1--What is the title of your latest release?
PONY CONFIDENTIAL
2--What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
In this one-of-a-kind mystery with heart and humor, a hilariously grumpy pony must save the only human he’s ever loved after discovering she stands accused of a murder, he knows she didn’t commit.
3--How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
It’s inspired by The Odyssey, so I knew Ithaca should be the ending point, though it’s Ithaca, New York, not the one in Greece. The pony travels back and forth across America, tossed on the sea of human whims, so I set it in all the places a pony might end up, from a highway rest stop in the Great Plains to an island off the Atlantic seaboard to a skyscraper in Chicago, and many more.
4--Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
LOL - I do! After I wrote the book, I adopted an elderly retired small pony who now lives thirty feet from my back door. He has turned out to be EXACTLY like the pony in my book, right down to his grumpy obsession with carrots and a highly manipulative personality. It’s like I conjured him into existence with my pen.
5--What are three words that describe your protagonist?
Short, hairy, opinionated.
6--What’s something you learned while writing this book?
That you should plot a mystery before you start writing the book.
7--Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
Both. I make changes as I go-- a lot of them-- and then I do a massive reverse outline using index cards to make sure each scene is deepening character, advancing plot, and exploring theme in a new way. I cut, rearrange and revise again after that step.
8--What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
I used to live in Italy and I’m a huge Italophile, so it’s pasta. Pecorino fresco cheese. Brunello di Montalcino. I could go on…
9--Describe your writing space/office!
I write in a small outbuilding on my property that used to be a mouse-infested workshop. Now it’s a less mouse-infested library—I have thousands of books in here, my desk, and a couch for napping that’s usually strewn with dogs.
10--Who is an author you admire?
One?! There are so many: Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, Italo Calvino, Evelyn Waugh, Percival Everett, Dorothy Sayers, Paul Beatty, Maggie O’Farrell… stop me because I won’t stop.
11--Is there a book that changed your life?
Black Beauty. It’s now considered a book for children, but it shifted culture in huge ways, popularizing for the first time the idea that animals had emotions and—like people-- should not treated cruelly. I devoured it as a child, and it inspired Pony Confidential.
12--Tell us about when you got “the call.”
In the fall of 2022. The manuscript, which was then just a novella about a pony looking for his owner decades after he last saw her, had been floating around for a couple of years with no buyers biting, so the call really came out of the blue, especially because my agent said, “They love it but they want you to turn it into a mystery.” My answer was “Whaaaaaat?” But I did, and I’m delighted with the result. It was meant to be.
13--What’s your favorite genre to read?
Anything funny, or with a slightly irreverent take on life. But I’m a fairly voracious reader, so I will tackle most anything, and I teach literature, so I’m always rereading classics.
14--What’s your favorite movie?
“The Philadelphia Story” (I’m a big Katherine Hepburn fan) but I rewatch the first twenty minutes of “The Black Stallion” all the time.
15--What is your favorite season?
I live in central California, so our two seasons are Cauldron of Hellfire and Lovely Green Winter of Wildflowers. It’s not hard to choose.
16--How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
Annually. Eating pasta and drinking wine while laughing and telling stories with friends after a day outdoors with the dogs and the ponies.
17--What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
I love “Slow Horses” (and not just for the title!). It’s a smart, funny, engaging, and irreverent look at espionage and power.
18--What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
Almost anything that doesn’t involve mayo. But really, Italian.
19--What do you do when you have free time?
Go camping with my larger pony. I like how she carries me through beautiful scenery, and she likes the nonstop snacks coming out of the tent.
20--What can readers expect from you next?
A new mystery! I can’t say much yet, but it has another unusual narrator.
In this one-of-a-kind mystery with heart and humor, a hilariously grumpy pony must save the only human he’s ever loved after discovering she stands accused of a murder he knows she didn’t commit.
Pony has been passed from owner to owner for longer than he can remember. Fed up, he busts out and goes on a cross-country mission to reunite with the only little girl he ever loved, Penny, who he was separated from and hasn’t seen in years.
Penny, now an adult, is living an ordinary life when she gets a knock on her door and finds herself in handcuffs, accused of murder and whisked back to the place she grew up. Her only comfort when the past comes back to haunt her are the memories of her precious, rebellious pony.
Hearing of Penny’s fate, Pony knows that Penny is no murderer. So, as smart and devious as he is cute, the pony must use his hard-won knowledge of human weakness and cruelty to try to clear Penny’s name and find the real killer.
This acutely observant feel-good mystery reveals the humanity of animals and beastliness of humans in a rollicking escapade of epic proportions.
Mystery [Berkley, On Sale: November 5, 2024, Hardcover / e-Book, ISBN: 9780593640364 / eISBN: 9780593640388]
CHRISTINA LYNCH’s picturesque journey includes chapters at Harvard, where she was an editor on the Harvard Lampoon, and in Milan, where she was correspondent for W magazine and Women’s Wear Daily, and disappeared for four years in Tuscany. In L.A. she was on the writing staff of Unhappily Ever After,; Encore, Encore; The Dead Zone; and Wildfire. She now lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and teaches at College of the Sequoias.
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