1--What is the title of your latest release?
INTO THE STORM (Evidence: Under Fire #1)
2--What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
Armed only with paint pellets, a team of Navy SEALs HALO jump into a training exercise in a remote national park, not knowing that the fake op is about to become terrifyingly real.
3--How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
My husband is an archaeologist for the US Navy and has spent much of the last several years assessing whether or not Navy SEAL training exercises in the Pacific Northwest parks have the potential to damage archaeological and historic sites. It was his work in this area that sparked the idea for the story, but I wanted to set the training in Olympic National Park, not a state park because I love the temperate rainforest setting on the western edge of the park.
4--Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
Absolutely. I worked for a decade as an archaeologist and as mentioned above am married to one. The heroine, Audrey Kendrick is an archaeologist who has a dream job (Park Archaeologist for Olympic National Park). I’d want to hang out in the lodge and talk about how much I envy her.
5--What are three words that describe your protagonist?
Audrey: Strong, loyal, impassioned
Xavier: Protective, fierce, driven
6--What’s something you learned while writing this book?
This book was very much in my wheelhouse: archaeologist in the Pacific Northwest dealing with Navy issues (see above about my husband’s job) so my research was much more minutia about Simunition (the paint pellet bullets that SEALs use when training in public lands), in-holding properties within national parks, and temperate rainforest flora and fauna. I did visit the real historic lodge that I based my fictional one on during the same week of the month in which my book is set and enjoyed walks in the woods and long drives along winding dirt roads to get a feel for the terrain. I was disappointed it didn’t rain any more while I was there!
7--Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
After the first 50 pages or so—which I edit as I go—I write forward until I hit a problem that requires reworking the timeline. Usually, after I hit the 150-page mark, I have the sequence down and write on my Neo, which makes it very hard to edit so I just write forward to the end.
8--What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
I make a chocolate cake / chocolate mousse / raspberry / shiny chocolate glaze dessert I’m quite proud of. I made four of them for my nephew’s wedding. (My daughter made the white tiered cake—by the way, that isn’t fondant, that’s cream cheese frosting. It was delicious.)
9--Describe your writing space/office!
In February 2020 I redid my office, having no clue how prescient it would be to have a comfortable workspace because the rest of my family would all spend the next six months working/schooling from home as well. I bought a comfy loveseat recliner, and I extend both sides and spread out with my computer, Neo, notepads, and cat, Malala. Malala usually wants to be on my keyboard or lap, but the extra room of the extended recliners helps when she’s ready to let me work.
I also have a big L-shaped desk with a desktop computer which is where I do graphics and design book covers along with other business-related tasks. I never write at the desk.
10--Who is an author you admire?
So many, and I’m so lucky to call many of them my friends. I’ll list a few romantic suspense authors here (in no particular order): Toni Anderson, Jayne Ann Krentz, Pamela Clare, Christina Dodd, and Laura Griffin.
11--Is there a book that changed your life?
Reading Elizabeth Peters mysteries my senior year in high school made me want to become an archaeologist. So I did.
12--Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
I’m only a recent hybrid after years of being self-published, so I don’t really know where to begin. Getting “the call” after you’ve sold hundreds of thousands of books is quite different. But through it all, I had the same agent—Elizabeth Winick Rubinstein—who was with me for 9 years before she sold me to Montlake (and now Thomas & Mercer), so that was an incredibly special moment. Over the years she’d sold sub-rights including, at one point, film rights, but this was the first front-list deal, and I can’t say what it means to have someone believe in you for so long and be willing to invest their time the way she did. I still get teary-eyed when I think about that phone call. I dedicated that book, DANGEROUS GROUND to her.
13--What’s your favorite genre to read?
Romantic Suspense
14--What’s your favorite movie?
I have a new answer this year! As an archaeologist turned romance novelist, obviously it’s The Lost City! I mean, it’s basically my life story but with more Channing Tatum. (For the record, my archaeologist husband loved the movie except for the part where the heroine’s archaeologist husband was dead.)
15--What is your favorite season?
Fall (biased by the fact that my birthday is November 2nd)
16--How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
Last year I had a biopsy to check for breast cancer on the big day. It was negative so I’ll call that a good birthday. This is a reminder to get a mammogram for those who need them!
17--What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
The Lost City! (Is this cheating??) Not mentioned above: there are two scenes in that movie that were straight out of my books! (One scene in DANGEROUS GROUND the other in CRASH SITE.)
18--What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
All of them as long as it’s not too spicy hot (I lose my appetite when I eat super-hot foods which makes me sad).
19--What do you do when you have free time?
Explain this concept of free time? Really, I listen to audiobooks. Sit in the hot tub and plot books. (I need to go to remedial relaxing school.) Watch football. Watch Great British Bake Off.
20--What can readers expect from you next?
I just sold a book to Thomas & Mercer to be published under R.S. Grant. Here is the Publisher’s Marketplace announcement:
R.S. Grant’s IT GIRL, in which a crime reporter never reported her abduction or the 48 hours of abuse that followed in order to protect her rising career and the man she loved; when a trusted informant tells her that recent deaths in Yosemite National Park are connected to her nightmare, she has no choice but to enter the backwoods to investigate her personal crime story, not knowing if she can trust the man hired to be her backcountry guide, to Lauren Plude at Thomas & Mercer, for publication in fall 2023, by Elizabeth Winick Rubinstein at McIntosh & Otis (world).
As a storm rolls in, a team of elite Navy SEALs arrives at a remote lodge for a wilderness training exercise that becomes terrifyingly real…
Xavier Rivera planned the exercise down to the smallest detail, but he didn't plan the arrival of archaeologist Audrey Kendrick—a woman he shared a passionate night with before betraying her in the worst way.
As the storm is unleashed on the historic lodge it becomes clear the training has been compromised. Trapped by weather, isolated by the remote wilderness, and silenced as communication with the world has been severed, unarmed SEALs face an unexpected and deadly foe.
Audrey and Xavier must set aside their distrust and desire and work together to save a team under fire and survive in a battle against the wild.
Romance Suspense [Janus Publishing, On Sale: October 7, 2022, Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9781944571528 / ]
SA Today bestselling author Rachel Grant worked for over a decade as a professional archaeologist and mines her experiences for story lines and settings, which are as diverse as excavating a cemetery underneath an historic art museum in San Francisco; surveying an economically depressed coal mining town in Kentucky; and mapping a seventeenth century Spanish and Dutch fort on the island of Sint Maarten in the Netherlands Antilles.
In all her travels and adventures as an archaeologist, Rachel has found many sites and artifacts, but she’s only found one true treasure, her husband, David. They met while working together excavating a four thousand year old site about to be destroyed by the expansion of a sewage treatment plant in Seattle. Despite their romantic first meeting, she has no intention of ever setting a story at a sewage treatment plant.
Rachel Grant lives on an island in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and children.
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