with Marta Tandori
We are delighted to welcome author Marta Tandori to Omnimystery News today.
Marta's new mystery is No Hard Feelings (Marta Tandori; April 2014 trade paperback and ebook formats), the second in her series featuring Kate Stanton.
We recently had the opportunity to talk to Marta about her books.
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Omnimystery News: Introduce us to your Kate Stanton mysteries.
Photo provided courtesy of
Marta Tandori
Marta Tandori: The Kate Stanton mystery series is based on some of the characters from my first book, Too Little, Too Late. I chose to create a series based on some of the characters from the book when I received countless requests for a sequel to the book. Rather than write a sequel, I thought a series might be more interesting because it would allow some of the characters to evolve beyond what could be contained in one or two books. There was also a very strong relationship between the matriarch, Kate Stanton, her daughter Eve and her granddaughters, Liz Farrell and Karen Devane, that I wanted to develop more. While it's important to have a certain consistency in the characters, especially if you're writing a series, I think it's also important to have the characters change and grow, to some respect. It keeps the books fresh and less predictable.
OMN: Into which genre would you place your books?
MT: I would categorize my books first and foremost as mysteries. However, they also have suspenseful elements and while primarily directed to adult readers, they also have cross-over appeal to new adults and even young adults since Kate's granddaughters are now 19 and 24, respectively, and the storylines in both Too Little, Too Late and No Hard Feelings also focus on their respective relationships.
OMN: Tell us something about the series that isn't mentioned in the books' synopsis.
MT: The catastrophic past events that shaped the future of Amanda Nixon, one of the characters in the book, were influenced by two real-life events; one was the Sunset Strip curfew riots which actually took place in L.A. in the late sixties and the other was the Charles Manson family massacre of Sharon Tate and her friends, also in the sixties.
OMN: How much of your own personal or professional experience have you included in your books?
MT: My books tend to be less about my characters being based on people I know and more about the situations in which my characters find themselves being based on an actual event in either my life or in the lives of people I know.
For example, in my first book, Too Little, Too Late, the young child Kate, her mother and her sister are rescued from an internment camp after the fall of the Third Reich by a former Norwegian soldier and are taken to his farm in a remote part of Norway. While Kate's sister tends to their mother, who's drunk after drinking the plum brandy she finds in the cellar, Kate has to pluck and cook a goose for the family's dinner on her own. Unfortunately, she doesn't know that the plucked goose's guts have to be removed before she can roast the goose. As a young girl/teenager, I also lived on a farm and part of my chores included helping my mother pluck and gut countless geese, ducks and chickens. You're plucking boiling hot feathers that smell horrible until your fingers are numb. While it's certainly an experience I'll never forget, it did prove to be good fodder for the book!
OMN: Describe your writing process for us.
MT: Something will happen in my everyday life that will "ping" something in my brain. It can be something as insignificant as someone dropping their hat in the subway but that will get the ball rolling in my head. I'll start thinking scenarios around that incident and it'll rattle around my head for a few days until it becomes a full-fledged idea for a book. It'll take another few weeks for that idea to evolve into a story in my head so that when I close my eyes, I'm able to "watch" this story unfold. That's when I know I'm ready to sit in front of my keyboard and start typing. I will usually write one or two chapters and then I'll take out my notebook and do a plot outline for each paragraph. I'm a bad sleeper at the best of times and when I'm in the middle of a book, it's not uncommon for me to wake up in the middle of the night, having just dreamt something about the storyline that I have to quickly write down in the event I forget it.
I have a dedicated office in the basement of our house. It's tucked away into the corner of the basement because I'm totally focused when I write. I don't like any noise or music or anything else to distract me.
OMN: How do you go about researching the plot points of your books?
MT: The characters from my books come from every walk of life and many have interesting occupations or professions. For example, Kate Stanton's former son-in-law, is a reproductive endocrinologist and in my book The Ties That Bind (a prequel to Too Little, Too Late), the reader will learn something about the nature of his job. In his daughter Karen's own words, her father "helps couples get pregnant". My book, Continuance, alternates between two mysteries set in two alternating time periods — present day New York City and New York City in 1905. I had to do in-depth research on that time period because I knew nothing about it yet I wanted my readers to be transported to that era, to smell the boiling cabbage in the immigrant slums of the Lower East Side or to "see" the grandeur of the lives of the gilded rich. In my new book, No Hard Feelings, the remains of a murdered man are found on the property that Kate's granddaughter, Liz Farrell, inherits requiring the services of a forensic anthropologist. Again, I had no knowledge of this profession so it had to be thoroughly researched.
As a writer, I am thankful for the Internet more than I could possibly tell you. It gives you access to so much information and then sites like Google Earth open the world up even more by letting you see glimpses of a world that's not known to you. I also have encyclopedias I refer to, atlases and dictionaries as well.
I love research, everything about it, in fact. I absolutely loved researching 1905 New York City. It was such an exciting time in American history. There was a huge influx of immigrants into the country at the time and the country was booming both technologically and in population. This was a time when the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies and the Astors were amassing huge empires while squalor and disease ran roughshod in the city slums.
