1.- Could you introduce yourself to Jamreads' readers?
My name is Nick Kolakowski. I’m an author of horror and crime novels, including Where the Bones Lie, Love & Bullets, and many more. Because I’m hyperactive, I also enjoy writing short stories and essays, and I’ve been lucky enough to have those tales appear in a number of magazines and anthologies, including Mystery Weekly, Noir City, CrimeReads, and Best American Mystery & Suspense. I live in NYC, and I’m a huge fan of cats, gloomy music, biking, and reading everything I can get my hands on!

2.- When did you start writing?
Like many writers, I started as a little kid, illustrating my own short stories about monsters. I got interested in crime and mystery fiction when I was around 10 years old, and I fell in love with the old-school writers: Chandler, Christie, Highsmith, Hammett. I’ve never lost my infatuation with literary mayhem and murder.

3.- Let's talk about Where The Bones Lie, your latest release. How did the idea for it appear?
I’d always wanted to write a detective novel, particularly one set in California; I grew up on novels like Raymond Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business and always wanted to take a stab at something similar. However, it’s also an intimidating subject, because so many people have covered that ground so well over the decades. Finally, two things happened that allowed me to roll forward:
First, I started reading news stories about how climate change was drying up lakes out West, revealing the bodies of famous mob people who’d been thrown into the depths decades before. I thought that was a very cool idea for a mystery plot, and I began tinkering with it.
Second, I thought that I could incorporate a lot of my past as a journalist driving around California—people I’d met, things I saw. That would give me a unique spin on the traditional detective narrative, provided I could do it in an interesting way. I hope I succeeded!

4.- How would you say Where The Bones Lie evolved from its inception to the final published version?
Usually, I’m a “pantser” when it comes to writing books, meaning I don’t outline—I let the muse guide the plot, and then I try to fix any logical or character issues during the rewriting phase. But because Where the Bones Lie is an intricate mystery with a lot of clues and red herrings, I outlined it pretty intensively well in advance of writing. As a result, the book’s overall plot arc and characters remained fairly consistent between my initial ideas and the final version—with the exception of the ending.
My original ending was far less twisty and interesting, but thankfully I had an idea for a big twist that I think works really well on the page. I grew up in the 90s loving films like “Ronin” and The Usual Suspects that banked heavily on a last-minute reveal that changes everything you thought about the plot, and I’m happy I was able to come up with something similar for this book.

5.- Could you tell us more about the process of getting this book acquired by Datura books?
The manuscript circulated among a few publishers, most of them focused on thrillers and mysteries. Datura is a relatively new imprint and has been rapidly building up its portfolio of mystery and thriller authors, and I hit it off really well with the editors there. The whole process from submission to acceptance to editing and release has been incredibly smooth, and I say that as someone who’s been in the publishing trenches for many years at this point.

6.- Which part of writing thriller do you find the most challenging, and why?
I always find it difficult to write an ending that’s surprising while also feeling inevitable. In order to pull that off, you need to come up with a finale that the audience won’t see coming, but that also works from a logical and story perspective. You also need to weave in details throughout the narrative that’ll support that ending when it comes, without giving anything big away. It’s too easy to telegraph what you’re doing well ahead of time, and it regularly drives me nuts—I just go with my gut and hope that I’m right.

7.- Which other books would you recommend to people that enjoyed Where the Bones Lie?
I absolutely love Ivy Pochoda, particularly her recent novel Sing Her Down, which is about two women on a potentially deadly collision course in L.A. Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay is another novel that I constantly find inspiring, both for its character work and for how she simmers the tension so effectively for hundreds of pages. If you’re looking for a fun read, I wholeheartedly recommend Thomas Trang’s Dark Neon and Dirt, which just came out—it’s the quintessential L.A. heist novel, and it’s a ton of fun.

8.- What can we expect from Nick Kolakowski in the future?
If Where the Bones Lie does well, I’d love to write a sequel. I already have an idea that involves Silicon Valley, drones, and the consequences of some of our nastier foreign-policy decisions over the past few decades. I think it’d be a real killer.