New York Times bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz — who also writes under the pen names of Amanda Quick and Jayne Castle — had always wanted to write an amnesia story.
“It’s the ultimate mystery of ‘did I do it?’” she says, in an exclusive interview with BookTrib. “And it just lends itself perfectly to romantic suspense.”
The problem was, Krentz couldn’t figure out how to give the characters amnesia without succumbing to familiar tropes — and then, how to bring them out of it for the “happily ever after” readers have come to expect from her novels.
But then she came up with the idea to have three women who didn’t know each other walk into the ruins of a mysterious hotel, each thinking they’re there for a job interview. They wake up, an undetermined amount of time later, not only with a loss of memory, but also with psychic powers.
This idea became the basis for the Lost Night Files trilogy, with Book 1, Sleep No More, shining the protagonist spotlight on Pallas Llewellyn. In The Night Island (Berkley), we follow Talia March who is still trying to solve the mystery of what happened to her and the other two women. She follows up on a lead — and is led to a remote island where cell phones don’t work, danger lurks behind every boulder, and a killer is on the loose.
There’s also a romantic interest. Obviously.
“Talia is very focused on solving the problem,” Krentz says, adding that Talia also has an affliction for good food, which takes the reader down some tasty segues as we move through the plot. “The hero in this book is also obsessed, albeit for different reasons.”
Their paths collide of course — this is a classic Krentz novel of romantic suspense — but in this series, Krentz throws in a bit of the supernatural. Not in the form of werewolves and vampires, but in a psychic sense. For Talia, that means her “intuition” is ramped up to uncomfortable levels.
“If you’re born with a psychic ability, I think you’d learn to manage it,” Krentz says. “But if you’re slammed with it in your adult life, the first thing you might do is start questioning your sanity. Part of the story is how Talia is learning to cope with this ability. I think we’ve all got some version of intuition and I think that’s why readers can follow into this world with me. Because this world ultimately spins out of intuition and dreams — and we’ve all got those.”
Krentz admits her personal fascination stems from her mother, who she says was a “hippie before it was ok to be a hippie.”
“In her world, she had this idea that we all give off energy and processing all day long, and not all of it is explainable in modern physics,” she says. “Music is a great example. When you listen to music, nothing touches you except the sound waves, but it can have a huge impact on you. It can change your mood, that’s how powerful it is.”
The abilities the characters in The Night Island possess are powerful too — but they’re only part of the story. Krentz introduces a formidable hero for the important romantic subplot, ramps up the suspense by making good use of her setting, and ultimately delivers a fast-paced mystery that is in line with Krentz’s stoic core values as an author: trust and reinvention.
Photo Credit: Mark Von Borstel
About Jayne Ann Krentz:
The author of a string of New York Times bestsellers, Jayne Ann Krentz uses three different pen names for each of her three “worlds.” As Jayne Ann Krentz (her married name) she writes contemporary romantic-suspense. She uses Amanda Quick for her novels of historical romantic-suspense. Jayne Castle (her birth name) is reserved these days for her stories of futuristic/paranormal romantic-suspense. In addition to her fiction writing, she is the editor of, and a contributor to, a non-fiction essay collection, Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
She earned a B.A. in History from the University of California at Santa Cruz and went on to obtain a Masters degree in Library Science from San Jose State University in California. Before she began writing full time she worked as a librarian in both academic and corporate libraries. She is married and lives with her husband, Frank, in Seattle, Washington.
