New Twists on an Old Story

When I’m reading for relaxation, I often select thriller, suspense, and mystery novels. Rescues are a common trope in these books: somebody—usually a woman—is held against her will, in danger of bodily harm, and either must save herself or be rescued by the hero. Movies often include this situation, too. From Die Hard to Taken, we see lots of damsels in distress.

What we don’t see nearly enough in books and movies is a civilian woman (one with no military/police/ninja training) rescuing her man. Wife-saving-husband is the angle I wanted to explore in Watch What You Say, my suspense-thriller that launches this fall. Here’s the premise:

To what lengths will a woman go to save her family? Web-radio personality Bo Riccardi is pushed beyond her mental and physical limits when her husband, Oscar, is kidnapped by a man from her dark past. The abductor commands her to interview him live on her show, with Oscar’s life on the line.

Giving in, though, creates an endless nightmare for Bo, as Oscar’s captor begins to destroy her career and alienate everybody she loves.

Bo’s secret asset is chromesthesia, seeing colorful shapes that reveal the intentions behind anyone’s speech. She can literally watch what they say. But relying too much on this gift renders her vulnerable to the madman’s purpose, making her even less likely to rescue Oscar—and escape the guilt and shame that binds her to the kidnapper.

I wanted to keep Bo normal and relatable, so I didn’t give her the superhero firearms or fighting abilities writers usually fall back on when they want a badass heroine. Besides, I’ve read too many suspense-thrillers that morphed into action-adventure tales once the mad skills were revealed. What’s suspenseful or thrilling about that? As soon as an author gives the protagonist a hardcore training background, you know in your reader’s gut the fix is in.

On the other hand, I did want to provide Bo with an apparent edge, something cool that initially would feel like it would give her a fighting chance to rescue her husband. The reader would soon understand, though, that this gift was as much of a liability as a benefit. In this way I’d make her situation even harder, so that more suspense and thrills would result.

Why did I choose a form of synesthesia (blended senses) for her? Having grown up with an eerily psychic mother and grandmother—and experienced spot-on precognitive flashes myself—I’ve always been fascinated by the powers of the mind. Reading about various phenomena led me to synesthesia, which affects 5%-15% of the world population, according to the National Institutes of Health. Numerous creatives as diverse as Vladimir Nabokov, Marilyn Monroe, Duke Ellington, and Tori Amos have described their experiences with sensory intermingling. Color hearing, or chromesthesia, is one form that I thought would work well in a story, especially if Bo were able to interpret what she saw as people spoke.

The same time I was developing her character, I was doing many interviews about my books that were conducted on the new medium of Internet (“web”) radio. These interviews were done live—people could listen and sometimes watch on the station website as they were happening—and the recording was then posted for listening/viewing anytime thereafter. Because readers like to learn new things, I thought making Bo a professional interviewer for a web radio station would be interesting. Due to her formidable chromesthetic abilities, she’d be the ultimate BS detector, so I conjured a backstory where she was famous for tearing into charlatans of all stripes live on the air. Bo Riccardi could thus be known as The Barracuda.

To compound the stress on Bo and amp up the suspense, I made her workplace a toxic blend of bottom-line decision making and #MeToo and gave Oscar’s abductor a deep understanding of how to turn social media into a life-destroying force. Add in her teenage daughter, who also gets caught up in the doxing and slander, and Bo has to navigate a tsunami of troubled waters as she tries to save her family and herself from a madman’s wrath.

And it’s these new twists on old stories that cause you, dear reader, to lose hours of your life and neglect the lives of others as you keep turning the pages. It’s okay to love and hate us simultaneously for this!