I am delighted to share a Q&A with Raymond Khoury,
author of RASPUTIN'S SHADOW, an ingenious, fast-paced historical thriller from the author
of the New York Times bestseller The Last Templar.
On a cold, bleak day in 1916, all hell breaks loose in a
mining pit in the Ural Mountains. Overcome by a strange paranoia, the miners
attack one another, savagely and ferociously. Minutes later, two men—a
horrified scientist and Grigory Rasputin, trusted confidant of the tsar—hit a
detonator, blowing up the mine to conceal all evidence of the carnage.
In the present day, FBI agent Sean Reilly’s search for Reed
Corrigan, the CIA mindcontrol spook who brainwashed Reilly’s son, takes a
backseat to a new, disturbing case. A Russian embassy attaché seems to have
committed suicide by jumping out of a fourth-floor window in Queens. The
apartment’s owners, a retired physics teacher from Russia and his wife, have
gone missing, and further investigation reveals that the former may not be who
the FBI believe him to be.
Joined by Russian Federal Security Service agent Larisa
Tchoumitcheva, Reilly’s investigation of the old man’s identity will uncover a
desperate search for a small, mysterious device, with consequences that reach
back in time and which, in the wrong hands, could have a devastating impact on
the modern world.
Packed with the twists, intrigue, and excitement that
Khoury’s many fans have come to expect, Rasputin’s Shadow will keep readers
turning pages long into the night.
Head on over to www.bookbitch.com
if you’d like to win a signed copy!
1. RASPUTIN’S
SHADOW is a great mix of technology, history, and action, but there is a little
romance too. How do you work to balance these in the novel?
I guess it just comes from practice, really. I’ve been a
storyteller for years, whether in screenplays of in my previous five novels,
and I suppose it’s just a personal preference for how to tell a story, for the
pacing, for having a gut feeling about when those different aspects should pop
up and not jar or crowd each other out. It’s not something I consciously map
out, I don’t outline the books; I just spend a lot of time setting up the
characters and their motivations, the triggers of the story, then I let them
loose and the story—and all the elements you refer to—come in when it feels
right.
2. In RASPUTIN’S
SHADOW, there are two distinct storylines that are woven together: one in early
Russia and the other in modern-day New York City. How important is it for you
to have both the historical and contemporary storylines in your novels?
I’ve now done it in four our of my six novels (THE SIGN and
THE DEVIL’S ELIXIR are the two only-contemporary books). So it varies. I do enjoy
writing the historical storylines, though, and I feel the readers really love
going back in time and living through a parallel (though secondary) storyline,
especially if it feels very “real,” which is my aim. But in books like THE
SIGN, for instance, it was never part of the plan, and I love that book (which
is actually my longest to date) as much as its siblings.
3. At this point
in your writing career, what has been your most memorable moment as an author?
I guess I was spoiled early on. You have to remember that
when I wrote THE LAST TEMPLAR (my first book), it was a personal challenge, I
was just adapting the screenplay I had written in 1996 and I had zero
expectation of it being a bestseller. So I remember vividly when, the week
before it came out, my agent called and said “based on the numbers so far, we
just might have a chance of breaking into the New York Times extended list (not
the list itself). Which was amazing enough. Then that first Wednesday night
after it came out, late at night, I got the call from Mitch Hoffman, my editor
at Dutton, who told me we’re on the list, and #10. Which was surreal. Then the
following week, I completely lost my voice from nervousness while waiting for
the call which would inevitably tell me we were off the list. I was walking
back from a football game when Mitch called again and said, “Guess what? You’re
#5.” Which, I was told, never happens. And it just kept getting better from
there.”
4. What is next
for you?
There are 4 stories fighting to make it to the blank page on
my laptop screen, I wish I could write all 4 at the same time. I’m deep into
one of them, it’s a standalone, a bit of a departure from the Reilly books.
Then as soon as it’s done, the next installment of Reilly.
5. What do you
hope readers will take away from RASPUTIN’S SHADOW?
I hope they’ll have fun and not be able to put it down! I
hope they’ll have enjoyed hanging out with Reilly, Tess, Leo, Rasputin, Misha,
and the rest (maybe not so much Koschey). I hope they’ll be curious to find out
more about Russian’s history in the first decades of the 20th century, the fall
of the tsars and the brutal rise of communism. And I hope they’ll have learned
a thing or two about how our brains work, what’s possible, what technologies are
being researched out there and how horrific it would be if they were ever
deployed…
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