Douglas Corleone is the author of the new novel Falls to Pieces. His other books include The Rough Cut. He is a former New York City criminal defense attorney, and he lives in Honolulu.
Q: What inspired you to write Falls to Pieces, and how did you create your character Kati Dawes?
A: A solo trip along the stunning Road to Hana on Maui initially inspired Falls to Pieces. During a getaway, I visited Haleakala National Park and hiked the trail where Kati’s fiancé Eddie Akana goes missing.
Gazing up at the 200-foot waterfall, I imagined the drop and my heart sunk into my stomach. Then, I peered down and realized I might never be found if I fell.
That opened up a number of possibilities, each more terrifying than the last. I thought about who I’d leave behind and how they’d feel if I vanished from the trail without a trace.
Kati Dawes emerged from those moments. I saw her fully formed in my head but knew nothing about her. She wasn’t native to Hawaii, yet she wasn’t completely foreign to the islands either.
She’d been on Maui a couple years because she’d fled something or someone on the mainland. Who or what? An ex-husband? A criminal investigation? A domineering parent? All three?
Of course, she didn’t flee for her own sake. She fled for someone else, with someone else, someone she loved – her teenage daughter Zoe. They didn’t just move either. They changed their names, erased their online presence, and lived off-the-grid in the sleepy town of Hana, where Kati eventually met and fell in love with the local attorney who goes missing on the trail.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Kati and Zoe?
A: Kati and Zoe have a love-hate relationship. But their bond goes much deeper and leads the reader through a number of shared experiences and chilling revelations.
The dynamic was inspired by a few of my favorite psychological thrillers – The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave and Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight.
The crisis in the beginning of the story brings the pair closer together than they’ve been in a long while. From there, the relationship evolves, until Zoe herself goes missing and Kati’s entire universe crumbles to pieces.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: This is one of the few novels I’ve written that reads completely different from first draft to the last. There are a few reasons for that.
During the pandemic, I decided to move away from writing legal and international thrillers and spy novels toward something more challenging. I’ve always been fascinated by psychology, and books like Gone Girl and Zoje Stage’s Baby Teeth made me realize that, writing-wise, I wanted to shift gears.
The pandemic gave me ample time to study the subgenre. For two years, I read nothing but domestic suspense and women’s fiction to capture the right tone and feel for Falls to Pieces.
My first novel written from a female POV, The Rough Cut, was well-received by critics, so I was confident writing from Kati and Zoe’s points of view, but I wasn’t satisfied with the first draft.
I loved the first 50 pages and kept most of the beginning intact. But from there, I deleted more than 250 pages and started from scratch. When I completed the book, the ending remained largely the same – what significantly changed was how my characters reached that point.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The working title of this novel was The Falls. At some point, a friend said the title was too generic. The Maui waterfall at the start of the story plays such an important role that I wanted the word “falls” in the title.
Music plays such a large part in my writing that I often turn to it for inspiration when choosing a title, and one of my favorite all-time songs is “Fall to Pieces” by Velvet Revolver. I knew Falls to Pieces was a bold choice, so I was thrilled when my publisher called and told me we were keeping it. I think it’s a perfect fit for this particular psychological thriller.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I recently sold my next novel to my publisher Thomas & Mercer. It’s a second psychological thriller, also a standalone, titled We Were Merely Freshmen. It’s set in both 1993 and 2023 and returns the protagonist Gregg Dryer to his old college in rural Pennsylvania, where he believes he lost the love of his life to murder.
During Homecoming 30 years later, he revisits the campus for the first time, determined to discover what really happened to her. He wants whoever was responsible for her death to pay, even if the person responsible was himself.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: One unintended consequence of writing Falls to Pieces is that it captures a snapshot of the beautiful and historic shore town of Lahaina on Maui. The wildfires that ravaged Lahaina occurred soon after the novel was completed, and rereading the descriptions now brings tears to my eyes.
While Lahaina is being rebuilt, it’ll never be restored to what it was, and I’m grateful that I got one last look at the shore town before the disaster. I’m even luckier that I managed to document what I experienced.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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