1--What is the title of your latest release?
SONS AND BROTHERS
2--What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
Top heart surgeon Johann Gurtner was the model of an upright citizen, yet someone punched him in the face and pushed him into a river to drown. As Swiss police detectives Giuliana Linder and Renzo Donatelli investigate Gurtner's present and past, the man's estranged son Markus becomes their prime suspect. But is Markus really a killer, or is he, too, a victim?
3--How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
That was an easy decision! This is the second book in the “Polizei Bern” mystery series. All the novels take place in Bern, the capital of Switzerland, where I’ve lived with my Swiss husband for the past thirty-five years. I love setting scenes in the beautiful medieval core of the city.
4--Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
I have two police detectives who work together and get more or less equal time in my books, and I’d have fun hanging out with either of them, talking to them about their work or their kids.
5--What are three words that describe your protagonists?
Giuliana Linder, in her mid-forties, is kind, analytical, and determinedly independent.
Renzo Donatelli, in his mid-thirties, is funny, self-critical, and exceptionally good-looking.
6--What’s something you learned while writing this book?
Doing research, I learned a lot about Bern’s untitled nobility, who are an important political and economic force in the city, and about the way Swiss authorities used to “foster” poor children with farmers, so they could serve as unpaid labor. This practice of taking kids as young as eight away from their “unfit” parents (single mothers in particular) and putting them out to work was only stopped in the 1960s.
7--Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
I won’t say I do no editing along the way, but I generally prefer to get the story down from beginning to end before starting the long process of revising.
8--What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
I love crispy cookies. I go through different favorite cookie phases, but right now my go-to treats come in a long roll from the main Swiss grocery chain and are full of raisins.
9--Describe your writing space/office!
I have a wonderful office. My desk is huge, with piles of paper, mugs full of pens and pencils, sometimes a fresh flower or two (right now, I have one tulip), and my favorite snapshot of my son as a toddler. I have an adjustable desk, so when I get sick of sitting, I can work standing up. My computer is in front of a big window, so I take a break from staring at the screen by gazing out at the building across the street with its tiled roof and red wooden shutters. From my office window I can also see a strip of sky and a tree full of birds.
10--Who is an author you admire?
I think the author who has given me the most pleasure in my adult life is Lois McMasters Bujold, who has written a space opera series with a great protagonist, Myles Vorkosigan. I admire not only Bujold’s skill at creating wonderful characters in one book after another but also her extraordinary world-building talents Her “World of the Five Gods” fantasy series is brilliant, too.
11--Is there a book that changed your life?
When I was nine or ten, I read a children’s novel called Downright Dencey (1927!) about a Quaker girl in her early teens who does something her mother has forbidden, because the girl’s conscience tells her that it’s the right thing to do. This story made me think in a whole new way about what it means to be “good” or “bad,” and I’ve never stopped thinking about that, which is probably one of the reasons I write mysteries.
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.
My “call” came in the form of an email that I’ll never forget, especially since I had to read it twice to understand and believe what it said. It was from Dan Mayer, the editorial director of Seventh Street Books, telling me how much he was enjoying Pesticide, the first book in my series, and asking if it was still available for Seventh Street to publish. You bet it was!
13--What’s your favorite genre to read?
Mysteries.
14--What’s your favorite movie?
I write police procedurals, and my favorite movie is a police procedural: Inside Man (2006) with Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, and Jodie Foster. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a must.
15--What is your favorite season?
Late spring. That’s when I fill my balcony with red geraniums, blue salvia, white alyssum, and pink spider flowers (cleome). When I need little breaks, I go out on my balcony and pinch dead blossoms off stems—for some reason, this helps me think when I’m stuck with my writing!
16--How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
What I love to do on the big day is go out for dinner at one of my favorite restaurants with my husband and son. I also tend to spread out the celebrating over a week or two, trying to see individual friends for coffees and meals for as long as I can, to make the birthday mood last.
17--What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
I recently devoured Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead as an audiobook. It’s twenty-one hours long, and I listened to it during every minute that I was cooking, cleaning, running washes, and taking walks. I was transfixed.
18--What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
Although I often eat Indian and Korean food and enjoy other nationalities’ cuisines very much, my favorite meals are what I’d call standard European/North American fare: some form of meat with a sauce, several vegetables, and a starch, followed by cake, pie, or a pudding. Yum!
19--What do you do when you have free time?
If it’s a lot of free time (between a weekend and a month), my husband and I go traveling somewhere interesting. If it’s only an hour or two, I go for a walk in the park with a one of my friends, and we talk nonstop, catching up on news while getting exercise.
20--What can readers expect from you next?
The third book featuring Polizei Bern’s Giuliana Linder and Renzo Donatelli is scheduled for publication in 2024. The working title is A Fondness for Truth.
Kim Hays' second novel serves us a suspicious drowning, ugly secrets, and unresolved romantic tension . . .
Walking his dog along Bern’s icy Aare river, a surgeon in his seventies drowns. When his bruised corpse is found, his watch is missing. A mugging gone wrong? The more Swiss police detective Giuliana Linder and her assistant Renzo Donatelli learn about Johann Karl Gurtner, the more convinced they are that he was no random victim.
Talking to Gurtner’s family raises as many questions as it answers, but one thing becomes clear: the surgeon’s middle son, Markus, a photographer with a history of violence and substance abuse, has been a disappointment to his father all his life, and he is an increasingly plausible suspect for Gurtner’s murder. Other information leads Giuliana and Renzo back to the village where Gurtner was born, and, spending so much time together, they again have to deal with their attraction to one another and their ambivalence toward having an affair.
Alongside their investigation another story unfolds. During the year leading up to Gurtner’s death, his son Markus becomes friends with Jakob Amsler, a long-ago classmate of the surgeon’s. In contrast to the privileged young Gurtner, Jakob was a foster child, removed from his family by the authorities at nine and placed on a farm to work in terrible conditions. From Jakob, Markus learns that his father’s life contains some ugly secrets.
As Giuliana and Renzo discover more about Gurtner’s past, these secrets threaten to surface. Did Gurtner’s killer want to keep them hidden—or to force them out into the open at any cost?
Suspense [Seventh Street Books, On Sale: April 18, 2023, Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9781645060581 / ]
Kim Hays has made her home in Bern since she married a Swiss. Before that, she lived in San Juan, Vancouver, and Stockholm, as well as around the United States. She has worked at a variety of jobs, from factory forewoman to director of a small nonprofit, and, in Switzerland, from university lecturer to cross-cultural trainer for several multinational firms. Kim has a BA from Harvard and a PhD from the University of California-Berkeley.
PESTICIDE, the first book in the Polizei Bern series, was shortlisted for the 2020 Debut Dagger award by the Crime Writers' Association.
You can read more about Kim Hays and PESTICIDE at www.kimhaysbern.com. Or look for kimhaysbern on Twitter and Facebook. SONS AND BROTHERS, her second book featuring the Swiss police duo Linder and Donatelli, is due out in April 2023.
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