Book Shots with Author Elena Taylor

We’ve launched a new series over here called Book Shots. It features some of the top mystery writers working today. No one has time to doom scroll endlessly to find a YouTube clip of an interview. We’re giving you quick Book Shots of authors and their newly released books.

Some may be familiar faces, and others–well, you might just find your new favorite author. You may have caught the interview with Peggy Townsend.

So, sit back, relax, and pour yourself the libation of your choice and enjoy Book Shots with Author Elena Taylor.

Elena Taylor spent several years working in theater as a playwright, director, designer, and educator before turning her storytelling skills to fiction. Her first series, the Eddie Shoes Mysteries, written under the name Elena Hartwell, introduced a quirky mother/daughter crime fighting duo.

With the Sheriff Bet Rivers Mysteries, Elena returns to her dramatic roots and brings readers much more serious and atmospheric novels. Located in her beloved Washington State, Elena uses her connection to the environment to produce tense and suspenseful investigations for a lone sheriff in an isolated community.

Elena is also a senior editor with Allegory Editing, a developmental editing house, where she works one-on-one with writers to shape and polish manuscripts, short stories, and plays. If you’d like to work with Elena, visit www.allegoryediting.com.

Elena’s new book, The Haunting of Emily Grace dropped recently and I was able to have an event with her recently in Sacramento. So much fun…and I know you’ll enjoy this book. And this cover…whoa

The Haunting of Emily Grace is a very different story from your Bet Rivers, or Eddie Shoes series. What inspired you to write a suspense novel?

I had such a great time writing this novel. I write what I read. The Eddie Shoes books are because of my love for Sue Grafton, and the Bet Rivers series are inspired by all the great police procedurals out there (including yours!). But I also read suspense. I love authors like Lisa Jewell, Lisa Hall, and Mindy Mejia.

I started writing The Haunting of Emily Grace during the pandemic. With my private eye books and especially the police procedurals, I try to follow the rules of those professions. With suspense, it’s a very different experience. There are no professional standards or rules of procedure for a person trapped in an isolated situation with other people behaving badly. That gave me a new kind of freedom that was a lot of fun to explore at a time when life felt very chaotic.

Lastly, it was inspired by Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, fans of that novel will likely find the parallels.

You always have great characters, Eddie Shoes and Bet Rivers are characters readers enjoyed coming back to. We got to see them evolve. That’s not the plan with Emily Grace in this standalone novel, is it? Is it hard to leave her behind?

It was a really different experience writing a story where I knew we would never visit the characters again. But I actually loved it. She got to have a complete story, one that while we may keep thinking about her, we know exactly where her life is heading. With a series, we may not know what the final book will be, leaving our characters in limbo. I think in some ways it’s harder to send a series book into the world, because we have to wonder, if this ends here, does this feel like a satisfying end?

No spoilers, here, but the setting you created for Emily Grace, is wonderful. The island becomes a character and lends so much mystery to the situation Emily Grace finds herself. How did you think of the island as the place where the story would unfold? And the house! How did you conjure up this incredible house?

Yay! I’m so glad you loved the location. The house and island mean as much to me as the characters. The island was fairly simple for me to conjure, because it’s based in very real places. I’ve spent time in the San Juan Islands, which run from the Puget Sound near Seattle up north into Canada. While Salish Island doesn’t exist, visiting any of the San Juan Islands would be very similar to where the book takes place.

The house was a blast to “design.” I would love to see it in the real world. I do believe the construction elements are accurate and doable with our existing technology. I know enough about construction (and have the right experts!) to feel confident in that. But mostly it was just a lot of fun to create a house with an unlimited budget.

If you had to do it again, what would you change about Emily Grace?

I’d pick up the pace in the opening chapters. I learned a LOT about writing suspense with this project.

I saw some similarities between Bet and Emily Grace. Taking on a job that they might not have wanted, but needed, for one. Was this a deliberate choice?

I would say that Bet and Emily Grace share a lot of similarities with me. All three of us feel a responsibility toward other people. We all tend to put the safety of others first, and we’ll be damned if we’re going to let someone tell us we can’t achieve something!

I love the unexpected twists in The Haunting of Emily Grace. When you’re writing the story, how do you know when to start getting readers ready for a twist?

I wish I had a great answer for this, because then I could do it again! I think the honest answer is a reliance on intuition.

What was the most difficult part of writing this very different book?

Definitely the opening. I wrote and rewrote the opening chapters multiple times. That was due in great part to never having written suspense before, and I was in that learning phase of discovering how it’s different than writing a mystery.

If you had one piece of advice for new authors, what would you tell them?

Success in writing is not about mystical talent or the coincidence of being in the right place at the right time. It’s about hard work, a constant commitment to learning the craft, and putting yourself and your projects out there, that’s how talent “appears” and being in the right place at the right time can happen.

What’s up next for you?

The third book in the Sheriff Bet Rivers Mysteries is currently with my editor. Fingers crossed she doesn’t hate it, and I’ll be digging into rewrites at the end of the year. We plan to launch that summer/fall of 2026. I’m also working on a new suspense novel that I really love. Emily Grace is about grief. The new book is about rage, so I’m excited to get that one done.

Here’s where you can find your copy–and you should!

Amazon Barnes & Noble Bookshop.org

Let Elena know what you think about her latest, or leave a question for her in the comments below.

Hope you enjoyed Book Shots, please keep checking back and give me your recommended mystery authors for a future session. Up next will be Nancy Cole Silverman with her new thriller, A Spy In Saigon.

Book Shots