tonyhealey.com

I had an idea for a serial killer story, but the idea wasn’t enough by itself to create a novel from. I didn’t feel there were enough compelling elements to it to sustain that many words. But I also had this idea of a woman who was a survivor or trauma, who could touch somebody and ‘see’ things about them. I thought, ‘What if she were to touch a dead body and see how they died?’

That’s when the two concepts merged into one.

I spent about four months writing what was then called ‘In Her Skin’ (still my preferred title to be honest) and sent it to my agent just before the birth of my daughter. She saw promise in it, so we spent the next few months working on the book and preparing it to go out on submission.

At the end of the year ‘Hope’s Peak’ as it was then called had been picked up by Thomas and Mercer, with a deal for a follow-up too. I worked with my editor there to develop the book further and then began writing the sequel, ‘Storm’s Edge’. In August 2016 Thomas and Mercer flew me out to Los Angeles to film some promotional material for the release of ‘Hope’s Peak’ and then I returned home to continue writing ‘Storm’s Edge’.

‘Hope’s Peak’ was released December 2016 as a Kindle First selection, reaching #1 in the Kindle chart, with about 500,000 downloads. It has, to date, sold 32,000 copies. ‘Storm’s Edge’ was released in October 2017 and has sold 10,000 copies.

Amazon declined a third entry in the Harper and Lane series, so I self-published a follow-up novella, ‘Blue Ruin’ and teamed-up with Blunderwoman Productions to release an audible version featuring the same narrator of ‘Hope’s Peak’ and ‘Storm’s Edge’, Shannon McManus.

I wrote the crime novel ‘Rogues’ (then titled ‘Not For Us’) which went out on submission but was never picked-up. It happens. Many writers have worked on novels that were passed on by publishers. It’s a bitter pill to swallow at the time, but part of being a published author is learning to take these knocks and move on. I eventually self-published ‘Rogues’ myself when it became clear no one was going to take it on. It was too good to leave it collecting virtual dust in my files.

When covid hit, my author friend Bernard Schaffer told me he’d been contracted by Berkley (Penguin Random House) to write some novels in the Ralph Compton Western series. I thought, ‘I can do that’ so I put together about a dozen different pitches for westerns I thought they might find palatable. My agent sent them off and that led to the writing of ‘The Devil’s Snare’ . . .