A Conversation with Rhodi Hawk

with Rhodi Hawk

We are delighted to welcome novelist Rhodi Hawk to Omnimystery News today.

Rhodi's second mystery in the "Twisted Ladder" series is The Tangled Bridge (Tor Books, October 2012 trade paperback and ebook formats).

We recently had the opportunity to talk to Rhodi about her books.

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OMN: The Tangled Bridge is the second in a series. Why did you decide to extend your debut novel into a series?

Photo provided courtesy of
Rhodi Hawk

RH: I did not intend to create a series at first. I was just telling the story as it unfolded. Somewhere along the way I realized the world was too big to contain in a single tale, and the supporting characters had their own story threads that needed to come to light. It's wonderful to go back to the world each time I write a novel in the series. It feels familiar but also open for exploration.

OMN: We tend to apply labels to books we feature — "novel of suspense", "legal thriller", "police procedural" and the like. How do you describe your books?

RH: Some call the books Southern Gothic, and they've also been referred to as supernatural thrillers. At first I was put off by the way books are categorized — I wasn't sure my series fell under any particular umbrella. Now I feel differently. Categories help give a sense of what a reader can expect going in. I no longer see it as limiting.

OMN: One of the first rules of any writing class seems to be to write what you know. How much of you is in your books?

RH: That's a great rule. I think it should be taken with a grain of salt. If you're writing about something that fascinates you, you're more likely to provide the level of detail that will paint the picture for the reader. I'm better prepared to write about something that took place in a loamy grove of hemlocks than, say, onboard a rocket ship. I don't know anything about the controls or fuels or fiddly doodads you find in a rocket ship. (Ask my step son — he'll know and he isn't even in kindergarten yet.) But in that grove of hemlocks, I could tell you about the lichen on the bark, the way the leaves are defoliating prematurely, or all kinds of nonsense that doesn't really matter except that it helps to set the scene. That said, I could also tell you about how the body is lying partially exposed under a layer of those prematurely-defoliated hemlock leaves. I don't have to have committed a murder, nor solved one, in order to talk about that.

OMN: Tell us about the setting of your book.

RH: The setting is its own character! The Tangled Bridge is set in southern Louisiana, beginning in New Orleans and then meandering down the Mississippi delta until the heroine, Madeleine LeBlanc, is lost in the forgotten byways and bayous of a wilder Louisiana. The title itself refers to the Huey P. Long bridge, all steel girders and rivets joining the Crescent City with the rest of the world; and the title also refers to bridging reality to a realm less understood, where river devils roam. The book also follows a historical thread that transpires in the same location eighty years past — back in the early thirties, when the Huey P. Long bridge was under construction.

To the best of my ability, the setting stays very true to reality. What you read is what I know of that world. However, I was not alive in the 1920s and 30s, so all of those details are derived through research, and sometimes it is necessary for me to fill in the blanks.

OMN: Did the kinds of books you read as a kid influence what and how you write today?

RH: There's a smile on my face as I answer this because I'm remembering all those books. But first, let me just show you where I was at the time:

I grew up as something of a gypsy in that we moved a couple of times a year. My father was in the navy, and my mother just couldn't stay put. Reading started with the grandmothers.

Dad's mom worked for Crown publishing and read a couple of books a week. She shelved them in my Pop Pop's study, and yet every time we went to visit, the shelves held a completely fresh crop of reads. My sister and I pillaged the Nancy Drews, the Hardy Boys, the Paddington Bears, and my favorite: an illustrated version of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by J. A. Barrie. We would tote them up to the spooky attic and read them by flashlight under the covers when we were supposed to be asleep. Later, it was books like Clan of the Cave Bear and the Hitchcock anthologies. That was from the library of Dad's mom in a cozy old house in Roselle, New Jersey.

Mom's mom was completely different. My maternal grandparents lived on seventy-six acres of rural nothingness in South Texas. We had cattle, prickly pear, and a whole lot of time on our hands. Mom's mom had stacks and stacks of Reader's Digests and a ridiculously extensive collection of Louis L'Amours. We read the stuffing out of all of those.

So if you can imagine, my sister and I were in a new home and a new school every six to nine months, and our anchors — the consistent homes of our childhoods — were our grandparents' homes. That's where we returned summer after summer, year after year. Better than Christmas every time. But the coup de gras went beyond the grandmothers' libraries: the best part was that both Mom's mom and Dad's mom were themselves storytellers. After a little bedtime pleading, my sister and I would be entertained by fairy tales (grandma of the North) or spooky tales (grandma of the South) on any given night.

I'm pretty sure both grandmas made up their bedtime stories as they went along. They were invariably brilliant.

OMN: What is next for you?

RH: I'm settling into a wonderful time. My husband and I have a "project" house (I call it the Glorious Dreadful) that we will continue to renovate over the next few years. It's a wonderful place, full of life, and we stuff it with whatever it is that we are. We have two dogs (used to be three: miss you, Banjo); two bearded dragons; three sugar gliders; three ponds full of fish, ducks, turtles, and geese; and gardens with butterflies, hummingbirds, and squirrels. No joke, it's my utopia! It's also on the wobble and a ton of work.

My office looks out over the hummingbird garden, and that's where I'm working on my next projects — the new book in the "Twisted Ladder" series, plus a little something extra. Life is good.

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Rhodi Hawk has been fascinated by storytelling since her earliest memory, when her grandmother read to her from Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Rhodi has been reading or writing ever since, and began her career as a transcription linguist in US Army intelligence. She later made a living as a technical writer during the Internet boom, working on her first novel in the early mornings and at night.

Rhodi Hawk won the International Thriller Writers Scholarship for her first work of fiction, A Twisted Ladder.

A compulsive traveler, she lives in Magnolia, TX with a host of critters, including her husband, Hank.

To learn more about the Rhodi and her books, visit her website at RhodiHawk.com. Or find her on Twitter and Facebook.

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The Tangled Bridge
Rhodi Hawk
A Twisted Ladder Novel
Publisher: Tor Books

Psychologist Madeleine LeBlanc is desperate to escape the madness that has followed her family for a century. She's struggling to adjust to her new-found power and to stick to the pact that protects her sanity.

But an innocent little boy is being hunted — by Madeleine's half brother and her great-grandmother, Chloe, and by the demons they control. The boy is a threat to their bloodline, to their very nature, but Madeleine cannot let his young life be callously destroyed.

Thrust into an age-old battle of dark versus light, Madeleine dives deep into the history of her family and into the vast paranormal underworld of New Orleans, a world seemingly controlled by her great-grandmother.

The only way to stop Chloe lies past the tangled bridge that could lead to great power … or total destruction.