Please join us for a Q&A with Nicola Solvinic, author of the BookBrowse First Impression selection The Sister’s Curse and The Hunter’s Daughter, a recent BookBrowse Book Club pick.
Please join me in welcoming Nicola Solvinic to the BookBrowse Community Forum. She’s the author of two crime thrillers: The Hunter’s Daughter and its sequel, The Sister’s Curse, both of which feature Lieutenant Anna Koray. Nicola has a master’s degree in criminology and has worked in and around criminal justice for more than a decade. She lives in the Midwest with her husband and cats, where she is surrounded by a secret garden full of beehives.
Please use this space to ask Nicola questions about her work. As a reminder, to reply to an existing comment, click the grey Reply on the right side under the comment. To ask a new question, click the blue Reply button a little lower down.
Thanks for being here, Nicola! Please tell the group a little bit about yourself.
Hi Kim! Thanks so much for having me. I’m so excited to get the chance to chat with you and the readers here!
As Kim mentioned, I’ve been in and around criminal justice for awhile. That definitely gave me some ideas for stories, and I hope that the little details that I picked up along the way help stories ring true.
My current passion includes helping feral cats - I have a big orange former feral snoozing on my lap as I type. I’m trying to convince him that he doesn’t need to pat the keyboard, but you know. Cats. We also have a new little feral void roaming the house who is very much like a ghost and wants nothing to do with people, but who adores the other ex-ferals.
I’m gearing up for gardening season. I try to always have something blooming, and as a result, several species of bees have moved in. There are cats, of course. And I’m waiting for my little DeKay’s snakes to wake up from hibernation under the rock garden.
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That sounds idyllic, Nicola! As the servant of three cats myself, I know how much they love to help with tasks like typing.
I think one of the aspects of your books that makes them so engrossing is your main character, Anna Koray/Elena Theron. She’s an incredibly complex heroine, impacted by her father’s history as a serial killer and her mother’s emotional distance (and there’s a bit of bloodlust there, too). How did you develop her? Did you know right away that she’d be in a moral gray area, or did she evolve as you wrote her?
And as a follow up to that, question, you continue Anna’s story in The Sister’s Curse. Did you know from the start that her story would continue, or did you originally plan The Hunter’s Daughter as a standalone?
Both books rely on Slavic folklore – Veles in the first book, rusalka in the second. Were stories of these beings part of your upbringing? If not, when did you discover them? What made you decide to include them in your books?
Cats are super helpful, lol!
So I did want to play with a morally grey protagonist from the start. I didn’t really want to be constrained by creating a character who always does the right thing; I wanted to create a protagonist who was unpredictable. I didn’t know what she was going to do most of the time, so it was more enjoyable for me to write and see what she did.
And I also wanted to get out of the pressure that sometimes exists to make female protagonists “likeable.” There’s a lot of leeway for male protagonists to be grey or “unlikeable,” and I feel like that’s not nearly as acceptable for female protagonists. When I read, I don’t care as much about likeability as I care about whether the protagonist is interesting, if that makes any sense.
I don’t think that I was finished with Anna with the first book. I felt like there was more to her story, more that I wanted her to explore and resolve. She dealt with her relationship with her father in the first book, but there was also the dark feminine principle to deal with - her mother, and all the shadows she cast.
And Anna is fun to write. I don’t know what she’s going to do next, so continuing was also for my own curiosity.
I’ve always been fascinated by Slavic folklore, so I’ve accumulated a bit of a mental library of stories. When I was a kid, I quickly exhausted the fairy tale section at my local library, so I moved over to other mythologies.
I didn’t plot the story, but as I dove into the motivations for Anna’s father, I got the idea that perhaps there was a spirit whispering in his ear. And that connected with Veles, a shadowy forest spirit. There’s not a huge amount written about Veles, so I felt that gave me the flexibility to create a version that made sense for the story.
For the Rusalka in the second book, I’ve always been fascinated by that myth. There’s a deep sense of injustice that comes with Rusalka’s story, a desire for revenge that simmers for a long period of time. She’s a metaphor for rage, for denied justice, for rebelling against what many of the characters consider to the the natural order of things.
But Rusalka wasn’t always considered to be an evil spirit drifting around ponds and dragging unsuspecting men to their deaths. In earlier accounts, she was a fertility spirit, and there were festivals in spring to make offerings to ensure a good harvest. So Rusalka got corrupted somewhere along the way, and I think that’s very interesting from a mythological standpoint.
That’s a fascinating observation, Nicola! I don’t know how many times I’ve seen people complain that the protagonist was unlikeable, so they didn’t enjoy the book - and it’s almost always a female character. Do you think this is especially true in the thriller area? There don’t seem to be that many female leads in this genre in the first place, so it must have been super challenging to walk the tightrope with Anna. What elements, if any, did you throw in to soften her?
Do you ever start with an outline? Or how do you start, once you have the spark of an idea for a novel?
In both novels it’s not clear if Veles and the rusalka are real or products of Anna’s imagination. What do you think? As you were writing them, did you consider them real beings in Anna’s world?
I think it’s less prevalent in the thriller genre than in others. We are expecting crime and mayhem, after all! But I think there’s often an expectation that female characters be more likeable, and by extension, virtuous and doing the right thing. That really limits storytelling sometimes. Above all, I want a protagonist of any gender to be interesting and doing unexpected things.
Some of the things that I do like about Anna are that she has a deep respect for nature. Some of that, she inherited from her father. But I think that she’s the type of person who feels an affinity for the woods and the creatures in it. I think her relationship with Gibby, her dog, shows that in the second book. I’m a sucker for a furry sidekick, and I love that he’s a former “bad dog” that made good.
THE HUNTER’S DAUGHTER was completely stream of consciousness. I really enjoyed working that way, with feeling immersed in the story and being willing to go where it took me.
THE SISTER’S CURSE required some outlining. I think that’s because it’s a sequel book, and I wanted it to be reflective of the first one in some ways, and to diverge in others. It’s also a much different writing process with deadlines and more input from the start of the story. I was no longer strictly writing for myself, like I was for the first book.
This is really a thing that I wanted readers to draw their own conclusions about! I have had readers fall on one side of the question, and others on the other side. I intentionally wanted it to be like that. Sort of like the old monster of the week X-Files episodes…did you believe Mulder or Scully?
I think that the characters believed that Veles and the Rusalka are real, and so I treated them as such. Whether they’re tangible or exist in the characters’ imaginations, they have real effects on the world. The construct of Veles in Anna’s father’s mind exhorted him to kill. And the Rusalka reflected her mother’s wrath, and later, Anna’s.
I think that, in fiction, reality is entirely subjective. We have an unreliable narrator in Anna, and I think it makes sense to question the parameters of what she perceives.
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You created Anna with a rare DNA anomaly called the Lyssa variant. Where did the idea for this plot device come from? And while you mention it in The Sister’s Curse, it seems to be less important to the story than it was in the first book. Was downplaying it a deliberate choice you made, or does that reflect how the character and her story are evolving?
Hi Nicola, I appreciated the ambiguity of the supernatural aspects in The Sister’s Curse (haven’t had a chance to read The Hunter’s Daughter). I wanted to follow up on this from a writing and editing perspective - did you find it difficult to maintain the ambiguity, and did it require any sort of significant editing / plot planning?
I imagine it can be hard to balance between readers who enjoy supernatural stories, readers who don’t, and then of course if everything is tied too neatly in a bow then that can potentially be its own kind of problem.
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