Welcome friend! I’m thrilled to welcome Lori Rader-Day to the blog to talk about music, place, found family, and the emotional undercurrents that shape her latest book,Wreck Your Heart. Lori is the Edgar® Award-nominated and Agatha, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark award-winning author of Wreck Your Heart, The Death of Us, Death at Greenway, The Lucky One, Under a Dark Sky, The Day I Died, Little Pretty Things, and The Black Hour.
Set against the backdrop of Chicago’s country music scene, Wreck Your Heart explores what it means to survive broken beginnings, complicated family ties, and the longing to be seen for who you really are. Check out the synopsis below and then dive into the conversation.
Wreck Your Heart
Dahlia “Doll” Devine had the kind of hardscrabble beginning that could launch a thousand broken-hearted country songs, but now she’s the star of her own stage at McPhee’s Tavern. As part of Chicago’s—yes, Chicago’s—country music scene, Dahlia is an up-and-coming singer in spangles and boots of classic country tunes. Up and coming, that is, until her boyfriend Joey up and went, taking the rent money with him.
So Dahlia is back to square one, relying on Alex McPhee—again. Alex helped her out of a bad situation when she was a kid living rough with her mother. Now he’s part landlord, part band booster, all-around rescuer. It’s just that Dahlia wishes she didn’t keep giving him reasons to have to do it.
Just as Dahlia suspects she’s scraped rock bottom, the mother she hasn’t spoken to in twenty years shows up with something to say. The next morning, a distraught young woman arrives at the bar, asking after her missing mother—Dahlia’s mother, too, even if the missing suburban PTA mom the girl describes sounds pretty different from the one who let Dahlia down all those years ago.
Though no one is using the word sister any time soon, Dahlia lets herself be drawn into reuniting the family that might have been hers. But when a body is discovered outside McPhee’s Tavern, the crime threatens not just the place Dahlia has made into a home, but everything she’s believed about her past, her dreams for the future, and the people she was just, maybe, beginning to let into her heart.
Get to know the author: Lori Rader-Day
Hi Lori! Welcome to Armed with A Book. Please tell me and my readers a bit about yourself.
I live in Chicago with my husband and dog. I’ve been highly involved in the mystery fiction community for years and run an event in Chicago everyone should come to, Midwest Mystery Conference. I teach creative writing at Northwestern University and other places when I get invited but mostly I sit in my house and try to get fake people to do things when they are very reluctant to get involved.
Wreck Your Heart blends country music, family secrets, and mystery. What was the spark that ignited Dahlia “Doll” Devine’s story for you?
I had signed up to do one of those month-long writing challenges, except I didn’t have a project in the works. So the night before the challenge began, I made a list of topics I wouldn’t mind spending some time with, just having some fun with. The list was country music, dogs, Chicago. The next morning, I started writing about a country music singer walking some dogs in deep Chicago winter.
This is not actually how I usually start writing my novels, but there is definitely an element of going wherever the story takes me built into my process. I’m hoping to make following my own joy part of my process going forward.
Dahlia has such a rich, layered past. What part of her emotional journey felt the most compelling to write?
In early attempts at writing Dahlia’s story, she walks into the bar where she spends a lot of time, and there was a guy behind the bar named Alex. Alex was intriguing to me. I didn’t know who he was when he first showed up, and he actively rejected me getting to know him. He and Dahlia so obviously had entwined their lives to each other, but he’s not her dad, he’s not her boyfriend—who is this guy? What’s his story, and why are they so protective of one another? But Dahlia has a lot of trouble with relationships (and so does Alex, turns out!) so getting to the heart of why that was and bringing her around to an earned moment where she can admit how she feels about Alex became the goal of the novel.
Alex McPhee is protector, realist, and sometimes Dahlia’s soft place to land. What did you enjoy most about crafting their history and unresolved feelings?
Alex is definitely Dahlia’s soft place to land—she’s just very dedicated to staying all sharp edges. She can’t let herself get hurt again.
I really enjoyed writing about a relationship that shouldn’t exist, that shouldn’t be required. If things had gone well in Dahlia’s life, if things had gone as planned, she wouldn’t know Alex and wouldn’t need the safety he has always represented to her. And I loved writing Alex, who is just as awkward as Dahlia when it comes to saying what he feels, but who processes things in his own unique ways.
What drew you to the idea of exploring a “family that might have been”?
The “might have been” part is a recurring theme in my work because I just really like thinking about how tiny decisions we make can change the course of our lives. And of course family is such a huge part of our lives. Who do we surround ourselves with? How do those people hold us up or let us down? Healthy familial relationships are great in real life but don’t offer a lot of plot potential. As Dahlia revealed herself to be fractured from her family of origin, I wanted even more for her to understand and acknowledge her found family, the people who were there for her, who she was letting down. To grow up, basically.
Chicago isn’t usually associated with country music. Where would you point curious readers who want to explore the city’s country scene today?
Chicago was the center of country music before Nashville was. Okay, end of dissertation. If you’re trying to get connected to the Chicago country music scene, you could follow some of the venues on social media to catch who’s coming through town. Space in Evanston, Fitzgerald’s in Berwyn, The Salt Shed, to name a few. The Evanston Folk Music Festival has been a great new addition to the scene, too. Chicago is a great cultural city, in which you could go out every night of the year three times over to see live music, literary events, plays, films, lectures. An embarrassment of riches. That’s true with country music, too. In the last two years, I’ve caught a lot of country and Americana acts passing through Chicago.
