Goodman Goes Genre

Beijing’s Forbidden City. Shanghai’s Pearl Tower. Suzhou’s thousand-year old canal villages. Hangzhou’s West Lake. Xi’an’s Terracotta Army.

 

What do these places all have in common, besides being in China? They make up a few of the many settings in my latest novel-in-progress: Dead and Buried.

 

For a couple years now, renowned author Bathsheba Monk and I have talked about collaborating on a novel. After writing well-reviewed literary fiction for the likes of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Bathsheba decided to take up genre fiction. Thus the Swanson Herbinko Cozy Mystery series was born. So far, her popular mystery novels have included Dead Wrong, Dead Silence, and Dead Karma. Each is set in a different country.

 

When I returned from my two weeks in China last year, I knew I wanted to set a novel in some of the exotic locations. I realized my ideas might make for a good addition to Bathsheba’s series.

 

Dead and Buried is a bit of a mystery-thriller hybrid, and my first collaboration with another author. Written from the perspective of one of the side characters in Bathsheba’s previous books in the series, Dead and Buried takes the familiar characters—and new ones—on an adventure throughout China’s most interesting places in search of an Imperial artifact. Of course, there’s a murder or two to solve along the way.

 

Look for Dead and Buried from Blue Heron Book Works later in 2015.

 

Learn more at www.blueheronbookworks.com/eric-d.-goodman.html.