thanks to the Brontës, Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, and their fellow Gothic writers, we know that the gaiety of a costume ball is a frail disguise for the secrets the guests are hiding. (And don’t we all have secrets?) We know that a young woman, alone in the world, who sets out to earn a living as a governess or paid companion, is exquisitely vulnerable to the people who pay her wages, but we cheer her bravery in doing it anyway. We know that the crumbing ruins at the top of a windswept cliff are dangerous, but their beauty makes them an irresistible draw. We know that jewelry given by someone who wishes you ill is cursed.

With those things in mind, imagine how much I love my new home in a quaint town nestled between cliffs lining the Hudson River, a place so beautiful that it inspired a whole school of artists. It’s a landscape that’s been inhabited for so long that ruins and graveyards and battlefields are everywhere, reminding us of death in the midst of life.

In North by Northwest, one of Hitchcock’s most famous films, Cary Grant’s character takes a train ride out of New York City on a track that hugs the Hudson’s curves. As he flirts with a mysterious woman played by Eva Marie Saint, the dramatic cliffs of the Palisades parade past the window behind them. This evocative landscape is the reason, I think, that Hitchcock chose to put Grant and Saint on that particular train. The scene fascinates me personally, because the train passes a certain beautiful hill that I can see from my kitchen window. Its soft beauty and dangerous height put me in a Gothic frame of mind, and I like thinking about how this view that inspires my stories also inspired Hitchcock more than sixty years ago.

As it turns out, I don’t even have to drive down the highway looking in ditches for story ideas. I can just look out my kitchen window.

The post All My Characters Are Suspicious, Even Me appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

People love science. And I’m not just talking about the people who choose to do science for a living. I’m talking about regular, ordinary folks. I’m talking about all of us.

As evidence, let me point to the nineteten (nineteen!) seasons of NCIS, not to mention its spinoffs based in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Hawai’i. And let me remind you of Patricia Cornwell’s thirty-seven books. And Kathy Reichs’ twenty-one books. And all the other movies, television shows, and books that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for forensic science. Many, many people aren’t just willing to spend a lot of time thinking about physical, chemical, and biological science. They actively choose to spend their leisure time learning more about it.

I’ve written thirteen books featuring archaeologst Faye Longchamp, and my readers have happily gone with me on deep dives into archaeology, yes, but also into astronomy, geology, meteorology, and more, because archaeologists have to know about these things in order to do the fascinating work they do. Archaeology, like forensic science, is an ever-popular subject for mystery fams, and I think I have an idea why: They are all about the search for truth.

Who lived on this ancient site thousands of years ago? Who murdered this person yesterday? How will this book end? We turn the pages to find out, and we do it quickly, because we are driven to know the truth.

I believe the secret to hooking readers on a story boils down to four words: “Make them feel something.” This means that the secret to hooking readers on a story based on science is to keep their emotions front and center.

My new book, The Physicists’ Daughter, has the science and the emotions right there in the title. The protagonist ,Justine Byrne, loves physics and dreams of a career doing laboratory research, but she loves it because her parents loved it. Her mother and father were both physicists—an unusual situation in 1944, to say the least—and they taught her to be curious about the world from the day she was born. Sadly, they died in an automobile accident when she was only 17. At the opening of the book, Justine is 21 and she has a a real Rosie-the-Riveter-style job at a factory that builds boats and airplanes for the Allies fighting World War II. Everything’s going as well for Justine as they can be during wartime for a young woman who has lost her parents…

…until Justine realizes that somebody’s lying to her. Nobody expects a woman to know physics in 1944, so nobody expects the women on the assembly line to notice that they’re not building what they’ve been told they’re building, but Justine is different. She remembers the physics her parents loved, and she can see the lie.

Justine can also see that somebody is trying to sabotage their work, and this is information that could be deadly. She can trust nobody—not the charming men trying to get her attention and certainly not her slimy boss—so she’s forced to use the science her parents taught her to uncover an enemy spy and to salvage a secret project that’s critical to winning the war.

Justine is chronically underestimated. Nobody expects her to be a threat the plot taking shape around her. She is just a young woman, alone in the world, but inside her brain is the answer to a crisis that could hand victory to the Axis powers.

Fortunately, the Nazis are no match for the physicists’ daughter.

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