G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the new novel Charred, the third in her Whipped and Sipped mystery series. She also hosts the podcast New Books in Literature on the New Books Network.
Q: Charred is the third in your Whipped and Sipped mystery series--do you think your character Alene has changed over the course of the series?
A: Yes, Alene has changed. The first time she’s confronted with a murder, in Battered (Book 1), Alene suspects everyone, including neighbors, employees, and her ex-husband.
Once she starts dating Frank Shaw, a Chicago homicide detective, she learns to focus more on evidence and less on gut feelings. The biggest change over the course of the first three books in the series is that she is happier being in a healthy relationship.
Q: What inspired the plot of this new novel?
A: I was familiar with the story of an apartment building that was under construction in a city I’m not at liberty to name. A close relative’s company was involved in the project, and after the building burned to the ground under suspicious circumstances, nobody ever determined the cause of the fire, and it took years for the insurance and lawsuits to be resolved.
I couldn’t stop thinking how much worse it would have been had someone found a body in the ashes, as happens in Charred: A Whipped & Sipped Mystery. The pastry chef’s husband builds and manages affordable housing and understands the wrath of neighbors who fear a decline in property values.
Q: Do you usually know how your novels will end before you start writing them, or do you make many changes along the way?
A: I write a vague outline that starts with a triggering event and ends with the unveiling of who committed the crime and why. When I’m about halfway through a first draft, I show it to my editor, and if she guesses who the villain is, I rework the story! I’ll do that several times, continuously rewriting so you’ll never guess who did it.
And I make tons of other changes along the way; just last week, a “beta reader” noticed that in Book #4, Pounded, which I thought was completely polished, the protagonist, Alene Baron, comes home to find her children’s shoes scattered in front of the door. But they only come home a few pages later.
I fixed it by having her father say that the kids ran across the hall for a snack with the neighbors. I like the challenge of making changes along the way.
Q: How do you choose the recipes to include in your books?
A: I’ve always loved inventing recipes, and I choose the ones that get the most positive feedback from family and friends. I took serious baking classes but must have skipped the one about how to write a recipe (A friend once called to ask if there was any chocolate in my chocolate cake.).
This morning I’m reworking a recipe for the peanut butter balls (PB, milk powder, and honey) my children loved when they were young. I’ve replaced the powder with almond flour and the honey with maple syrup, plus I’ve added a little vanilla extract. They’re easy to pull together with ingredients I always have on hand, and they don’t require baking. Plus, they’re fun to mold into shapes.
Not sure if the finished recipe will be included in Book #5. I can always include it in a guest post or simply add it to the Recipes-To-Die-For Section of my website. Along with healthy desserts, I especially enjoy inventing dips and sauces.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m about 15,000 words into a first draft of Book #5 in the Series: Grilled. It involves the Whipped & Sipped pastry chef’s husband, who is seeking investment money for another affordable housing project. Everything changes when his main investor is suddenly murdered.
Because I always change the situation and characters from anything in real life, you’d never connect my antagonist to the villain whose attempts to cheat my father led to a heart attack and the dissolution of my father’s company.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: My degrees are in music and I still sit at the piano most afternoons to play through a little Bach or Chopin.
Also, although I write murder mysteries, I dislike reading about violence, gratuitous pain, and suffering. My passion is for solving the puzzle of a crime and my goal is to give readers all the necessary clues while simultaneously distracting them with red herrings and a whole community of potential bad guys. I challenge you to figure out who did it!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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