In the author’s third novel, The Fervent Whites, a wrongly convicted white couple’s return from prison to their predominantly Black hamlet stirs up old resentments.
What inspired this novel?
The idea to write about a small, troubled neighborhood in Upstate New York came to me in 2020 because I was living in Saugerties, and my landlord and his family are from El Salvador.
Maybe a week after I’d moved in, I asked him if he was the only property owner of color there, and he said no, but his was probably the only family of color living there full-time. Then I started to notice that when I would go walking, some neighbors would throw their hands up and say hello, and some would turn their backs and not acknowledge my presence at all. Sometimes you think it’s just a bad mood or whatever, but it becomes consistent, and you’re like, okay, I think this is a race thing. That planted the first seed. And then some time later, the Tops grocery store shooting happened in Buffalo, and things really started to take shape.
You didn’t start out as a huge fan of crime fiction. Is the idea of mystery as a plot catalyst growing on you?
As a reader, I do like to have some sort of quest, whether it’s to find a killer, or to find a missing person, or whatever. Even if we have to take some stops along the way and watch characters deal with their lives unrelated to the mystery, I still enjoy the fact that I’m going to get an answer at the end. My last novel took regular breaks from the murder plot, but this time I tried to stay closer to the main mystery.
Do you see this novel as an evolution of themes you dealt with in your last two books, In West Mills and Decent People?
I think I intended for this one to be a severe departure, but the homophobia theme is there, and that’s definitely present in both previous books. And simmering racism—that topic returned. I think what makes The Fervent Whites different from my last two novels is that, in those, the Black people and the white people shared a town, but they didn’t live next door to each other. And this time, I made them neighbors—they can throw a stone at their neighbor’s house. That really turns up the heat when someone in the equation is secretly racist.
Often, we hear about people of color being wrongly imprisoned, but here, the wrongly convicted couple is white. Were you deliberately subverting expectations?
Yes. I’m new to writing thrillers, but I like to toy with what the reader expects—not that all readers like that. I’m the type of writer who reads my Goodreads reviews, and I find that some readers seem to prefer a more predictable plot. I won’t say I’ll never go that way, but my intention so far has always been to upend expectations.
