JA Konrath's - Rusty Nail

In my previous thrillers, WHISKEY SOUR and BLOODY MARY, Jack Daniels has faced some pretty terrifying characters. For RUSTY NAIL I wanted to give her the ultimate villain to square off against--someone who would make the previous bad guys look like choir boys.

After thinking about it for a while, I decided the fun thing to do was to have Jack chase a whole family of psychos, and they would incorporate some traits from various real-life murderers, including Albert Fish, John Wayne Gacy, H.H. Holmes, Eileen Wuornos, and Ed Gein. Psycho families can be traced back to the Sawney Bean clan of the seventeeth century, who murdered and ate (yum!) travellers in the Scottish countryside. While I avoided anything graphic (I'm not a fan of gory scenes in books) the depicitons of their crimes are left tot he reader's imagination, which makes them even scarier.

Of course, at its heart, the book is very funny, with a lot of laughs.

I wanted RUSTY NAIL to be a trip through the haunted house; you scream, you giggle, and you finish with your heart pounding in your chest and a smile on your face. There are creepy disclosures, major twists, funny scenes, big surprises, and (hopefully) a major surprise when you figure out the killer's true identity.

RUSTY NAIL was a lot of fun to write, and I think it's my best so far. It hits the shelves July 5th.

Joe

Visit JA Konrath at http://www.jakonrath.com/