Edwin Hill is the author of the critically acclaimed Hester Thursby mystery series, the first of which, Little Comfort, was an Agatha Award finalist, a selection of the Mysterious Press First Mystery Club, and a Publishers Marketplace Buzz Books selection. The second installment, The Missing Ones, was also an Agatha Award finalist and a Sue Grafton Memorial Award nominee. Formerly the vice president and editorial director for Bedford/St. Martin's (Macmillan), he now teaches at Emerson College and has written for the L.A. Review of Books, The Life Sentence, Publishers Weekly, and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. He lives in Roslindale, Massachusetts with his partner Michael and their Labrador, Edith Ann.
Harvard librarian Hester Thursby is back in Watch Her, attending a gala at Prescott University’s lavish new campus along with fellow guest, Detective Angela White, when they are called to the home of the college’s owners, Tucker and Jennifer Matson. Jennifer claims that someone broke into Pinebank, their secluded mansion on the banks of Jamaica Pond. The more Hester and Angela investigate, the less they believe Jennifer’s story, leaving Hester to wonder why she would lie.
When Hester is asked by the college’s general manager to locate some missing alumni, she employs her research skills on the family and their for-profit university. Between financial transgressions, a long-ago tragedy, and rumors of infidelity, it’s clear that the Matsons aren’t immune to scandal or mishap. But when one of the missing students turns up dead, the mystery takes on new urgency. Hester is edging closer to the truth, but as a decades-old secret collides with new lies, a killer grows more determined to keep the past buried with the dead.
Edwin Hill stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about writing and researching his books:
Finding the Pieces of a New Novel
Starting a new novel can be a daunting process, one that can sometimes feel like putting together a jigsaw puzzle not only without looking at the picture on the box, but also without looking at the colors or shapes on the pieces. I usually start a new novel with a vague concept, a blank Word document, and forty workdays in front of me where I force myself to write two thousand words a day, no matter how terrible they might be. If all goes right, at the end of the forty days I have eighty thousand words of drivel, and one or two good concepts or characters.
Once I finish the terrible first draft, I ask myself a few questions, one of which is “what do I need to know more about?” as I look at what I need to research before plunging into a second draft.
With my latest novel, Watch Her, a few areas stood out. The main character in the novel is a research librarian named Hester Thursby who works at Harvard’s Widener Library (or to be more precise, the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library). This is my third Hester Thursby novel, so I know the character pretty well, and with this novel I wanted to fill out her work life. I arranged to meet with the fantastic Odile Harter, an actual research librarian at Widener, who not only walked me through the library, but also a typical day in her work life, and I used that research to make Hester day-to-day work activities feel authentic.
I also knew that I wanted to set the main action in Boston. I scouted around for interesting locations, and finally landed on Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood in Boston that is a mix of urban and residential, but that also has a large park with a pond at its center called Jamaica Pond. The more I read about Jamaica Pond, the more interesting it became. The pond is part of the Emerald Necklace, a park system designed by Frederick Olmsted at the turn of the twentieth century. At that time, Jamaica Pond was a summer resort of sorts for wealthy Boston families who would leave their houses on Beacon Hill and travel the six miles southwest to stay on the pond. When the city acquired the pond for the park, they demolished most of the houses, except one, called Pinebank Mansion.
Olmsted liked Pinebank Mansion so much he decided to work it into the park’s design, and for many decades the house was used by the city, as the Children’s Museum for a time, and then for offices and classrooms. Unfortunately fires at the mansion in the seventies rendered it uninhabitable, and by the time I began my research, it had been torn down. As I moved into the second draft of Watch Her, I was looking for interesting details about Jamaica Plain to bring into the story and Pinebank Mansion kept coming up in my imagination. Finally, I decided to resurrect the house for the story. What is the good of an imagination if you don’t use it, right? So now, Pinebank still sits on the shores of Jamaica Pond and it plays a major role in the novel.
(You can learn more about Pinebank Mansion at the Jamaica Plain Historical Society: https://www.jphs.org/)
With my research done, I dove into a second draft, and when I finished that draft, I had another list of things I needed to learn about before heading into my final draft. You can learn about some of those in the acknowledgments of Watch Her.
Learn more about author Edwin Hill and his books via his website, and follow him on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Watch Her is available in digital, print, and audiobook formats from all major booksellers.
