Q1. What inspired you
to write this book? My
grandmother. She was a wealthy, mentally unstable hoarder with a string of
husbands who disappeared in ways the family never fully explained, and she
lived on an almond ranch with a cellar I was scared of as a child. We kept pool
toys down there, but the smell of the place stayed with me longer than the toys
did. I spent my whole childhood storing up small details about her — the way
she watched a room, the things she kept that should have been thrown out, the
things she threw out that should have been kept — and at some point, those
details stopped being family memories and started being a character. I'd been
writing non-fiction for fifteen years and missed the part of my brain that gets
to lie for a living. Once I let myself put her on the page, the book wrote
fast. Betty in the novel isn't my grandmother — she's the woman my grandmother
could have been if you gave her a different decade, a different husband, and a
locked trunk in the back bedroom. The cellar I remember is in the book. Almost
nothing else is.
Q2. What exactly is it
about — and who is it written for? Dark Granny opens at a funeral with a
guest list of two. Lindsay Carter, a homicide detective with the Los Angeles
County Sheriff's Department, drives up to Paso Robles with her younger sister
Shelley to bury their grandmother — Betty Switzer, a hoarder, a fabulist, and a
woman who'd burned through more last names than any one life should require —
and to clean out the house she left behind. What they find under forty years of
junk mail and TV Guides isn't junk. A loaded pistol under the bed. Real jewelry
hidden in a fake jewelry box. Cash bricked into the freezer. And a locked metal
trunk full of yellowed newspaper clippings — a Chicago killing in 1943, a house
fire in Michigan, a baby kidnapped from a San Luis Obispo County ranch in 1949
— each one filed and tied with string like a private archive of tragedy.
Alongside the clippings, Betty's diaries. Lindsay starts pulling on the thread
off the clock and unofficially, with help from Boyd Parker — a former Western
actor turned gun historian whose shop becomes the unofficial war room — and
what looks like an estate cleanout becomes a forty-year cold-case puzzle that
nobody asked her to open. It's written for readers who buy the new Kellerman,
the new Slaughter, the new Coben, and finish the weekend wishing they hadn't
read it that fast. Specifically: women forty and up who like a smart female
detective, a Central California setting that earns its sense of place, and a
mystery that doesn't cheat. If you read for the puzzle and stay for the people,
this one is for you.
Q3. What do you hope
readers will get out of reading your book? A weekend they don't put down and a
series they want to keep reading. I'm a working publisher — I know what it
costs a reader to commit to a new author. My job is to make sure that bet pays
off on page one and keeps paying off through book three. Beyond entertainment,
I want readers to come away with the feeling that ordinary women in ordinary
towns have always been the ones keeping the record. Dark Granny is, underneath
the puzzle, a book about women who watched and remembered while everyone around
them was counting on them not to. That theme runs through the whole Lindsay
Carter series. If a reader closes the book and looks at the woman behind her in
line at the grocery store and wonders what that woman knows, I've done my job.
Q4. How did you decide
on your book's title and cover design? The book was originally titled differently
in my drafting phase, but "Dark Granny" kept coming up in every
reader survey, every focus group, and every casual conversation at the post
office. The word "granny" lights up the part of a reader's brain that
thinks they know what's coming, and "dark" tells them they don't. The
title does the marketing for me, which is the only kind of title I'm willing to
put on a book. The cover follows the same logic. We resisted every cozy-mystery
cue on the shelf — no cats, no quilts, no pastel, no cursive script over a
teacup — and went the other direction entirely: a sharply dressed older woman
in a trench coat, pearls, sunglasses, and leather gloves, walking calmly away
from a burning van on a wet city street at night, pistol in one hand, doctor's
bag in the other. Behind her, a storefront sign that just says GIFTS. The image
is doing the heavy lifting before a reader has read a word: this granny is not
who you think she is, and this book is not the book you think it is. The title
type tells the same story — DARK in a hard, weathered slab, Granny in a red
script that almost smiles at you. The whole series is being designed as a set,
so when a reader walks into Dark Granny first, the next two books on the shelf
already feel familiar before they've read a word. That's intentional. A series
only works if the second book looks like it belongs to the first.
Q5. What advice or
words of wisdom do you have for fellow writers — other than run!?
Treat your reader like the smartest person in the room
and your craft like the dumbest. By which I mean: never underestimate the
reader, and never assume your last good sentence is good enough — go back and
earn it again. And learn the industry before you sit down to write. So many
people write a book without ever understanding how publishing actually works —
how readers find books, how covers earn a click, how a launch is really built,
what a publisher does and doesn't do for you, what a category is and why it
matters. The writers who break through aren't always the most talented. They're
the ones who understood the business they were walking into before the
manuscript was finished. And second — build the audience while you write the
book, not after. The single most expensive mistake I see authors make is
finishing a manuscript and then turning around and asking who's going to read
it. By the time your book is ready, your readers should already be waiting.
