Wendy M. Barnhart is the author of the new novel Scaled Vengeance. Her other books include the young adult novel The Rampart Guards. She lives in the Denver area.
Q: What inspired you to write Scaled Vengeance,
and how did you create your characters Emerson and Cassidy?
A: Because I love to read thrillers, I’d long wanted to challenge myself to write one, intimidating though that was. But during the pandemic, a number of things aligned which in turn inspired me to take the thriller-writing plunge.
One of the things that pushed me toward the plunge also directly led to the creation of my female serial killer, Emerson Kemp, who is on death row and nearing execution.
Emerson was born from my imagination after I attended a Zoom call where a woman shared that she’d interviewed a convicted rapist for her work in progress and was now in a romantic relationship with him.
That revelation sent my mind whirling with whys and hows and wondering about motivations. I wanted to more deeply explore what might be happening in the mind of a convicted felon who engages in a relationship with a “fan.” Enter Emerson Kemp.
Equally important to me was the perspective of the other party in the relationship, whether that relationship was mere interest, or friendship, or something deeper. From there came Cassidy Vickers, a former true crime podcaster who was focused on serial killers and studied the Scales Killer (aka Emerson Kemp) before she was apprehended and convicted.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between them?
A: Their relationship starts with some element of respect for each other. Before she was captured, Emerson followed Cassidy’s podcast and her discussions about serial killers. Emerson was especially impressed when Cassidy posted about the then-active “Scales Killer” and hypothesized that the killer was female before anyone in law enforcement.
Cassidy comes in with a repressed pseudo-respect for Emerson in that Emerson’s victims were abusive people who escaped the justice system. Removing them meant an innocent person was saved, which seems good. Yet murdering someone is bad. Ergo, Cassidy thinks Emerson must be bad. As Cassidy gets to know Emerson, she struggles more with that moral dilemma.
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 know how the novel would end and was actually surprised that it did still end the way I’d planned. My previous novels did not – lol.
But Scaled Vengeance still took some unexpected turns. I believed one character would remain unlikeable throughout the novel but their arc changed, even though I initially refused to allow it. In revisions, I finally gave in because it made the story stronger.
I also expected someone else to die, yet they survived. And I had to cut one character I loved because the number of words it took to keep them wasn’t adding enough to the story. (I suspect I’ll see them in a future novel.)
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: My research started with reading about female serial killers. I read books on the subject as well as reviewing online resources. (Of note: No AI was used in my research. There were no publicly available LLMs when I started this project back in 2021.)
What surprised me the most is that female serial killers through history were often financially motivated to commit their murders.
There are historical references to women who posed as someone who would, for a fee, help a family with an unwanted baby, promising to get them adopted. Instead, they would drown or incinerate the child.
There are other instances of women running boarding houses who would kill their residents then cash their ongoing Social Security checks. Or nursing homes where the proprietor pressured her residents to add her to their wills, and then poisoned them.
Which is not to say there are not recorded female serial killers who killed for reasons other than money. There definitely are, and they are definitely brutal. But the financial motivation for some was unexpected.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have an outline for the last novel in my YA fantasy series, but it needs revision. I originally completed the outline in 2021 before I got distracted by the shiny object of Scaled Vengeance and put the fantasy novel on the back burner. But the outline is on the front burner now, and I expect that final story to be released in 2027.
I’m also noodling and pondering and chewing on an idea for my next thriller. I mentioned a character I had to cut from Scaled Vengeance...well, she seems determined to tell her story. The book won’t be a direct sequel to Scaled Vengeance, but it will take place in the same world where we meet Cassidy and Emerson.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I held my breath waiting for reviews of Scaled Vengeance. Since this was my first thriller, I figured there was a chance reviewers might say I had no business in the thriller genre.
But thankfully and happily, that is not the case. Kirkus Reviews, Foreword Clarion, and BlueInk Reviews have all had positive things to say about Scaled Vengeance (along with early reviewers on Goodreads and NetGalley), and that has been both a relief and a delight. :)
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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