Within the first year and a half of buying a house in Pensacola, Fla., Nebraska native Alex Kava found herself in the direct path of hurricanes Ivan and Dennis. While she was cleaning up the damage — no fun at all, as South Floridians know all too well — Kava was inspired to write the eighth installment of her bestselling Maggie O'Dell series.
In "Damaged" (Random, $24.95), FBI profiler O'Dell has to find a serial killer who is brokering body parts and the source behind a mysterious disease outbreak on an army reserve, while a Category 5 hurricane is heading directly toward Florida.
Kava took a break from her hurricane season book tour to answer a few questions about her new thriller.
Q: In "Damaged," O'Dell finds herself faced with a couple of aggressive threats: a serial killer and Mother Nature. What inspired you to set the story in the backdrop of a hurricane?"
A: I don't think that you can go through a hurricane without it affecting you somehow. ...You see things so differently. You understand the way that people gather together and help each other and really come through a crisis, and at the same time you see the really awful things that a crisis brings out as well. ... Ever since that experience of back-to-back hurricanes, I have been chomping at the bit to throw Maggie O'Dell into a hurricane and see what it does to her character.
And the conflict isn't necessarily always coming from the killer. This gave me a chance to really throw her in a situation that was way out of her league and see what she was made of.
Q: So do you see similarities between an impending hurricane and a killer on the loose?
A: Absolutely! And the title has a two-pronged effect there because "damaged" comes from what the hurricane is about to do, and because the killer is someone who harvests body parts for brokering and can't use damaged bodies.
Q. How do you keep coming up with ideas for these grisly crimes?
A: I've actually been very, very lucky because I have quite a few experts who have volunteered their time and their expertise. I used to have what I called my Crime Scene Dinner Club, and it was composed of a Douglas Nebraska County prosecutor, homicide detective, the regional CSI crime lab director and one of his techs, and we would go out for dinner, and they would tell me about the scenes that they were working on or the scenes that stayed with them forever.
The funny thing is that some of the things that people think are just sort of gratuitous in my novels are often the things that I've gotten from them that actually are the real-life stuff. So it's just kind of funny how fact really is stranger than fiction.
I'm also kind of a news junkie. I'm constantly watching cable news, reading the newspaper, and I'm interested in the oddest crimes.
Q: This is your eighth installment in the Maggie O'Dell series, all of which have been written in the span of 10 years. What was your inspiration behind this character?
A: You know, the funny thing is that I never intended to write a series. Maggie actually happened accidentally. The very first book that I wrote, she was the investigative FBI agent on the scene, and I believe that she doesn't even come into the story until maybe chapter seven or eight, but my publisher loved her, and readers seemed to really connect and love her.
So I really had to sort of learn how to write a series by the seat of my pants, and in each book it has been a challenge, but it has also been really good because not necessarily knowing what I'm doing sometimes helps because I think that that adds to sort of the freshness of who she is. And I am continually learning about who she is too with each book. I try really hard to give new information with each one.
But at the same time I try to have each one as a stand-alone, so that anybody can come to the series and pick it up and enjoy it for an individual thriller and then hopefully get hooked on Maggie's character or some of the other characters who surround her and then maybe go back and pick up the others.
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