Kerblooey is Good

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And the winner of TRUST ME is  holdenj! The winner of The Drowning is Judi!  Email Hank via  http://www.HankPhllippiRyan.com with your mailing address.  YAY!


HANK PHILLIPPPI RYAN: What life are you on? Certainly not your first—or maybe you are? We don’t mean reincarnation, the real reincarnation, but the personal on-purpose (or sometimes not) changes we make and come out to be someone very different.

Or—somewhat different at least.

Joanna Schaffhausen is a true Jungle Red favorite. A terrific writer, and a wonderful mom, and an all-around hilarious person. And her new book NO MERCY is out!

How did she get here? Just like the new year,  she started over.

Kerblooey is Good

by Joanna Schaffhausen

Hank and fellow Reds, thanks so much for having me today! I want talk about starting over, which is fitting since we’re all starting anew in 2019. We look at the fresh calendar year, full of blank opportunity, and we make resolutions and big plans for ourselves. That’s not the kind of starting over I’m talking about today, though. I’m talking about what happens when all those plans go kerblooey and suddenly you’re scrambling, wondering what to do next. Has this ever happened to you? ‘Cause I’ve been there a time or two.

In graduate school at Yale, my advisor told us he was moving to the University of California at Irvine. I could either go with him, 3000 miles from my New England home, or find a new advisor after four years of sunk investment in his laboratory. Believe me, I did not start the year 2000 with “move to California” penciled in for June. But that’s what I did. I got sunburned a lot, made new friends, and became the only person to take public transportation in Orange County.

Then came the next curve ball. That degree I’d gone to California to procure? Suddenly I didn’t want it anymore, at least for neuroscience research. But graduate school prepares you for one of two paths: academia or industry research. Here I was, looking ahead at these two paths and pondering jumping into the thorn bushes instead. 

A friend sent me a link saying that ABC News was looking for an editorial producer, someone to help them with their science and medical news. I had no journalism training but applied anyway. I spent the next seven years interpreting science for Diane Sawyer, Charlie Gibson, and others at ABC. I met tremendously talented and brilliant people; I do not miss the 4AM calls from Good Morning America.

 ABC News ID: Proof of my stint as a journalist.

Then one day a realtor showed up at our Boston ABC outpost and started showing the space to future clients, an important alert that my job was going elsewhere. Uh, what? Time to scramble for a third potential career! I found an opening for a scientific editor at a magazine devoted to research on drug development. Not, er, quite my background, but I figured I’d give it a whirl. The learning curve was STEEP, let me tell you, but I got to chat up Nobel Prize winners and read about medicines of the future.

TiPS cover: An early cover for my science journal—one I drew myself!

Along the way, I realized my dream of becoming a published mystery author! Very shortly after that, I realized I could not manage a fulltime job with a 3-hour daily commute, a young family, and friends, all the while writing more books. I left my office job to write at home, which is a huge blessing but also a leap of faith that this whole “be a writer” gambit will pay off. I am, as we say in the biz, back on page one again.

But so is my character. That’s the beauty of a second book—you can push your characters into new, uncomfortable situations, places they’d never put on their own calendars if they had a choice. In No Mercy, Ellery Hathaway is suspended from her job as police officer and outed as the lone survivor in a famous serial murder case. Worse yet, her superiors have ordered her to undergo her worst nightmare: group therapy. 

Ellery is convinced that ordinary survivors have nothing to teach her. Instead, she starts working their cases, including a brutal rapist who's still on the loose, and a would-be arsonist who is possibly doing time for a crime he did not commit. Ellery's so wrapped up in the search for justice that she misses the larger truth: her fellow survivors are hiding dark secrets of their own, the kind that someone just might kill to keep.

I think most books discombobulate their characters, no? Pull the rug right out from under them. I speak from experience when I say that sudden, forced change can be terrifying, but it’s also exhilarating. It’s a chance to grow and learn, to fall down and get back up again. It makes you want to turn the page on your own life—because you can’t wait to find out what happens next.

Me signing books: Living the dream as a mystery author! 

Did life ever force you to make a surprising change? I want to know about it!

HANK:  Well, sure. Like--daily. But let's hear from you, reds and readers!

No Mercy

Police officer Ellery Hathaway and FBI profiler Reed Markham take on two difficult new cases in this stunning follow-up to The Vanishing Season.

Ellery Hathaway is on involuntary leave from her job because she shot a murderer in cold blood and refuses to apologize for it. Forced into group therapy for victims of violent crime, Ellery immediately finds higher priorities than “getting in touch with her feelings.”

For one, she suspects a fellow group member may have helped to convict the wrong man for a deadly arson incident years ago. For another, Ellery finds herself in the desperate clutches of a woman who survived a brutal rape. He is still out there, this man with the Spider-Man-like ability to climb through bedroom windows, and his victim beseeches Ellery for help in capturing her attacker.

Ellery seeks advice from her friend, FBI profiler Reed Markham, who liberated her from a killer’s closet when she was a child. Reed remains drawn to this unpredictable woman, the one he rescued but couldn’t quite save. The trouble is, Reed is up for a potential big promotion, and his boss has just one condition for the new job―stay away from Ellery. Ellery ignores all the warnings. Instead, she starts digging around in everyone’s past but her own―a move that, at best, could put her out of work permanently, and at worst, could put her in the city morgue.