A Conversation with Thriller Writer L.A. Starks

with L.A. Starks

We are delighted to welcome novelist L.A. Starks to Omnimystery News today.

L.A.'s new Lynn Dayton thriller is Strike Price (L&L Dreamspell, April 2013 trade paperback and ebook formats).

We recently had a chance to catch up with L.A. to talk about her new book.

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Omnimystery News: Tell us a little more about your series character.

Photo provided courtesy of
L.A. Starks

L.A. Starks: Corporate executive Lynn Dayton is my recurring protagonist. Other characters wax and wane in importance across the series. She continues to be tested in violent and cultural conflicts, as well as in professional and personal conflicts. As we all do, she grows from her experiences.

OMN: We read the first book in this series, 13 Days: The Pythagoras Conspiracy, calling it a "topical international thriller". How would you characterize your books?

LAS: I think of them as thrillers with strong mystery subplots. In many mysteries, a death or deaths has happened, and the quest of the protagonist is to discover the killer. In both modern thrillers and mysteries, as in my books, the protagonist is also at personal risk.

In thrillers, we know the villains and the quest of the protagonist is to stop their deadly schemes, which are usually global in scope, with hundreds or even millions of lives at risk. Moreover, in thrillers, there is an escalation, and usually one or many chases. Inferno by Dan Brown is a current example of a thriller that can be characterized as one long, fascinating chase scene.

In my books, the reader knows one of the villains but not all of them; thus, she knows some of the scheme but not all of it. The threat is international, and it escalates in each chapter.

In terms of marketing, many mystery readers like thrillers and vice versa; the bigger the potential reader market, the better.

OMN: Tell us something about the book that isn't mentioned in the publisher synopsis.

LAS: This book is dedicated to the memory of my younger sister, who died from metastatic breast cancer. I stopped writing for about two years to spending time with her. After her death, it was difficult to resume writing. I pushed through completion precisely because I'd promised myself this was her book.

In the first book in the series, 13 Days: The Pythagoras Conspiracy, there was one character my sister felt deserved a different fate. Naturally, I took that into account when I wrote Strike Price.

OMN: Now tell us how you would rewrite the synopsis if you were tweeting it.

LAS: STRIKE PRICE is about a plot to sabotage a hidden, crucial US oil center and the woman who must save lives by discovering and stopping it.

OMN: How much of your own experience is included in the series?

LAS: I bring to bear everything I know about the energy business, which is a lot. However, I'm writing fiction, not non-fiction, so much in each scene is imagined, researched, or sometimes just elided to avoid hanging up in too much detail and halting the action.

A weird occurrence for me is when I discover a subconscious reference in a name or a scene to something real that I thought was totally imaginary.

The satisfying thing is that because I study risks, the books have a certain prescience: in this book — finished twenty-one months ago — prescience is evident in the scenes about Oklahoma tornadoes, Chechens, and suspicion falling on, among others, rogue civil servants.

OMN: What is the best advice you've received as an author?

LAS: First, after reading an early draft of my first book, another author suggested I expand its scope. That was, and is, excellent advice for a thriller writer.

Second, when I wrote myself into a corner in one scene, an editor with whom I worked on the first book said, "This is fiction — the solution doesn't have to be hard." That's advice all writers should find encouraging.

OMN: Tell us about your writing process. Do you outline your plots or create biographies of your characters? Do you write a detailed synopsis then expand from there? Do you let the story develop as you write?

LAS: My "process" — a term used in the most generous possible way — includes all of the above, except that my cast of characters always expands. The number of characters doesn't contract until the editor's red lines start to appear.

OMN: Describe your writing envionment for us.

LAS: I often need to work in my "away" office: the outer of two fifth-floor rooms in a five-story office tower that I reach by cranky, creaky elevators. The office looks out over a six-lane roadway onto a shopping center parking lot notable for its occasional fender-benders.

Many of my neighbors are dentists and podiatrists. In this room, the walls are blank and the only furniture is a desk and a chair. The laptop I use there is not connected to the internet; the most important feature of the office is the lack of connectivity and the absence of my barking dog.

OMN: The cover of Strike Price has a raven superimposed on it. What is its significance?

LAS: The shadowy raven on the cover of Strike Price refers to the Cherokee legend of the Raven-Mocker, which is told in the book. The raven is a cross-cultural reference, most notably in Edgar Allen Poe's poem by the same name.