The book ties Dahlia’s personal heartbreaks to a full-blown mystery. What was the biggest challenge in balancing emotional stakes with crime plot?
For me the big challenge of writing mystery novels is that there’s usually a death, and the reader needs to care about who that person is, in my opinion. In this case, I had to balance how Dahlia felt very carefully. Without giving away spoilers, she needed to care but she also needed to have some distance so that she could function. If she’s not functioning, what use is she as a protagonist? But if she doesn’t care enough to ask a few questions and move through the story, we don’t have a mystery novel.
The relationships in the book, the characters showing you who they are and what they’ll do to survive and save who and what they love, that’s the stuff I love to write most.
McPhee’s Tavern is almost a character itself. What inspired this particular setting, with its mix of music, community, and danger?
I started writing this book at a time when we weren’t going out much—fall of 2020. I missed my community. I missed going out with friends and just hanging out listening to a live band with a drink in my hand. Near a fireplace. The fireplace is very key. So in that way McPhee’s is a wish fulfilment setting as magical as a Nancy Meyers movie kitchen, as the cottage in The Holiday. If I need to be somewhere everyday while I write, why not a cozy pub?
But… mystery story! I needed to mess up the cozy sanctity of McPhee’s, and get characters I really liked into danger.
One thing I enjoyed about writing McPhee’s was giving it this history as a speakeasy, a mythology that people come looking for and never find. We still have some cool old speakeasies fronting as neighborhood pubs in Chicago, one of the things that makes Chicago special. There’s a story for every old building—if we’d only stop knocking them down for more bank branch locations.
What’s your favorite way to create suspense in a scene—dialogue, pacing, misdirection, emotional reveals, or something else?
I like writing dialogue the best. You can do a lot of suspense-building with dialogue, by letting characters speak as they would to the people they know and trust without explaining every single thing and forcing the reader to come along. Suspense isn’t just the darkness at the heart of a crime story, though. We have to suspend the reader’s attention, to make them want to know: Who is this character? What’s their life like? And then: Why are these extraordinary things happening to this ordinary person? How will they get through or out of this trouble? But at first, the character has to seem like a real person, someone you wouldn’t mind hanging out with a while, which is the suspension of your attention. If I don’t earn that first, I’m not doing my job.
What’s one song you would pair with Dahlia—either as a theme song for her arc or a track she’d perform on stage?
One song? I have so many ways I could go with this, but “weren’t for the wind” by Ella Langley is a good one. It’s a song about a woman who’s hard to pin down, “might have been different in a different life,” but this is who she is. But what she’s much more likely to sing something by Patsy Cline.
Do you have a favorite music artist or genre you listened to while writing this book?
So many! *cracks knuckles* Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris, Sierra Ferrell, Lainey Wilson, Emmylou Harris, Mavis Staples, Hurray for the Riff Raff, The Highwomen, Brittney Spencer, Rhiannon Giddens, Kacey Musgraves, SG Goodman, Ella Langley, Molly Tuttle, Adeem the Artist, I’m With Her, Kaitlin Butts, Julien Baker, Cat Clyde, Jobi Riccio. Dolly Parton! Patsy Cline!
You might notice those are all women or nonbinary artists, and there’s a reason I highlight as many of them as possible when I get the chance. They don’t get nearly the support from country music radio as male performers, so here we are! I have a playlist available on my website of all the music I listened to while writing the book, which features these artists and many more.
You’ve written award-winning mysteries of many kinds. How does Wreck Your Heartfit into your wider body of work—and how does it stand apart?
Wreck Your Heart is my eighth crime novel—but it is by far the most fun I’ve ever had on the page. I wasn’t writing a book, remember, when I started. I was just playing along with a writing challenge. But when I started to think about whether this exercise could result in a novel, what I liked best was that it was fun, that it made me laugh. I get asked if my books are funny sometimes, and while there are moments of levity in all of them, Wreck Your Heart is the first of them that I would answer yes. I also think it’s more me than any of my books, and that’s saying a lot, because I have always put a lot of myself into my books.
And finally: after writing so many gripping, emotional stories, what keeps you excited about the mystery genre?
I love the mystery genre. You might find some parallels in Wreck Your Heart with how Dahlia feels about her genre, in fact. I love the tried and true, the classics, just like Dahlia loves her classic country.
I love fully realized characters in a lived-in story, and plot, frankly, is a cherry on top. When I find an author working at that level of skill, it’s so exciting. I also love to see a book doing something different. I know mystery readers love their series books, they love seeing the same characters fight crime again and again, thirty-six books in the series, no problem! I love series books, too, don’t get me wrong. But what I truly love is novelty and risk-taking. An interesting character, a different way of telling a story, an author trying something I haven’t seen before, new voices attempting classic crime stories, new perspectives in stories we think we know. That’s where literature of any kind is interesting, and mystery fiction is no different.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
I keep saying this: Readers don’t need to like country music to enjoy the books. ☺ Interesting facts about me that didn’t fit anywhere else: I got married on top of the Empire State Building and I once stayed at Agatha Christie’s house for three nights to write my historical novel set there. (Death at Greenway)
Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me!
Thank you!
Thanks for joining us! Add this book on Goodreads.Wreck Your Heart released earlier this month and is now available wherever books are sold! Be sure to check your local library too.
Learn more about Lori at loriraderday.com.
Many thanks to Hector DeJean at Minotaur Books for the review copy and interview opportunity! Stay tuned for my review! 🙂
Be First to Comment