Interview: Tami Hoag, author of 'Cold Cold Heart'
HEA is thrilled to welcome back Paste BN and New York Times bestselling author Tami Hoag, whose new release, Cold Cold Heart, is out today. Tami chats with us about her new suspense, the challenge of writing a heroine with PTSD and a brain injury, and the contradictions in her guilty TV-watching pleasures.
Joyce: Welcome back to HEA, Tami! Please tell us a little about your new release, Cold Cold Heart.
Tami: Sure. Cold Cold Heart is about a young woman who has survived the unthinkable, but has brutal physical and psychological scars to deal with. Her life as she knew it is over, and she returns to her hometown to heal and try to figure out how to rebuild from zero. As she tries to piece together her memory, she starts digging into the unsolved disappearance of her best friend from school, who went missing the summer after they graduated.
Joyce: Heroine Dana in Cold Cold Heart was the victim of your fictional (and freaking scary) serial killer Doc Holiday in The 9th Girl. Dana has brain damage and PTSD. What kind of challenges did you encounter writing a character struggling with such intense issues?
Tami: That was very hard. I've written characters with PTSD before, and that's always emotionally taxing. The traumatic brain injury was a fresh kind of hell. It literally made my head hurt as I struggled to imagine what Dana was dealing with — the pain, the holes in her memory, the inability to remember how to accomplish routine tasks, searching for the right words when words had literally been her life, the struggle of coming to grips with the fact that she isn't who she was before, that she has to rebuild her life from nothing. And then I had to go and double my fun with the character John Villante, who suffered a head injury while serving in Iraq and is also dealing with post-traumatic stress.
Joyce: Now my head hurts, too!
You didn't intend for Dana to have her own book when you started The 9th Girl. What happened when you were writing her that made you decide you needed to tell her full story?
Tami: That's true. She started out as a minor character in The 9th Girl, but when I was writing the climax of her part of the story, she wasn't done. I've learned that when a character wants to take a different turn, it's always best if I let them. I know that sounds crazy, but that's how it works in my head. The books are always better for it.
Joyce: Do you have some favorite dialogue from Cold Cold Heart?
Tami:
"Are you all right, sweetheart?" her mother asked.
"I'm fine," Dana said, almost laughing at the absurdity of the statement. "I'm a brain-damaged idiot who sparked a manhunt by forgetting to turn off a faucet. It's all good."
Joyce: You write some pretty dark suspense. What do you do to get out of a scary character's head after a day of writing?
Tami: I just put it down and walk away. I learned from watching cops deal with their jobs how to detach myself a little emotionally when necessary for self-preservation. I don't let myself inhabit those dark characters in the same way I do with my protagonists. I also feel like I don't have anything in common with most killers, so there's not the same kind of empathy that binds me to other characters.
Joyce: Do you have any guilty pleasures of the TV variety?
Tami: Of course! I have two from opposite ends of the spectrum. I am a mixed martial arts fanatic, and I will watch fights until the cows come home. Opposite of that, I spend Sunday mornings watching Say Yes to the Dress, the show about women trying on wedding dresses. Crazy, I know. I personally have no interest in ever getting married again, but I love that show. I love watching the dynamics of the brides and their friends and families. And last year I was obsessed with True Detective. I thought that was brilliant. I watched every new episode three times over to make sure I didn't miss anything.
Joyce: Read any great romance or suspense (or both) lately?
Tami: I've been reading Liane Moriarty lately. Her stuff isn't truly romance or suspense, but has elements of each. I like her voice, and she has a great sense of humor. Her writing is a great palate cleanser before I dive into something dark and gritty.
Joyce: I know you don't like to reveal much about what you're working on now, but can you share maybe a little tidbit about what readers might expect to see next from Tami Hoag?
Tami: I'm actually writing the next Kovac and Liska book. They have a cameo appearance at the beginning of Cold Cold Heart where Liska is struggling with the idea of leaving Homicide for a job with regular hours. In the new book she has moved to the cold case squad and is investigating the unsolved 20-year-old murder of a sex-crimes detective. Kovac, meanwhile, is having to break in a new partner, and that is predictably going badly. An intriguing double homicide gets his mind off his woes — the brutal murder of a middle-aged husband and wife in an affluent neighborhood. Death by antique Samurai sword. It's a very twisty shell game of a story, but it's always fun writing those characters. They're like old friends.
Joyce: Thanks, Tami! Can't wait.
Find out more about Tami and her books at tamihoag.com.
HEA curator and contributor Joyce Lamb is a Paste BN best-selling author of romantic suspense and three-time RITA finalist and has been a professional journalist for 25 years. You can reach her at jlamb@usatoday.com and follow her on Twitter (@JoyceLamb). You can also follow HEA on Twitter (@HEAusatoday).