Book Number One of The Group series
Mystery
Date Published: Jan. 07, 2023
Publisher: Books in Motion
Narrator: Caryn Hoaglund
Run Time: 9 hours, 22 minutes
He was one of several marked for death, but the only one who saw it coming.
Interview with Kevin R. Doyle
How many books have you written and which is your favorite?
I’ve written a total of fifteen; however, the first four were pretty weak and never saw the light of day, so there have been ten published books with one more just submitted to publisher. As for my favorite, that’s a little tough to figure out. If you mean favorite in terms of plot, characterization et. al, that’s one thing. If you mean favorite in terms of feeling of accomplishment at getting the darned thing finished, that would be another. If you combine those two factors, up to now I’d say my favorite is And the Devil Walks Away, the third in the sequence that began with The Group. I wrote it during a span of time where I churned out five novels in three years, and it is by far the most intricately plotted of anything I’ve done yet. I was beyond satisfied that I managed to pull it off.
If you’re planning a sequel, can you share a tiny bit about your plans for it?
There have actually been two sequels so far for The Group: When You Have to Go There, and And the Devil Walks Away, mentioned above. I have a couple of vague ideas for more follow ups. I’ve had this idea for years for numerous more books in the series, each focusing on a different one of the secondary characters.
Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book?
The original idea for The Group was a complete standalone. Once I was finished with it, I never intended to go back to that particular well. Then, a year or two later an interesting idea for a sequel popped into my head, and about halfway through writing it a way to viably extend the story even further came to me. At the moment, those three are complete, and in a way that nicely complete the arc of one of the secondary characters in the first book. As I said, though, I do have a broad concept in my head of an interlocking network of short stories and books, some of them going off on wild tangents but all of them connected to the base story in some way.
How did you come up with the title for your book?
I don’t usually have much trouble with titles, and this one came really easy. The inspiration for the overall story came to me one night while I was watching a cable news interview, and I had the title in my head before I even began writing.
How long did it take you to write this book?
This was my fifth attempt at a novel and the first to actually see publication. (My first published “book” is a little novelette of about 14,000 words.) So when I sat down to hammer The Group out, I was still well into the infancy stage of learning how all this works. That being said, it took me about a year straight up from conception to finish.
What does the title mean?
I’d rather not answer that, as explaining the title would spoil a big chunk of the plot. Suffice to say that, upon completing the read, the title makes perfect sense.
What did you learn when writing the book?
I learned a lot about how to pace myself and how to structure a plot for a full-length novel. I didn’t learn it all, as I continued to refine my process for several years, but with this one I took a big step towards putting together a process that works for me when it comes to novel-length works.
What surprised you the most?
The fact that I actually got it finished and, shocker of all, this one was accepted for publication.
Have you ever killed off a character your readers loved?
Not sure about readers, but about two thirds of the way through writing one particular novel I concluded that it served the story best to kill one of the main characters off. I agonized over that for several days as I really didn’t want to lose that character. After moping about it for a while, I realized that, if I had that much of an emotional response to losing them, it was the right move to make. It threw the publisher for a loop when she was reviewing that book and got to the death scene.
What do you do to get inside your character’s heads?
For every book, I have a separate file called Character Bios. (This is part of that process I worked out over the years.) Each bio is anywhere from a paragraph to half a page long, and it includes as much information as I can think of. This isn’t a one and done thing, though. As I’m working, either first, second or sometimes third draft, I keep refining those bios as new details come to me.
About the Author
A retired high-school teacher and former college instructor, Kevin R. Doyle is the author of numerous short horror stories. He’s also written four crime thrillers including The Group and The Anchor, and one horror novel, The Litter. In the last few years, he’s begun working on the Sam Quinton private eye series, published by Camel Press. The first Quinton book, Squatter’s Rights, was nominated for the 2021 Shamus award for Best First PI Novel. The fourth Sam Quinton book, Clean Win, was released in March of 2023.
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1 comments:
Good morning. As always, I do appreciate you're helping out with this tour.
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