Early in the book, we meet him seducing a victim while masquerading as a deaf man named Tobias. Her husband, the unnamed narrator, is clearly complicit in the crimes and is also clearly a follower with his own set of skills. She’d be Millicent, married 15 years, the mother of two teenage children, a boy and a girl. “What if the woman was the instigator? And if it were a woman, who would that woman be?” “It’s always the men who are the instigators in these crimes,” she says. This got Downing thinking about gender reversal. “Ultimately, the wife let her go and ended up testifying against her husband.” The inspiration? “I saw this documentary about a couple who kidnapped a woman and held her captive for years,” Downing says. The group was especially taken with Downing’s Millicent character, a suburban wife and mother who harbors and indulges some extremely terrifying impulses. It was, she says, “a lot about the publishing industry that just made me give up.”īut two years ago, Downing joined a local writing group that was very encouraging. Early on, she attended a writing conference in New Orleans (where she lives now, a transplant from the Bay Area). The perk is that it involves travel, and she loves to write in airports.ĭowning says she always wrote novels, in all genres-some she finished and some she didn’t. Her job (which she plans to keep) is as a corporate secretary for a manufacturing company. Until now, Downing tells me, she always thought of her writing as a hobby.

Books by samantha downing