Bernadette Calonego's Blog: Eventful - Posts Tagged "suspense"

Right now I feel like the reader of a slow-burning crime novel where not much happens at the beginning but the suspense gradually builds up and one expects something horrible to happen soon.
I am staying in a remote village in Northern Newfoundland and I have told many people how bad the winter is there, how brutal the storms, how cold the air coming down from the Arctic. Elaborating on the dangers, I felt almost heroic for the things I would have to endure. But so far the winter has been very bearable, sometimes even mild, with lots of rain instead of snow.
It doesn`t mean, of course, that the situation cannot change soon and that things will be really rough and scary. The unknown kills me.
I am also waiting for the feedback from my beta readers who are going through my latest German novel right now. They are the first humans to have laid eyes on this novel (except me). Will they like the book? Will they give a thumbs up or down? It is nerve-racking and - in contrast to the winter weather in Northern Newfoundland - I cannot protect myself with Arctic clothing and snowmobile helmets.
The only comfort is that virtually all authors go through the same dreaded waiting game. If my novel gets the approval from my beta readers, I will gladly endure whatever the next winter months will bring.
And if you like to play the waiting game, too: the translation of my next English crime novel is almost finished. Publication is planned for May. Stay tuned.

My latest author letter starts with this paragraph: " I remember a great short story that I read many years ago. This is a short summary: A murderer escapes a prison and the people in the entire region are in panic because of it. All of a sudden, there is a string of break-ins, and soon dead bodies are found. Victims of the murderer, it seems. There is no trace of the fugitive, however. He remains elusive. Winter comes and goes. As the snow melts, another dead person is found: It is the killer`s body. It turns out that the other murders were committed long after the escaped prisoner had frozen to death. The allegedly oh so innocent people in the area had exploited the situation in order to commit crimes that would be attributed to the murderer. A ingenious story."
Every month, I send out an author letter (for which you can sign up on the homepage of my website www.bernadettecalonego.com) with news that I normally don't share anywhere else. You get more than one glimpse of my life in a tiny fishing village on the northern tip of the island of Newfoundland.
The snow has disappeared now, but I haven't discovered any bodies like in the short story above. They are entirely on the pages of my mystery novels. But on the beaches, there are carcasses of seals that were crushed between the ice pans of the pack ice. Nature is not always benevolent. Nor are the humans.
In this rural, rugged existence of mine in an isolated, mostly COVID-free environment, everything is reduced to the essentials. With so few distractions and stimuli, I can concentrate on my writing - and publishing: My mystery thriller “Cries from the Cold” is almost ready to launch in the paperback version. Publication will be before the end of May. I’m so excited! You can also preorder the e-book that will be out June 25. It is the first case for detective sergeant Calista Gates. A German reader wrote to me: “I like Calista Gates, she is tenacious but very good at handling people and she also has a vulnerable side to her. I hope you keep her as a character in your next book.” I do, and now I have a Calista-Gates series! I hope to have the second book translated soon.
Four days ago, I discovered the first flowers under the snow-free bleached old grass. My life is complete!

One of my three brothers will not read my mystery thrillers because they would keep him awake at night. I totally accept this (I have two more brothers who make up for it, they read my mystery thrillers even before they are published). I can get scared, too. Recently I listened to a true crime podcast. In the night, I woke up and was afraid of the dark!
On the other hand, my translator said to me that I should have more dead people in my books (is three bodies not enough?). Translating my novels, he obviously acquired a taste for dark thrills. In my personal life, I`m not always ready for them. When I watch a movie and it gets too violent I close my eyes. I cannot bear it. How much gore and horror can you tolerate, dear reader?
When my mother wanted to tell me stories about ghosts knocking on windows and lost souls wandering through a house at night, I fled. As a child, my imagination was too vivid to enjoy these tales.
Being a crime writer doesn't mean I'm not frightened in the face of danger. But it is almost impossible to predict how we will react in the face of somebody or something threatening us. Maybe we stay calmer than we think. Or people who seem to be strong break down.
I relish in building up suspense and reinforcing the mystery in my books but I don't have fun describing a bloody scene, a mutilated body or torture. Like with romance, the most intensive things that can happen are in our imagination. Once it is described in detail, it can lose its impact.
Does this mean I won`t listen to another true crime podcast anymore? Of course not. The thrill is addictive.

Every morning, my neighbour's wife in the tiny fishing community in northern Newfoundland where I spend the summers, dresses up as a Viking woman. She works at Norstead, a cluster of replica buildings of a Viking port. There she tells the many tourists who are flocking to that historic area, about what daily life was in a sod hut about one thousand years ago. She tells them - among other things - that the women went almost blind as they aged because they had to sow clothes and other things in a house that had very little light.
When I first visited that area years ago, before I started coming back every spring, I couldn`t have imagined that one day I would publish a mystery thriller that is set in this location and that in my story, one of the foreigners who visit the Viking site would disappear without a trace. My neighbour's wife who is reenacting a Viking woman is not part of the characters in my book but there are fictional people who work at the Viking Center and there is a local tour tour guide who sees something terrible happen nearby, and there are local vendors who are selling handicraft to the tourists coming from large cruise ships.
My new mystery thriller "Bay of Evil" that is available now on Amazon as e-book and paperback, has crime scenes in places not far from the bay where I live. The locals don`t mind their coves and sheds turned into places of violent acts in fiction because they know what the summer tourists see is beauty and serenity and majestic nature.
A local woman wrote to me on Facebook that she got the first two books of my Detective Calista Gates series as a gift for Christmas and that she can`t wait to read the third one. Now it is here! My crime novels are just a different tale: not a Viking tale but a story about murder and mayhem that is a bit less true than what happened in northern Newfoundland a thousand years ago.
BAY OF EVIL: A gripping mystery thriller
Bernadette Calonego