For me, the most challenging thing to research is always anything to do with the medical field simply because it's a complex and highly-specialized field so you want to make darn sure that your research is on point.
OMN: Tell us more about the settings of your books.
MT: I customarily tend to set my books in real places. These places are ones where I've actually visited or have "seen" them through traffic cams, Google Earth, travel sites, etc. At times, I'll take the odd liberty by adding an unknown street to a real location in order to properly position the action in the story to where I need it to be. When I travel, I take lots of pictures of streets and roads and landmarks so that I can use it at a later date. This helped me immensely when I wrote Continuance, since the earlier part of the book is set in Savannah, Georgia, a place where my husband and I had visited a few years back prior to my writing the book.
OMN: What are some of your outside interests? And have any of these found their way into your books?
MT: I love to travel, read, garden and learn all kinds of languages. My love of traveling has figured heavily into the locations for some of my books and my knowledge of languages has held me in good stead when I wrote Continuance. One of the main characters in the book, Sonora, worked at Ellis Island as an interpreter.
OMN: What is the best advice you've received as an author? And what might you say to aspiring authors?
MT: I've received tons of wonderful advice as an author. However, what really sticks out in my mind was what my old English teacher had once said to me after she'd handed me back my essay. She said that as a writer, your curiosity and imagination are your best friends. I've never forgotten that because her remark couldn't have been more accurate. For a non-writer, seeing a hat fall in the subway would've barely rated a second glance. For a writer, seeing that hat fall prompts a thousand questions like, "I wonder where that hat's going to end up if it's left on the subway?" or "I wonder where the guy got that interesting hat? I've never seen anything like it." Then the writer's imagination will kick in and before you can say Bob's-your-uncle, that hat already has a history and a life of its own.
As for my advice to aspiring authors: Write because you have to write and because you need to write — not because you should write.
OMN: What kinds of books did you read when you were young?
MT: As a child, I read Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden mystery books. I was fascinated by the mystery solving process. Both Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden were amateur sleuths. Nancy was older and more sophisticated while Trixie was younger but more down to earth. I think as a kid, I wanted to be Nancy and Trixie, running around on adventures and solving all kinds of mysteries. It's probably every kid's fantasy.
OMN: And what do you read now for pleasure?
MT: As an adult, I love reading John Grisham, Mary Higgins Clark, Tess Gerritsen and Linwood Barclay, among others. All of these authors are very different in style and in technique but all write books that are hugely entertaining. With Grisham, I know I'll get a good legal drama and with Higgins Clark, there's suspense and a nice dash of mystery. Barclay always delivers a good thriller while Gerritsen has incredible depth and breadth as a writer and her books are always entertaining. All of these authors have not only entertained me but they've also influenced both what I write and how I write.
OMN: What's next for you?
MT: Next for me is another book in the Kate Stanton mystery series entitled The Crossing at Blaisdell Park and it'll be a mystery that's going to put a whole new spin on the concept of the Underground Railroad. After that, I'm going to work on another historical mystery that will have two of the characters from Continuance branch off and end up butting heads with one of the titans of the automotive industry, Henry Ford.
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By the time Marta Tandori reached fifth grade, she was an avid reader and writer with a stack of short stories collecting dust in a box under her bed but it wasn't until she began studying acting in her early twenties at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York that Marta realized acting wasn't really her passion — writing fiction was.
What followed was years of writing workshops as well as correspondence courses in writing for children through the Institute of Children's Literature in Connecticut. She credits the award winning author Troon Harrison as the instructor who helped her find her literary voice.
With her more recent endeavors, Marta has shifted her writing focus to "women's suspense", a genre she fondly describes as having "strong female protagonists with closets full of nasty skeletons and the odd murder or two to complicate their already complicated lives".
For more information about the author, please visit her website at MartaTandori.com or find her on Facebook and Twitter.
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No Hard Feelings
Marta Tandori
A Kate Stanton Mystery
Some secrets can't stay hidden, especially when they involve murder …
Liz Farrell is still reeling over the murder of her mother almost a year earlier at the hands of her father, Leo Bauer, when she receives the startling news that she's inherited her estranged father's sizable estate. Unable to come to terms with her father's unspeakable legacy, Liz and her grandmother, Kate Stanton, visit Leo's property in Benedict Canyon, desperately hoping to find closure. Instead, they find a bunker hidden under an old hunting lodge that had been used by Leo at one time to hold Liz's mother captive.
Horrified by the discovery, Liz immediately orders the bunker filled and the lodge destroyed but the ensuing demolition quickly comes to a grinding halt after a man's remains are discovered in a shallow grave at the base of the old lodge. Once the press get wind of the gruesome discovery, rumors quickly surface, linking the remains to a murder spree that took place at the same address almost half a century earlier; a murder spree conveniently covered up by the governor at the time who also happened to be Leo Bauer's stepbrother.
Liz and Kate's efforts to uncover the truth behind the murders are soon hampered by family secrets and a killer who's intent on finishing the job started almost fifty years ago.
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