In Blood and Belonging, RCMP Sergeant Ray Robertson is in the Turks and Caicos Islands, enjoying two weeks of leave from his job training police in Haiti with the UN. On an early-morning jog along famed Grace Bay Beach he discovers a dead man in the surf. Ray is shocked to recognize the body as that of one of his Haitian police recruits. To his wife’s increasing dismay, Ray is compelled to follow the dead man’s trail and finds himself plunged into the world of human trafficking and the problems of a tiny country struggling to cope with a desperate wave washing up on its shores. This timely story is the third in the Sergeant Ray Robertson series.
What was the hardest scene to write in your new book?
The scene with the boat ‘rescue’. I found it hard to visually imagine the scene enough to describe it, while working at my desk in my pajamas.
What comes first for you, the plot or the characters?
In a series book, the main character is set. The other characters are incorporated into the book along with the plot. What do they do, and why?
What part of a book is your favorite to write?
The first chapter! That sense of excitement over beginning something new.
What are 5 words that best describe your writing process?
Disciplined, organized, constant, enjoyable, fun.
Which author, living or dead, would you want to have coffee with?
Margaret Atwood, so we can talk about so much, including books.
What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever googled for book research?
How to make a car bomb.
What’s the most interesting / unusual job you’ve had (besides writing)?
I haven’t had much in the way of unusual jobs, but I loved my career as a programmer in the very early days of computer.
How do you select character names?
With great difficulty—I am often reduced to the phone book.
What do you do to combat writers block?
I don’t believe in it. Writing is work. Do it.
Blood and Belonging is available now!
Vicki Delany is one of Canada’s most prolific and varied crime writers and a national bestseller in the U.S. She has written more than twenty-five books: clever cozies to Gothic thrillers to gritty police procedurals, to historical fiction and novellas for adult literacy. Under the name of Eva Gates, she writes the Lighthouse Library cozy series for Penguin Random House. Her latest novel is Elementary, She Read, the first in the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series from Crooked Lane.
Vicki is the past president of the Crime Writers of Canada. Her work has been nominated for the Derringer, the Bony Blithe, the Ontario Library Association Golden Oak, and the Arthur Ellis Awards.