I was young, in love, and according to my parents at the time, far too impulsive. And maybe they weren’t entirely wrong. I often say that if I had known how difficult it would be to reinvent myself in a foreign land, to make new friends and learn a new language and culture, I would have thought a little longer about making that move. Starting over is daunting anywhere, but when not one thing about your new home feels even remotely familiar, it’s absolutely terrifying. 

I shed a lot of tears that first year, but the relationship stuck, and so did my life in Amsterdam, though it took me a while to feel completely at home. The guttural pronunciations my tongue couldn’t quite wrap around, the wind and endless rain, the people and their strange way of doing things—it was all so…foreign. Nothing made sense. Everything felt different and difficult. Even the simplest tasks took forever. 

Compared to Stella, though, my heroine in The Paris Widow, I had it easy. My Dutch husband and his family were there to guide me through the worst of it, and, looking back, I can see the transition wasn’t all that awful. I was lonely and homesick at times, but unlike the heroines in my stories, my husband didn’t disappear in a bombing. I wasn’t kidnapped or held at gunpoint. My new life there, the one I worked so hard to build, was pretty darn idyllic.

And yet bad things happen everywhere. Even in Europe—or maybe especially there—there’s plenty of real-life crime to serve as plot fodder. Armed robberies, abductions, shootings, disappearances, murders. Turn on the nightly news and there it is, the darkness creeping dangerously close. Especially in a city like Amsterdam, with its hordes of visitors stumbling around the Red Light District, there’s plenty to draw from. And while it’s one thing for these types of tragedy to happen to people who live there, who speak the language and understand the customs and culture, it’s another thing entirely when the victim is a foreigner. 

Like Stella, for example, who is at the tail end of the trip of a lifetime, a three-week tour of Europe when tragedy strikes: a bombing in the Parisian café with her husband Adam inside. A former flight attendant, Stella has seen more of the world than most people have in a whole lifetime. She has stamps in her passport from countries I have to look up on a map. Stella is smart and travel-savvy, but she’s still a visitor, and she’s ill-equipped to navigate the investigation into her husband’s death. It doesn’t help that his misdeeds have put her own life in danger.

Overnight, the city turns dark and treacherous. The twinkling lights and familiar façades give way to seedy streets and strange men lurking on every corner. Yes, some of the most famous landmarks make it to the page—the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame and the Seine all have starring roles, but lit with an edge of menace. This is a very different Paris than the one Stella knows from her travels, filled with dark motives and hidden agendas and people she doesn’t know and can’t understand. Like me in my own early days in Amsterdam, but then with an outlaw spouse and a target on her back. 

There’s something so deeply unsettling about being far from home in a strange and foreign land when Very Bad Things start to happen. In the real world, we all want our travels to go as smoothly as possible. We want the trains to run on time, the hotels to look just like the pictures, the sun to shine and the pasta to not stick to our thighs. On the page, though, is there anything quite so enthralling as a vacation turned disastrous? 

These are the stories I like to read: a picture-perfect setting filled with perilous alleyways and characters making booze-fueled bad decisions. Give me tempers that flare as hot as the Malta sun and that fish-out-of-water floundering that comes with navigating a foreign land. Armchair travel with a heavy dose of danger, but from the safety and comfort of my own couch. 

Murder takes a vacation, and for a few spine-tingling hours, I’m happy to tag along.