We are delighted to welcome author Lorne Oliver to Omnimystery News today.
Lorne's second book in The Alcrest Mysteries is The Menu (October 2015 trade paperback and ebook formats) and we recently had the opportunity to spend some time with him talking about the series.
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Omnimystery News: Introduce us to the lead characters of your Alcrest mysteries.
Photo provided courtesy of
Lorne Oliver
Lorne Oliver: Spencer Alcrest is the chef and owner of The Alcrest Gastropub which has been in his family for years. It was just a pub before, but after going to culinary school he took over and changed it. He's a good-looking man who struggles with making the business a success and committing to his girlfriend.
Chrys Alcrest was a foster child the Alcrest's took in after her mother disappeared. She's a free-spirited Aboriginal woman with a foul mouth and a yearning to find the next great adventure. An old friend of Mr. Alcrest's (an Irish mobster) has offered her to find the truth about her mother, however she won't take that step.
The two of them love each other as brother and sister should. They live together above the gastropub. Their personalities often clash, but they are still there for each other. The two characters have been part of me long before this evolution. When I first created them many years ago they were actually a couple named Jake Hart and Chrys Flowers and were private detectives. Together they seem to be all sides of who I want to be. A little selfish perhaps.
OMN: How have these characters changed from when you first introduced them in The Cistern?
LO: A person's life changes and develops from one day to the next and so do the character's lives. For the Alcrest's their relationships change, the staff at the restaurant come and go and the restaurant's successes and failures changes just as most restaurants do. Likes and dislikes change. Tastes change. The weather changes. A person changes. Characters must develop and change over time.
When I was a kid I loved reading the Hardy Boys and Sherlock Holmes. Now I read books by Tess Gerritsen and Kathy Reichs. In all of these series you don't have to read the books ahead. You can pick up any book in the series and enjoy that book on its own, but you'll want to get the rest and read them all.
And that's the kind of books I write, what I prefer to call a stand-alone-series. The books don't end in cliff-hangers and you don't have to read the first book to get the gist of what is going on in the others.
OMN: How do you go about finding the right voice for your characters?
LO: One of my main characters is a female, but luckily she's a tomboy type. She is still a woman who likes to dress nice and be sexy, however. It can get challenging at times writing the opposite gender and not knowing exactly what a woman thinks and feels. Luckily I have a lot of female friends I can call on to answer questions and tell me if I got it right. I think if the story is good then you get a couple of pages into it and forget what sex or who the writer is and just enjoy the characters. Take Anne Wilkes from Steven King's Misery. She's a fantastic character. Or look at the amazingly successful Harry Potter series written by a woman.
OMN: Tell us something about your books that isn't mentioned in the publishers' synopses.
LO: All of my novels are connected to each other with subtle hints. In Red Serge someone is reading a book titled Red Island. Also in Red Serge there is a singer/songwriter outside the Farmer's Market selling her CDs — she is a victim in The Cistern. She then appears (if you even notice) in The Menu. There is one connection in The Menu that wasn't supposed to happen yet. Red Rover (3rd in the Sgt. Reid series) was supposed to come out before it and in that the main character Reid visits The Alcrest Gastropub because his niece has started there as a server. She is in The Menu and Reid is mentioned. There are a lot of other connections, but you have to find them yourself.
OMN: How much of your own personal or professional experience have you included in your books?
LO: There is a lot of myself in every book I write and most of my characters are based on friends and people know. For one thing I am a chef. The Alcrest Mysteries takes place mostly in a restaurant, so a lot of my cooking life (and the experiences of friends) is also in there. (The scene in The Menu where someone gets fired, puts a knife into something and throws a paint can through a window actually happened at a restaurant I worked at) I also like naming characters and basing characters off of people in my life. When developing the Chrys character I searched out Aboriginal actresses and found Elizabeth Frances who has become a friend. She's a great actress in Las Angeles whose career is taking off. Everyone that works at The Alcrest Gastropub is somebody I know from a server at a favorite restaurant to my mother to my sister-in-law to my son. I try to always get permission before writing the character. The tricky part is when they read the book and argue that they wouldn't do this or that.
OMN: Tell us more about the setting for the series.
LO: The Alcrest Mysteries are set in a large west coast city named Middleton (the royal wedding was happening when I was developing it and I needed a name. Plus a lot of Canadian places are named after British Royalty) which is based on the city of Vancouver. I have never been there before, so I didn't want to use the actual city and have people complain about something I've written. A lot of Vancouver is in there, however I add in a lot of things from the places I have lived across Canada. For instance The Alcrest is on a street between Pearson St. between Gillies and Scoble. I used to live in Pearson Township on Gillies-Scoble-Townline-Road
OMN: Complete this sentence for us: "I am a mystery author and thus I am also …".
LO: I am a mystery author and thus I am also a little sick and twisted. My wife thinks that the fact that I don't yawn when someone else does proves that I'm psychotic.
OMN: The Menu has a very provocative cover. Is the model anyone you know?
LO: The cover is actually my sister-in-law Hanni. Yes, she is also the basis for the Hanni character and I have been told from her and my wife that I got her character pretty close. Not bad legs for a 39 year old.
OMN: What kinds of television shows do you enjoy watching?
LO: I watch crime television. I like things like Criminal Minds, Law & Order, Murdoch Mysteries and other fictional mystery shows. Plus I like documentaries on serial killers and true crimes. Oh and I like the show Firefly (see if you can find any references in The Menu) and Alaskan Bush People. You can't write those characters.
OMN: What's next for you?
LO: What is next is The Pass (book 3 in The Alcrest Mysteries). It is inspired by a friend from culinary school who went to work at a resort and was found dead under suspicious circumstances a few months later. I started writing it 30 minutes after finishing The Menu and had the novel finished in 4 months. It should be out by June 2016. After that will hopefully be Red Rover, the third book in my Sgt. Reid series.
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In 2007 Lorne Oliver received a diploma in culinary management and moved his family to Prince Edward Island, Canada where he worked in many restaurants to learn the trade of a chef. What he really learned is that the jobs he preferred were the ones where he could lean against the wall and write between customers.
His writing journey started at the age of ten because of Mrs. Staples, a great school librarian, and something called The Young Authors Club. Because of his love of Sherlock Holmes stories he started writing short mysteries and then Lorne changed to romance from a male perspective. He enjoyed books written by the likes of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity and Karen Brichoux's Coffee and Kung Fu.
While in PEI, thanks to his wife, Lorne had the opportunity to interview several members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It gave him the chance to write a story based on the idea he had for a long time of showing the officer chasing down a serial killer while letting the reader see how a little kid could grow up to be a monster. That is done, but there are more monsters that need to speak.
For more information about the author, please visit his website and his author page on Goodreads, or find him on Facebook and Twitter.
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The Menu by Lorne Oliver
The Alcrest Mysteries
Publisher: Lorne Oliver
A missing young man. A woman's body found in a back alley. Could the two be the connected? Enter the Alcrests. Spencer — the handsome chef and owner of The Alcrest Gastropub who's struggling to keep the restaurant going and Chrys — his gorgeous and stupidly courageous foster sister who's often blind to consequences.
Chrys dives right into the mystery risking herself, her brother and her co-worker's lives as she gets them in way over their heads. As they deal with their personal lives they are quickly introduced to a cast of colourful characters — drag queens, terrorists, secret agents and a sadistic murderer with eyes on one of them.
— The Menu by Lorne Oliver. Click here to take a Look Inside the book.
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