Luanne Rice on "The Shadow Box," her second mystery

January 23, 2021 11:01 pm • Last Updated: January 23, 2021 11:05 pm

By Rick Koster
Day Arts/Features writer

Author Luanne Rice poses for a portrait at a friend’s home in Noank in February 2019. (Sarah Gordon/The Day)
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Luanne Rice explores the dark side

Old Lyme novelist Luanne Rice is known to readers, fans, friends, bookstore folks and animals — she has four cats — as one of the kindest, warmest folks you'll meet. These traits have been very much on display over the course of dozens of bestselling novels that explore family dynamics, the intricacies of the heart, and the complex cartography of life itself.

About two years ago, though, Rice started killing people.

Not literally, of course — see above on gentle demeanor.

But her last two novels, "The Last Day" and "The Shadow Box," the latter of which will be published Feb. 1, center around homicide and violent acts and are published by Thomas & Mercer, the elite mystery imprint. The fact that Rice is writing crime novels, though, isn't as big a stretch as it might seem. Many of her titles over the years have dealt with darker subjects including spousal abuse, embezzlement, kidnapping, and jail time.

Plus, Rice is also a keen student of her beloved Connecticut shoreline — and that includes some sordid real-life felonies that have occurred and piqued her curiosity over the years. So perhaps it isn't such a stretch that, at some point, she would write a novel that, while focusing on the familiar and familial, centered specifically on crime rather than using felonious activity as a side plot.

Turns out, Rice is pretty great at this murder stuff.

"The truth is, I don't like killing people and creating mayhem," Rice says. "But maybe some of my characters do!"

Rice's first book for Thomas & Mercer, "The Last Day," was about a group of women, friends since childhood, and what happened when one of them was brutally murdered. Oh, and don't forget art theft! Reviews and sales were excellent, and big-time thriller writers including Lisa Scottoline, Tess Gerritsone, and Lee Child enthusiastically reviewed the work.

Now, in "The Shadow Box," Rice writes about renowned artist Claire Beaudry Chase, married to Connecticut state's attorney Griffin Chase, the odds-on candidate to be the next governor. To outsiders, the elite couple has it all. But as the campaign intensifies and Claire is preparing for her latest exhibition, she's brutally attacked by a masked assailant and left for dead. Except she doesn't die. Claire manages to escape into the dense woodlands near their home and hides out until she can be certain about who tried to kill her. If she's right, it's not just her husband who might be behind it, but a whole cadre of elite state-wide powerbrokers.

Meanwhile, the same day Claire is assaulted, two of the couple's neighbors, Don and Sallie Benson, are onboard their boat when it explodes. State police detective Connor Reid — just one of a small cast of popular characters from "The Last Day" who return and play significant roles — thinks the two events are connected. And the titular shadow box — the centerpiece of Claire's new exhibition — provides damning clues as to the responsible parties if he can figure out what they mean.

On Tuesday, in a special pre-publication event, Rice appears for the January edition of our "Read of THE DAY" book club, held in partnership with Bank Square Books. It's the first anniversary presentation of the club, and Rice was the in-store guest at that initial gathering. The coversation, which I'll moderate, is a unique opportunity for local readers to get an advance preview as well as preorder signed copies via the Bank Square Books. The autographed books will be available Feb. 1.

A lifetime writing

If Rice is settling into a groove writing books with crime elements, she hasn't changed anything in the approach to plotting. Over the course of her career, she never has any idea, when she starts a book, how it's going to end.

"It's the same for 'The Last Day' and 'The Shadow Box' in that I didn't know who the killer was," she says by phone last week. "Well, I kind of knew in 'The Shadow Box' because I wanted to write about the dynamics of that kind of marriage — where the husband is a powerful man with a lot to lose. But I wasn't sure. Could there be a cabal of powerful men behind it all that needed him elected? Or maybe there was an affair that had gone wrong." She laughs. "Or just random romantic skullduggery. The truth is, I don't plot at all. I just have a theme or an idea and start writing. As always, I trusted my characters to tell me when it's time for me to know."

When asked if the accelerating tension associated with crime novels requires a different rhythm and approach than the structures of her earlier work, Rice pauses.

"That's a really interesting question," she says. "Maybe because I'm older and have written more, maybe my mind adapts intuitively. I remember being told as a young writer that you have to find your voice. I had no idea what that meant. Was it a deliberate choice or did it mean the voice in my head?

"Now, maybe the answer to this is that I DID find my voice. You know your own rhythms and interests and trust them and, maybe most importantly, you don't doubt yourself so much. Doubt is so counterproductive. Whatever I'm writing, I sit at the page and have learned you trust your own voice and who you are."

If the plots of "The Last Day" and "The Shadow Box" revolve around crimes, longtime fans can take comfort in knowing that many of the elements they love about Rice's work are still present. There's always an affectionately rendered Connecticut shoreline seeting — along with warm hints of New London that surface occasionally.

"Old Lyme and the beach area have always been the setting, and the fictional characters have become a community in my mind," Rice says. "Nature, family, friendship ... these are always strong and gratifying elements of my writing journey. I think examining them through the prism of violence provides a different context. The beautiful things in life are even brighter when you've been through the dark. I've always written about pain and sadness in families but not anyone too frighteningly violent or irredeemable."

It's in the DNA

It's also true that elements of Rice's past are coalescing in ways that provide spark for creative exploration. "The Last Day" contained true crime elements from a homicide in Black Point in the early 1990s. And, without getting too specific, Rice says she's had loved ones murdered and that "those events influenced me a lot. To see how violent crime affects people and to have those bizarre connections is something that I think about."

She also points to her parents — mom was an English teacher and dad sold typewriters — and wonders if those childhood connections suggested a career in writing. Plus, her paternal grandfather was a captain of detectives in Hartford.

"He had true crime magazine scattered through the house, and he was the #1 pistol shot in the state," Rice says. "And I remember being around him and wanting so much to to be an investigator like Nancy Drew or Agatha Christie. Not so much because of the crime but because of how it was investigated. So maybe it was all inevitable that I'd reach this point."

In that spirit, another particularly impressionable moment in Rice's childhood was the first time she ever a shadow box. It was at the home of one of her grandmother's friends, and "it was just this magical installation," Rice says. "I was 6 or 7, and I was just captivated by this; it absolutely stuck with me, and here we are now with one turning up in a book."

Always more stories

As Rice celebrates the publication of "The Shadow Box" — Tami Hoag, Harlen Coben and Child are just a few of the crime writers who have provided advance blurbs — she's already well along in two new books. One is her next mystery title for Thomas & Mercer, and the other will be her third Young Adult for Scholastic Books.

"Thomas & Mercer have been wonderful and supportive and so creative in their efforts," Rice says, "and I'm so grateful to have found a publisher like Scholastic for my YA books. Writing is a tough business, and these are people who understand and care. I feel excited to keep writing."