Focused on Mystery
After her success writing romance, romantic suspense novels Kathyrn J. Bain is now focused on mysteries.
Welcome Kathryn! It’s a delight to have you join us today. Can you tell us a bit about your new novel Knight & Day?
Knight & Day is a humorous mystery that takes place in Jacksonville, Florida. Trubleh Lawrence has a gift for finding dead bodies, and while out on a job interview, she comes across a dead private investigator. She feels the police suspect her so she tries to find other more viable suspects to give to them.
Trubleh is a name I’ve never heard before.
Actually her name was supposed to be Trúblé but my publisher asked me to change it because the name wouldn’t transfer well into all the ebook mediums. This was the closest I could get to “trouble”. In the book it’s explained “… after being four weeks late, twenty-two hours in labor, and only willing to come by caesarian section, my mom named me Trouble with a French twist.”
Will your readers discover a bit of Kathyrn in Trubleh Lawrence?
Someone told me that the humor in the book sounds just like me. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. My kids think I’m corny, so you’ll just have to decide if you think I’m funny.
I like the fact that she can climb up trees without any trouble. If it were me, I’d be stuck on the first branch, two feet from the ground.
What for you is her most surprising shortcoming or weakness?
She has a tendency not to ask for help. She doesn’t go to the police when she starts finding things out so, of course, it puts her in more trouble. With her being a sheriff’s daughter, you would think she’d know better.
Mysteries are inevitably about murder. How did you pick your victim?
If this was going to become series, I wanted Trubleh to be a private investigator. There’s only so many murders a normal person can bump into without readers rolling their eyes. I thought the best way for her to go into the private eye business was to start the book off with a PI and have her meet another soon after.
Your other books are ‘inspirational’. Why did you decide to step back from that classification when writing Knight & Day?
I have a problem with Christian fiction not feeling real to me. The mean people aren’t always particularly nasty. In fact, some are downright sweet. Yet mean people are mean, they’re revengeful, and they hate others, even if they’re Christian. Also the married couples treat each other like brother and sister, there’s no passion at all. In my upcoming release Beautiful Imperfection, while on their honeymoon, I wrote that the husband wanted to spend the day “using the rest of the mattress”. My publisher made me remove it because that intimated they had sex. I don’t know about your church, but people in my church must be having sex. Otherwise, where did all those children come from? Some of the things Christian publishers don’t allow are silly to me.
One last question. You’ve suggested Knight & Day could be the first of a series. Does that mean you have a second mystery underway?
Right now I’ve got another couple things in the works, but I do plan to go back to it.
I can’t wait!