Newsletter, podcast, community — pick one and start it the same week you start
the manuscript. Your future self will send you flowers.
Q6. What trends in the
book world do you see — and where do you think the book publishing industry is
heading? Three
trends I'm watching closely:
First, the rise of the hybrid author. The line between
traditionally published and indie has effectively collapsed at the level that
matters to readers. Readers don't know or care who published the book. They
care whether the cover signals quality, whether the first page earns the
second, and whether the next book in the series is already available. Indie
authors who run their careers like small businesses — with covers, editing, and
audience development on par with traditional houses — are quietly winning more
readers every year. That trend isn't slowing.
Second, audio. Audiobook revenue
is now outpacing e-book revenue in most categories, and listeners are an
entirely different market than readers. They commute, they cook, they walk the
dog, and they want a voice they trust for ten hours. Authors who plan for audio
at the manuscript level — pacing, dialogue, and name choices the narrator can
actually pronounce — are going to outperform authors who treat audio as an
afterthought.
Third, AI as a tool, is not a threat. The flood of
AI-generated content is real, but it's clarifying rather than confusing the
market. Readers are getting better, not worse, at sniffing out machine prose.
The authors who win the next five years are going to be the ones who use AI for
the things AI is good at — research synthesis, formatting, marketing iteration
— and who hold the line on voice and craft, which is what the AI cannot fake.
The middle of the market is going to be compressed. The top and the genuinely
human bottom will both grow.
Where it's all heading: more books, more channels,
smaller average sales per title, and a much bigger reward for the authors who
build a real, direct relationship with their readers. There is no shortcut to
an author platform. The tactics that promise one don't work, and the authors
who try to skip the work end up paying for it twice. The ones who win are the
ones who sweat through it — one reader, one email, one episode, one book at a
time. That's not a trend. That's just how it is now, and how it's going to
stay.
Q7. Were there
experiences in your personal life or career that came in handy when writing
this book? Twenty
years of running a small publishing company taught me how cover-ups work, which
is to say: not by villains in capes, but by ordinary people who decide that the
small lie they told yesterday is easier to keep telling than to undo. Most of
the conspiracies in Dark Granny are scaled-down versions of dynamics I've
watched play out in family businesses, small-town boards, and church
committees. Real cover-ups have a banality to them that fiction often misses,
and I wanted Dark Granny to get that part right.
The Central California setting comes straight from my
own life. I know the smell of an almond orchard in August, the sound of a
county-road shoulder under tires at midnight, what a small-town diner sounds
like at six in the morning. You can't fake that, and readers in those
communities will close the book on page three if you try. And the protagonist,
Lindsay Carter, has my work ethic and the steadiness I've had to build for
myself over the years. I gave her a homicide - detective badge with the L.A.
County Sheriff instead of my career, but the way she runs a case is the way I
run a launch — outline, sequence, follow the document, don't argue with the
document.
Q8. How would you
describe your writing style? Which writers or books is your writing similar to?
Honestly?
I'm a good storyteller, not a good writer — just ask my editor. I write the way
I speak, which drives him crazy on the page and probably keeps him in business.
The prose is lean, sensory, a little wry, and conversational in a way that's
apparently a nightmare to copyedit, but readers don't read for the copyedit.
They read for the story, and story is the part I know how to do. I'd rather
under-explain than over-explain, and I'd rather drop you inside the kitchen
than describe it. My favorite reader response so far has been "I felt like
I was in the car with her." If a reader hears my voice in their head and
thinks I'm sitting across the kitchen table from them, the prose is doing its
job — even if my editor is going to make me fix every comma in it.
Closest comparisons readers tend to draw:
Karin Slaughter for the
female-investigator dynamic and the willingness to sit inside hard scenes.
Jane Harper for the regional
landscape doing real narrative work — what Harper does with the Australian
outback, I'm trying to do with the California Central Coast.
Harlan Coben for the
long-buried-secret structure and the small-town suspicion that something old is
coming back to ask its question.
Tana French for the way
memory and place keep talking to each other in the prose.
If you read those four authors and put them on a shelf
together, my book belongs on that shelf.
Q9. What challenges
did you overcome in the writing of this book? Three real ones:
Re-entering fiction after fifteen years of
non-fiction.
