I want to tell you a quick but important story about the book you’re holding in your hands. It will only take a moment, I promise.
Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book called Remembering Sarah. It was published in the US and several European countries, but never made it to the rest of the world. The book, my third, a story about a grieving father who refused to give up searching for his missing daughter, was nominated for an Edgar Award for best novel and, in the Netherlands, went on to become one of the top-selling books of the year. There was a lot I loved about Remembering Sarah … and a lot of things I wished I had done differently. A lot of things. I felt the book could have been so much better and wanted to revise it. That didn’t come to fruition, for reasons I won’t get into, so I moved on to my next project, a book called The Missing, which introduced Darby McCormick, a Boston-based forensic investigator with a traumatic past and a doctorate in deviant behaviour. I had always wanted to write a novel with a strong and resourceful independent woman as the lead character, and what I loved about Darby – what made her different, to me – was how she acted like Dirty Harry with a PhD in creeps. She was (and still is) smart, tough and oftentimes ruthless – I enjoyed my time with her.
It seemed others did too. The Missing became a global bestseller. Nine novels and millions of readers later, I’ve watched, with admiration and, more often than not, great trepidation, as Darby has gone head-to-head with the worst our world has to offer, some of whom are the people we encounter in our daily lives.
People always ask writers where we get our ideas. The honest to God truth is, we don’t know. But a couple of years back, I was sitting at my desk, writing a difficult scene and finding myself stuck in the mud – a common occurrence. When this happens, I usually turn away from the computer and look around my office to give my mind a rest. I saw a copy of Remembering Sarah sitting on my bookshelf and that voice responsible for ideas spoke to me (completely normal, by the way, for us writers to hear voices). If Darby handled the case of the missing girl, this voice said, things would have gone down very differently. What really captured my attention, though, was the villain my imagination had in mind – a former priest who would be unlike anyone Darby had ever encountered. I listened to that voice for a few minutes, daydreaming, then went back to work.
My imagination, however, wouldn’t let go of the idea – kept nagging at me, showing how the story could be bigger and more compelling than Remembering Sarah. You have to understand a writer is not in control of his or her imagination. It does what it wants. During my downtime and without my permission, the story kept taking shape, and I often found myself jotting down ideas for scenes, bits of dialogue, everything.
I’m not a fan of writers who take old stuff, recycle it, and pass it off as new. But the idea had taken root, and as I mentioned earlier, there was so much about Remembering Sarah I had wanted to do differently. So I spoke with people, a lot of them fans who had read the book, told them the idea I had in mind, and expected them to say, ‘Please don’t do that.’ Instead, they told me the exact opposite. I consulted my agent and editor and, much to my surprise, they also thought it was a great idea, so I went ahead and wrote The Snow Girls.
If there’s one cardinal sin a writer can commit, it’s cheating the reader. I would never want to do that to you, so just to be clear, if you’ve read Remembering Sarah, you may recognize some scenes in The Snow Girls, but I think you’ll find this new story richer and more compelling, with a new villain who will change Darby’s life. I hope you enjoy it.