Brandi Bradley is the author of the new novel Pretty Girls Get Away with Murder. She also has written the novel Mothers of the Missing Mermaid. She lives in Atlanta.
Q: What inspired you to write Pretty Girls Get Away with Murder, and how did you create your character Lindy?
A: I knew early on I had a woman in mind to be my detective. I could see her standing there like a marshal in an old Western, but with the energy of someone who was kind of over it all. She’s a little Bosch and a little Boney from Gone Girl.
And I wanted her to be married to someone she really, truly, deeply loved. And that’s where April came in. Lindy followed April to this strange little town because all she truly wants in the world is for April to be happy – and when you live like that, allow yourself to be in love like that, there are complications.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I did, but I had to make adjustments along the way. I knew I wanted the ending to have a final kiss-off phone call, but as the story grew, I had to tweak it a little as the middle started filling out.
I always do that. I am a planner and I like to have a bullet point list of what I think should happen in the novel. But it’s a living and moving beast, and sometimes I have to be flexible with where it wants to go instead of where I want it to go. I can’t always stick to the original plan.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Titles kind of come to me organically. I liked this one because of the irony of the statement and because I was dealing with characters who are in constant judgment of each other.
Pretty girls actually don’t get away with much of anything because people will make assumptions about their intelligence, their intentions, and their values because of the work they put into their outward appearance.
However, I have lived with and around “pretty” women and watched others fall all over themselves to please this outwardly beautiful person because they have a face and a body that’s not hard to look at.
That’s the challenge of being female. You have to live up to the expectations of the person who happens to be looking at you.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I hope that people see it as a fun read. Which is probably strange considering it’s a noir.
But I think about how people turn to books for a certain level of escapism, and not everyone wants to escape into a sci-fi or fantasy world. Some readers want to escape into places where someone is trying to put together a puzzle by talking to other people and finding out what they know.
I tell stories about gossip, liars, and drama because those are the stories that people share with their best friend.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I just finished a short piece titled “The Disappearing Family,” which is set in the same world as Pretty Girls. I don’t want to necessarily write a sequel or series at this point, but I want to mentally stay in this Kentucky world for a while.
I will soon begin the next novel about a reluctant amateur detective renovating an old house and investigating the disappearance of a young man in a small antiquing town. This is what popped into my brain after an emergency remodel and a tendency to binge-watch old episodes of Property Brothers.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: A lot of people don’t realize that I keep my website updated frequently. I have a blog that I post on weekly with snippets of my writing process. I also have a newsletter where readers get first access to anything new in my writing life – book releases, cover sneak peeks, events, etc.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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