My non-fiction voice is direct, instructional, and confident. My fiction voice
has to do something else entirely — it must leave room for the reader, withhold
rather than explain, trust the moment instead of teaching it. The first three
months of drafting were me unlearning a decade of how-to writing. The way
through it was — honestly — Audible. I'm a voracious listener, and I made a
rule that I had to be inside someone else's fiction before I sat down with my
own. Slaughter, Harper, Coben, French, on a walk every morning before I opened
the manuscript. By the time I got to the page, the rhythm I needed was already
in my ear. And I didn't let myself open my non-fiction inbox until the day's
pages were done.
Writing about a character close to home
without writing a memoir. Betty has my grandmother's DNA, but she is not my
grandmother, and I had to find the line between honoring the source and using
her. The discipline that worked was reminding myself that I was writing for the
reader, not for the family. Once I stopped trying to settle private accounts on
the page, the character got bigger.
Holding a series arc across three books
while delivering a satisfying standalone. Dark Granny had to close on its
own and open the door for Farmhouse Forgotten and Bad Lie. I outlined all three
books before I drafted the first one, which is not how I'd written before. I
used to discover the story as I went. For a series, that doesn't work — the
foreshadowing in book one must land in book three, and if you don't know what
book three is, you can't seed it. The outline was the hardest single piece of
work in the project, and it's the reason the books are coming out on the
schedule they are.
Q10. If people can buy
or read one book this week or month, why should it be yours?
Because there is no other story out there like this
one. The reason is simple: truth is always a little more interesting than
fiction, and the bones of Dark Granny came from a real woman — wealthy,
mentally unstable, a hoarder, an almond ranch, a string of husbands the family
never accounted for, a cellar that scared a child for good reason. I'm not
writing a memoir; I'm writing a thriller. But the strangest, most specific
details in this book are the ones nobody could have invented. Readers feel that
on the page even before they know why. Beyond the originality: Dark Granny is
the start of a series I'm building for the long haul, and getting in on book
one is the experience series readers tell me they wish they'd had with their
favorites. Four books are coming out across the summer — Dark Granny May
twelfth, The Fortune Teller's Daughter June ninth, Farmhouse Forgotten June
thirtieth, and Bad Lie mid-August — so a reader who picks up Dark Granny this
month is set up for a whole summer of Lindsay Carter without ever having to
wait. And the practical answer: if you've been looking for a smart, regional,
female-led mystery that respects your time and your intelligence, written by an
author who has spent twenty years inside the publishing industry watching what
works and what doesn't — this is that book. I built it on purpose. I'd love for
you to read it.
About The Author: Juliet Dillon
Clark is a three-time author, the 2026 Gold Bookfest winner for The Perfect
Reader Playbook, host of the Promote, Profit, Publish Podcast, editor-in-chief
of Breakthrough Author Magazine, and the founder of Superbrand Publishing. For
more than twenty years she has helped authors, coaches, speakers, and small
businesses build expert audiences and turn books into businesses. Dark Granny
marks her return to fiction after a fifteen-year gap — her last mystery series
sold more than 25,000 copies between 2010 and 2012 — and launches the new
Lindsay Carter thriller series, anchored by an L.A. County Sheriff's homicide
detective who comes home to the Central Coast to bury her grandmother and ends
up unburying a forty-year archive of someone else's secrets. For more
information, please see: www.julietdillonclark.com
Do You Need Book
Marketing Help?
Brian
Feinblum can be reached at brianfeinblum@gmail.com He is available to help authors like you to promote
your story, sell your book, and grow your brand. He has over 30 years of
experience in successfully helping thousands of authors in all genres. Let him
be your advocate, teacher, and motivator!
About Brian Feinblum
This award-winning blog has generated over
6,200,000 page views. With 5,600+ posts over the past 15 years, it was named
one of the best book marketing blogs by BookBaby http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs and recognized by Feedspot in 2021
and 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. It was also named by www.WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.” Copyright 2026.
For
the past three decades, Brian Feinblum has helped thousands of authors. He
formed his own book publicity firm in 2020. Prior to that, for 21 years as the
head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and as the
director of publicity at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many
first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with
best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen,
Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard,
Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C.
Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler.
His
writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s
The Independent (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/whats-needed-to-promote-a-book-successfully) and (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/10-things-my-dog-taught-me-about-marketing-books). He was recently interviewed by the IBPA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0BhO9m8jbs
He
hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and
has spoken at ASJA, three times at BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers
Association, Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod
Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, five
times at Morgan James Publishing Red Carpet, and Connecticut Authors and
Publishers Association. He served as a judge for the 2024 IBPA Book Awards.
His
letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal,
USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester)
and The Washington Post. His first published book was The
Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook. It
was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.
Born
and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids,
and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog.
You
can connect with him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum/ or https://www.facebook.com/brian.feinblum
