We are delighted to welcome author Marilynn Larew to Omnimystery News today.
We last visited with Marilynn after the The Spider Catchers was published, which introduced CIA analyst Lee Carruthers, and now she has the second in the series on bookshelves, Dead in Dubai (Artemis Hunter Press; April 2015 trade paperback and ebook formats).
We recently had the chance to catch up with the busy author to talk more about the book.
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Omnimystery News: Introduce us to Lee Carruthers. Have there been any changes in her life since The Spider Catchers? And what is it about her that appeals to you as an author?
Photo provided courtesy of
Marilynn Larew
Marilynn Larew: Lee Carruthers is a woman in her mid-thirties, a CIA analyst when we first meet her. She's the third generation of her family to work in intelligence. Her grandmother ran a safe house and escape route in Paris for the OSS during World War II, and her father sold counterfeit Vietnamese piastres on the Hong Kong black market to finance CIA operations in Viet Nam during the last years of that war. She has a MA in Islamic Civilization from Yale and monitors black money — money from crime, money laundering, human trafficking, drug and arms smuggling, and terrorist funding — from an office in Paris. She has skills that the average analyst doesn't acquire because her boss sends her out to do jobs analysts don't regularly do.
At the end of her first adventure, The Spider Catchers, she resigns from the Agency, but she finds that resigning from it and getting away from it are two different things. In my current novel, Dead in Dubai, she is trying to find out why a CIA officer is dead. In Dubai. She walks the mean, dark streets alone, and she has the scars to prove it. I keep trying to get her to work with a partner, if only to have somebody to protect her back, but so far it hasn't worked out.
What appeals to me about her? I'm trying to create a woman who is tough and self-sufficient like the men in the classic tales, a woman who can handle herself but who never stops being a woman. This is a challenge in many ways, not the least of which is dealing with violent men and violent situations.
OMN: Tell us a little more about your writing process.
ML: I let the story develop as I go along. This is not the most efficient way to work. I've tried to learn to plot, but I get frustrated, and then I have to begin to write. I do know generally where I'm going — that is what the ending is — and generally how I'm going to get there. I do write a bit of biography of major characters as I go along, especially of the ones that appear in the course of the story, but I find that if I do too much of this, too much of the back story gets into the work and slows it down. Unexpected characters may wander in at any time. That's fun but a chancy way to go about writing a novel.
OMN: How true are you to the settings of these international locations that Lee finds herself in?
ML: In both The Spider Catchers and Dead in Dubai, the setting is very important, and I am as faithful to it as possible. In The Spider Catchers, Lee goes from the old walled city of Fez, Morocco, to the modern French-built city to the Algerian desert in search of her lost colleague, and each change of scene is an important part of the plot. I have been as accurate as possible — so accurate, in fact, that my editor asked if I had ever been to Morocco. Research, it's all research. In Dead in Dubai, the setting ranges from Dubai to Istanbul to Varna, Bulgaria, and in each case the setting is an important part of the plot. Dubai is a fabulous city, one hard to believe, and for the reader to see it in her mind while she reads is an important part of the reading experience. When Lee drives in the snow in Istanbul, the reader must feel her precarious drive up the second hill as well as her trip across the icy Galata Bridge or her tension when she drives among huge trucks on a snowy Bulgarian highway. This contributes not only to the tension of the plot but also to the understanding of Lee's character.
OMN: Complete this sentence for us: "I am a thriller writer and thus I am also …".
ML: I am a thriller writer and thus I am also a news junkie. I draw my plots from the current international scene, so it's important that I know what is going on. Each new misfortune or disaster in the world is a possible new plot. The Spider Catchers involved human trafficking, money laundering, and terrorism. Besides research in current events, my understanding of how terrorist groups work comes from years of studying and teaching about the subject. While I was writing Spider, I would invent something rotten for my terrorists to do, and before the week was out, they actually did it. I began to feel like Typhoid Mary. Dead in Dubai deals with blood diamonds and the conflict between two arms merchants for control of the illegal arms trade in Africa, a trade that fuels local conflicts in all areas of the continent.
OMN: What's next for you?
ML: I've already started the next Lee Carruthers adventure, Hong Kong Central. In it, Lee goes to Hong Kong to rescue a leader of the pro-democracy demonstrations and get him away from the island. The book takes place while the demonstrations are still going on and will feature demonstrators, police trying to contain them, Triad soldiers attacking the demonstrators, Hong Kong politicians, and members of the People's Liberation Army stationed in Hong Kong. Sounds like a cast of thousands, doesn't it?
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Marilynn Larew is a historian who has published in such disparate fields as American colonial and architectural history, Vietnamese military history, and terrorism, and has taught courses in each of them in the University of Maryland System. Before settling on the Mason-Dixon line in southern Pennsylvania, she lived in Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Georgia, Wisconsin, Ohio, South Carolina, Maryland, in Manila, and on Okinawa. It's no surprise that she likes to travel. When she's climbing the first hill in Istanbul to Topkapi Palace, strolling around Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi, or exploring the back streets of Kowloon, she is not just having fun, she's looking for locations for her next novel. She lives with her husband in a 200-year-old farmhouse in southern Pennsylvania.
For more information about the author, please visit her website at MarilynnLarew.com and her author page on Goodreads, or find her on Facebook and Twitter.
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Dead in Dubai by Marilynn Larew
A Lee Carruthers Thriller
Publisher: Artemis Hunter Press
Lead had already begun to fly before former CIA analyst Lee Carruthers could get to Dubai to investigate the death of George Branson, and each question she asked ratcheted the danger up by a notch. She knew George. He was a CIA officer, but she discovered that he had other identities as well.
In Dubai he was Gil Brady, and he worked for the Russian merchant of death Sergei Malyakov. In Istanbul he was Karl Spiegel, and he worked for Belarusian arms dealer Felix Gringikov. He might have been collateral damage in the war between Malyakov and Gringikov for control of the post-Soviet arms trade, but Lee had to determine if Branson still worked for the CIA when he was killed or if he'd sold out and if so, to whom.
She had to answer that question quickly, before she was sent on a one-way trip to Karachi.
— Dead in Dubai by Marilynn Larew
