For the Thrill of It | The Indian Express

For the Thrill of It | The Indian Express

For the Thrill of It

Canadian author Shari Lapena on her new book, love for thrillers, and restoring a Victorian farmhouse

Written by Surbhi Gupta | Updated: August 16, 2018 12:29:29 am

Shari Lapena (Source: Tristan Ostler)

Friends since university, Gwen and Riley are on their way to the Catskills, a little town ahead of New York. David Paley, an attorney, is also on his way there. He has just parked his car outside Mitchell’s Inn. Nestled in the woods, the three-storey structure of red bricks and gingerbread trim is perfect for a relaxing, maybe even romantic, weekend getaway. It has spacious old rooms with huge wood-burning fireplaces, a well-stocked wine cellar, and opportunities for cross-country skiing or snowshoeing. More guests are yet to arrive — Lauren and Ian, Beverly and Henry. Newly engaged Dana is also here with her fiancé Matthew. As they make themselves comfortable, the weather takes a turn for the worse, and a blizzard cuts off the electricity, and all contact with the outside world. Soon a guest turns up dead at the feet of the staircase — it looks like an accident. But when the second guest dies, they start to panic. There is a killer among them. This is the premise of Canadian author Shari Lapena’s latest book, An Unwanted Guest (Rs 599, Bantem Press).

“I wanted to write a story about a group of strangers cut off from the world with a killer among them — a closed room mystery reminiscent of Agatha Christie,” says Lapena in an email from Toronto. She was inspired by Christie’s 1939 best-selling novel And Then There Were None, in which a group of people is summoned to an isolated island, to be slowly killed one-by-one. “I wanted to take that kind of story and update and modernise it and give it a darker psychological cast,” she says, “Also, a few years ago, the city I live in was hit by a severe ice storm, and all the power was knocked out for days. It was very treacherous outside. I thought it would make a great backdrop for a thriller, and I combined that idea with the locked room idea and came up with An Unwanted Guest,” she adds.

An old Victorian farmhouse, that Lapena and her husband have adopted, has served as inspiration for the story. It also has a grand staircase and a second one for the servants at the back. “A second staircase provides lots of possibilities for a murder mystery,” says Lapena. The couple had bought the farmhouse, in Ontario’s Cobourg, four years ago. “It had been empty for some time and was in pretty bad shape, but it had good bones and sat on a hundred acres of very pretty land in the country.” Once it is restored and their children join university, the couple will move in. “I’m looking forward to writing in my office there, which will be in what used to be the maid’s quarters, near the back staircase. It will be lined with books, of course,” she says.

This is Lapena’s third thriller, where she has taken a departure from the husband-wife plots that made her two international bestselling books, The Couple Next Door and A Stranger in the House. The former will soon be adapted into a television series.

Former lawyer and English teacher, she has quickly established herself as one of Canada’s most exportable writers. Her foray into writing began with literary comedies — Things Go Flying (2008) and Happiness Economics (2012). Though critically acclaimed, they didn’t sell enough for publishers to greenlight a third one. It was then that she decided to pen a thriller, a genre she has loved for long. “I’d always been a big fan of thrillers and but didn’t think I could do it because I could never plot my books out beforehand… however, I decided to give it a try without plotting it out first, and it worked out just fine. Turns out that I have a natural thriller voice,” she says.

Lapena loves domestic thrillers and psychological suspense — “partly because I’m so interested in human psychology and human relationships and why people act the way they do, and partly because I’m more interested in the tension created by the unknown, rather than any actual violence”. Some of her recent favourite authors have been Liane Moriarty, Gilly MacMillan, Herman Koch, Mark Billingham, Fiona Barton and Flynn Berry. Lapena wants to keep writing thrillers. “Nothing beats a good thriller for reading, or for writing. I want to keep experimenting within the thriller form though; it keeps things interesting, and challenging,” she says.