Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night

Alex Kava

When Alex Kava wrote her first novel, A Perfect Evil, she had no intention of making it the beginning of a new series. In fact, the character, FBI profiler Special Agent Maggie O'Dell doesn't enter the story until the seventh chapter. Instead of a series, Kava had simply based her story on two separate crimes that had occurred in Nebraska during the 1980s. One of the crimes, a serial killer who preyed on little boys, happened in the community where Kava was then working as a copy editor and paste-up artist for a small-town newspaper.

Years later, when Kava decided to write a novel, it was the same summer John Joubert-who thirteen years earlier had confessed to and was convicted for killing three little boys- was executed. The other crime, another little boy who was murdered in nearby Omaha several years after Joubert's capture, remains unsolved to this day. These two real-life crimes inspired Kava. However, because of A Perfect Evil and Maggie O'Dell's international success, Kava was compelled to develop a series. The results are four more novels featuring Special Agent Maggie O'Dell: Split Second, The Soul Catcher, At the Stroke of Madness and A Necessary Evil. Her one standalone thriller, One False Move, is also loosely based on a real crime.

Kava believes that truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction, which seems to be reiterated every time she begins research for a novel. One aspect of the Maggie O'Dell series that readers often comment on is the relationship between Maggie and her mother. It can best be described as challenging and confrontational, and definitely a far cry from what we perceive as a typical mother-daughter relationship. And yet, just like in real life there remains a bond, though sometimes unex-plainable and often irrational. Here, in Goodnight, Sweet Mother, Kava takes Maggie and her mother on a road trip to illustrate that relationships, as well as perceptions, aren't always what they appear to be.