![]() I have a little collection of Christopher Pike paperbacks that I’ve held on to over the years. I started reading Stephen King at around nine or 10 –I know that’s a little young! There were kids in his book, so yeah, I wanted to read them even though they were scary. What are some books that inspired your love of suspense and mystery? At some point, you just have to know yourself and do what you’re best at. ![]() I embrace it now since it seems to be where I naturally go. I’d start writing a book about sisterhood and end up writing about a murder – just kind of happens every single time. It became apparent that this was going to be my accidental genre. So I would set out to write these very literary books and what I would end up writing would be suspense and thrillers. Turns out that a lifetime of reading dark stuff, like Anne Rice and Stephen King and Dean Koontz, had influenced me more than I realized. I had always known I wanted to write books, but I thought I would write literary fiction. I really wanted to play into that idea of what magicians do to control the attention and to control what the audience is perceiving. I feel like Summer operates with a lot of the same principles of misdirection and distraction. I also did research into how magicians operate. It’s about empathy and really understanding what it’s like to be in someone’s skin. From the outside, she can see how people are internally experiencing the world, and that informs how she picks pockets. The interesting thing about Summer is that she has developed this very deep, instinctive understanding of the people around her and how they’re feeling. I did a lot of research on pickpocketing – not just how to pickpocket, but how it feels to be pickpocketed. What research did you do when building Summer and Leo’s skills, i.e. So I do feel like I have worn a groove up and down the state, going back and forth, up and down. And I lived down in LA with my mom, and then we also lived in San Diego for a minute. My dad is in the East Bay now, but when I was growing up, he lived in San Francisco proper. I was inspired to set most of my books here because of my parents and our travels up and down the state. It takes years to really understand those layers of what it’s like to live here, and sometimes it takes a lifetime. And I think it’s clear from reading my books that I’m from here these books are written by someone who is a hometown Californian. Most of my books take place in California, especially southern California. ![]() Besides Leo, California is Summer’s only other tether – “its freeways and roads my arteries and veins,” she says. After that, it was just about finding the right adventure for them to go on. The relationship between Summer and Leo was the heart of the book, I felt. ![]() And so I started thinking, what is it like when someone who has floated through the world so untethered finds that one person that they feel is their home? How close can that bond be when people are traveling together, and when they don’t have a million other people and jobs and other things they’re beholden to? I really wanted to give her a companion I had tried in a previous book, but it just wasn’t right. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. “You Can Trust Me” is both an examination of relationships with chosen family and a love letter to California from Heard. It’s up to Summer, using her wits and her skills picked up over years of living on the edge, to get to the island, find Leo and escape. But while targeting an eccentric billionaire, Leo goes with him to his private island – and vanishes. The two friends survive by scamming, grifting and pickpocketing the wealthy. In Heard’s new thriller set along the highways and coastlines of California, Summer and Leo are two young women living out of their car. The key, Heard says, was finding the right companion. Related: Sign up for our free newsletter about books, authors, reading and moreĪ writer of what she calls “dark little stories” for adults and young adults, Heard says her main character, Summer, had nearly appeared in two of her earlier books before Heard found the story that was right for her. That’s what happened with Wendy Heard’s most recent book, “You Can Trust Me,” out June 13 from Bantam. Sometimes characters in books take on lives of their own – so much so that they end up steering the plot or demand to be placed in a different book altogether.
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