with Susan Israel
We are delighted to welcome back author Susan Israel to Omnimystery News, courtesy of The Story Plant, which is coordinating her current book tour. We encourage you to visit all of the participating host sites; you can find her schedule here.
Susan visited with us last month to discuss her new novel of suspense Over My Live Body (The Story Plant; March 2014 trade paperback and ebook formats) and we asked her to follow-up with a little more about her personal backstory to the book.
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Photo provided courtesy of
Susan Israel
When I'm reading a book, whether mystery or not, a sense of place is important to me so when I started writing Over My Live Body, there was no question I was going to use mostly identifiable settings and those settings would be in my favorite city because (chime up the ad music) I love New York. In some instances, it's better for a writer not to use the names of real places — businesses close, change names and move faster than a New York minute and describing a favorite restaurant by name is the quickest way to date your material (unless, of course, you're writing historical fiction as well) But by not actually naming the hamburger place or the exact street it's on, you're usually pretty safe. Some authors (i.e. Ed McBain) have used a fictional name as a stand-in for the city and so can erect schools and stores that may or may not exist. But for the most part I like to keep things real. Sometimes in an effort to be too real, you might cite hockey team members by name who are traded right before publication (Farewell, Ryan Callahan).
As I was writing Over My Live Body, I was a "frequent flier" on MetroNorth, shuttling into the city from New Haven and traversing the streets and venues I was incorporating in my plot, taking pictures, arranging tours. Because I couldn't be there when I was writing a scene, the notes and pictures helped. In writing my second book, I decided to make at least one locale fictional, a middle school attended by girls, because I didn't want any parents of teenage girls wondering if that was the school their daughters attend, especially in light of the criminal activities suspected at the school. In the course of writing it, there were several, yes, several perps arrested for the same sort of crimes in the same borough — that pesky "life imitates art" thing — and that reinforced my choice to erect a fake school in the general area of a real cemetery by the same name and any resemblance to any real school in the borough of Brooklyn is entirely coincidental. The only pictures I had to go by were rather humbling recollections of the 7th grade me walking through corridors of my middle school, a school unencumbered by metal detectors and guards.
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Susan Israel lives in Connecticut with her beloved dog, but New York City lives in her heart and mind. A graduate of Yale College, her fiction has been published in Other Voices, Hawaii Review and Vignette and she has written for magazines, websites and newspapers, including Glamour, Girls Life, Ladies Home Journal and The Washington Post. She's currently at work on the second book in the Delilah Price series, Student Bodies.
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Over My Live Body
Susan Israel
A Novel of Suspense
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