Interview: Jeannette de Beauvoir on Trafficking in Murder
How did you come up with the title?
I have to just laugh—I try to show that each of my mysteries has a murder in it, so I use words like fatal, deadly, and so on. And since human trafficking as a crime was also involved, I came up with Trafficking in Murder. The silly part of it is that it’s absolutely technically meaningless—but it still sounded good, my publisher agreed, so we left it at that.
Can you give us a glimpse into the research that went into writing this story?
I generally spend two or three years researching the stories I write—once it’s in print, it’s forever, and I want to include everything that I can learn into my understanding, even though not all of it makes it into the original book. For Trafficking in Murder, there were a number of subplots that needed researching: the background to producing a weekly television program, the processes involved in human trafficking, and the history and culture of the Wampanoag tribe. So I was gathering a lot of threads together!
What is your inspiration?
Most of my books are mystery novels—what that means is at the most basic level, they’re about a crime, finding out how it happened, and resolving the aftermath in some way. And yet all of my novels, though they seem to be about solving crime, are at their core about respect and the non-“othering” of people who are different from us. And that will inevitably lead to exploring our own psyches, questioning why we believe what we believe about others, and figuring out whether we ourselves have room for growth. In exploring and sharing the world of the various different kinds of communities, I am hoping that readers will again enter emotionally into the lives of people they may never have thought about, and then go out and make the world just a little better, safer, and more joyful.
What’s next for you—what can readers look forward to?
I’m well into the research for the 12th Sydney Riley Provincetown mystery—this one will have a paranormal/metaphysical background (Provincetown has so many ghost stories, I couldn’t resist!). And I’m currently doing Draft Three of the next Abbie Bradford International mystery: after heading up to Base Camp in The Everest Enigma, she’ll be checking out some past espionage in England.
When a Boston TV crew comes to Provincetown to shoot a segment at the Race Point Inn, owner Sydney Riley takes it in stride… until one of the producers mysteriously disappears. The missing producer soon winds up murdered, miles away, the corpse gruesomely displayed in a Wampanoag graveyard. Worse, a bizarre note on the body implies Sydney is responsible!
Meanwhile, a beautiful young Wampanoag woman has also gone missing. Ali, Sydney’s husband and a DHS counter-trafficking agent, is assigned to look into her disappearance. And Sydney needs to investigate who killed the TV producer and left that horrifying note. Are the two cases connected? Has Sydney’s past come back to haunt her—and threaten the people she loves?
Don’t miss this gripping eleventh entry in Jeannette de Beauvoir’s beloved Sydney Riley Provincetown mystery series!