Interview With Thriller Author Juliet Dillon Clark

 

 

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

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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