I was happily creating Aggie Mundeen rom-com mysteries, and I love them. Aggie is fearless, preposterous, and funny. Her romantic interest, a San Antonio detective, is discombobulated by her sleuthing methods as they encounter crime in and around San Antonio.
I love writing humor, and I indulge myself and readers with these fun, sassy scenarios. Yet, I also had the itch to write meaty stories. Knowing that our national divorce was over 50%, I observed that parents sometimes waited to divorce until kids were in high school or college, believing they would be mature enough to understand. My novel, told through the eyes of a teen and adults, would answer three questions:
- Can older children better handle their parents’ divorce?
- Do children’s reactions depend on age? Intellect? Strength? Courage?
- Are teens scatter-brained humanoids, or sometimes thoughtful and resourceful?
I couldn’t give up the delight of crafting mysteries and creating suspense, and I wanted to write a thriller. It had to include humor, albeit more subtle, and multi-aged characters to show that maturity doesn’t always depend on age. I dove in.
In Risky Pursuit, high school senior Decker sees his about-to-be-divorced mom with a scruffy stranger, follows him to a dark house, and hears him attack the occupant. The assailant escapes. Decker follows the elderly victim to the hospital and, through their mutual love of baseball, they become friends.
But his friend can’t remember who attacked him, and Decker fears the assailant will return. Decker receives anonymous notes threatening him and his family if he doesn’t forget what happened.
Desperate, he devises a plan to expose and stop the assailant. If his explosive plan doesn’t work, he and his loved ones will be destroyed—multi-generational suspense with, I hope, memorable characters.
Could I create characters from three generations that readers would relate to? I thought of books by Karen Dionne, John Grisham, Allen Eskens, and William Kent Krueger. Yes, readers could care about multi-aged characters.
I thought of books with various classifications: Lightning Strike, Little Fires Everywhere, Ordinary Grace, All the Light We Cannot See, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Although it might be presumptuous to aim my sights so high, these authors and books set examples.
There were questions I was too fragile to contemplate until I finished writing. Was the novel YA, new adult, YA crossover, adult? For me, it was all of those. For the publishing industry, if the protagonist was 18, it was a young adult book.
YA readers are aged 14 through 80+. RT Book Review says, “YA Mystery is targeted towards young adults, typically those between the ages of 12 and 18, but its appeal extends to readers of all ages. The genre is characterized by its focus on mystery, suspense, and intrigue, often featuring young protagonists who find themselves embroiled in mysterious circumstances or puzzling situations.” Risky Pursuit included these elements, as well as POVs from three adults.
I never thought of Decker as a detective, just a young man trying to escape a dilemma. Yet, in addition to YA thriller/suspense, Amazon rates it acceptably among Teen and Young Adult Detective Stories. Sometimes you get lucky,
Although publishers and retailers classify the book as YA, I knew it wasn’t a perfect fit for any genre. Instinct told me to write it the way I did. Many writers followed their instinct and produced legendary books.
We must validate dreams. That’s what writers do.
Author Bio:
Nancy G. West was a business major who returned to grad school to study English literature and discovered that writing fiction was a lot more fun than accounting. She is the award-winning author of Nine Days to Evil, psychological suspense, the Aggie Mundeen Rom-Com Mysteries, each of which either won or was nominated for an award, and The Plunge, lead-in to the new spin-off featuring Aggie in The Lake Mysteries, a June 2019 pick by the American Library Association’s Book Club Central. Her latest novel, Risky Pursuit, is a book club novel of inter-generational suspense.
