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Crime novelist writes a gripping mystery set in Brooklyn

Brooklyn BookBeat

January 22, 2018 By Natasha Soto Special to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Brooklyn-based author Katia Lief. Courtesy of Katia Lief
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Crime novelist Katia Lief has lived in Boerum Hill Brooklyn for 21 years, and Carroll Gardens before that. She says that after she graduated college, rent was cheap, and it was a good place for aspiring writers to give their work an honest chance. She has since found that living in Brooklyn is deeply tied to her work as a writer. “There is a particular sense of history that floats up as you walk around,” she said of Boerum Hill, “the experience of this place definitely makes its way into my writing.”

Lief has written a four-book crime series about a Brooklyn-based investigator. Her most recent book, “A Map of the Dark,” written under her pseudonym Karen Ellis, features a different character who also lives in Brooklyn, an FBI investigator named Elsa Myers. Myers is a complicated individual whose trauma extends beyond her days working at FBI. As she uncovers the secrets of a string of disappeared children in her neighborhood, she is forced to reckon with a childhood she would rather forget.

Myers’ reckoning with her past comes to a head as she watches her father die in the hospital. At the same time, the disappearances around her continue, and the pressure mounts for her to solve the case. Myers must reckon with her own inner turmoil, which begins as a seeming distraction from the case and morphs eerily into a possible piece of the puzzle. Still, in order to prevent further abductions, Myers has to navigate her inner minefield while remaining aware of the facts before her.

While Lief is now a seasoned crime writer capable of constructing gripping plotlines, she did not originally set out to write crime novels. “I began writing crime novels as an exercise in understanding how suspense works in a novel,” she explained, “and then I got hooked.” Lief learned a great deal through her experimentation with the genre and currently teaches suspense writing at The New School.

One might wonder whether writing about intense murder mysteries that your own neighborhood would make you wary of going outside after dark. “I don’t lose sleep over it,” she said. “In fact, maybe it helps purge fear.”

 

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