Without giving any spoilers, in the financial markets the strike price is the price at which an option triggers. And yes, the term can also be taken figuratively.

OMN: The action in Strike Price takes the reader to various places around the world. How did you come up with the settings for the book?

LAS: For me, it is true what's often said — setting itself is a character in the story. I like the complexity of thrillers, so that means many settings: in Strike Price these range from the middle of nowhere Oklahoma, to Paris, the south of England, Florence, and Berlin. Part of constructing the puzzle of a thriller is describing real locations in ways readers may not have considered or real locations with which they are not familiar, like Tahlequah, Oklahoma and the Houston Ship Channel. Occasionally I slip in a building or place that doesn't exist. The refineries I describe are fictional, although they very much resemble real ones.

OMN: What kinds of books did you read when you were young?

LAS: I read everything I could, particularly books identified as classics. That "genre" gave me an overall cultural context.

However, I can't imagine anything worse than reading classics — except not reading at all — for learning to write pace. The pace of a thriller compared to, say, Dickens, is like a racing cougar versus growing grass.
Yet one of the best ways for a writer to learn clarity and the power of description is to read Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

OMN: And what kinds of books do you read now?

LAS: In fiction, most recently I would note first thriller/mystery authors like Vince Flynn, Michael Crichton, Taylor Stevens, Dan Brown, Alex Berenson, Jamie Freveletti, Joseph Finder, Linda Fairstein, Daniel Silva, Tana French, Michael Connelly, John Grisham, Tom Rob Smith, Martin Cruz Smith, and second, international authors who give a strong sense of place like Aravind Adiga's White Tiger, Helon Habila's Oil on Water, everything by Herta Müller and Ferdinand von Schirach, George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone, and Yann Martel's Life of Pi.

OMN: What are some of your outside interests?

LAS: I am a runner, so it is natural to write running scenes.
Because I am an energy economics expert, that background shows up. Sometimes it is to the true detriment of my characters, like Amanda Parsifal in Strike Price.

OMN: Give us an example of a question you most enjoy hearing from a reader … and maybe one you least enjoy hearing.

LAS: Most enjoy: Will you sign these ten copies of your book?

Least enjoy: how long did it take you to write this book?

OMN: Create a Top 5 list for us on any subject of your choosing.

LAS: Top five — well six — Texas thriller/suspense/crime authors everyone should read: Deborah Crombie, Michael Ennis, Richard Holcroft, Taylor Stevens, Carlton Stowers, and Gary Vineyard.

OMN: What's next for you?

LAS: I am marketing Strike Price and writing the third Lynn Dayton thriller. I continue to research and publish on energy economics and investing. Like my protagonist, I will hit the backyard pool this summer.

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L.A. Starks was born in Boston, Massachusetts, grew up in northern Oklahoma reading everything, and now lives in Texas. She earned a chemical engineering bachelor's degree, magna cum laude, from New Orleans' Tulane University, followed by a finance MBA from the University of Chicago. While at Chicago she made time to play for a celebrated women's intramural basketball team, the Efficient Mockettes.

Working more than a decade for well-known energy companies in engineering, marketing, and finance from refineries to corporate offices prepared her to write global energy thrillers.

She continues to research, write, and consult on energy economics and investing, often speaking to professional groups for their members' continuing education credit.

For more information about the author and her work, visit her website at LAStarksBooks.com.

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Strike Price
L.A. Starks
A Lynn Dayton Thriller

Murder disrupts a billion-dollar oil deal …

When several people involved in bidding for an oil refinery are murdered, the situation becomes far more than a billion-dollar business deal.

A self-made woman in the oil industry, Lynn Dayton fights to save lives when escalating attacks reveal a hired assassin's plan to disrupt oil trade, wreck world economies, and draw another global power into dangerous confrontation with the United States. Are the killers rogue civil servants challenging the Cherokees' financial independence, Sansei operatives again wreaking violence, or sinister investors swapping the bidding war for a real one?

Lynn Dayton and Cherokee tribal executive Jesse Drum must learn to trust each other so they can find and stop the killers. Can sobering up really be fatal? How have so many of the deaths been made to appear accidental? Who's creating weapons with modern poisons and ancient Cherokee arts?

        

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