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| photo: Alaxandra Rutella | |
Hannah Morrissey grew up on a farm in a small northern town and now lives near Milwaukee with her husband and two pugs. Hello, Transcriber (Minotaur Books, November 30, 2021), her debut novel, was inspired by her work as a police transcriber. This thriller-romance hybrid centers on a married police department transcriber who becomes fixated on a case and on the detective covering it.
On your nightstand now:
Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby. I love the premise of two unlikely and unconventional heroes uniting to find out who murdered their sons.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I read Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton for the first time when I was 12. While I always knew I wanted to be a writer, this book opened a whole new world of "What if?"
Your top five authors:
I'm afraid that as soon as I commit to five authors here, I'm going to discover a new favorite. But I consistently love Michael Crichton, Oscar Wilde, Tana French, Gillian Flynn and Lisa Jewell.
Book you've faked reading:
Literally every book for my Vampires in Translation class. Trust me, it sounds cooler than it was. I read The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova instead, and got a much more thorough education on Vlad the Impaler and his victims.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Finlay Donovan Is Killing It by Elle Cosimano. To say I LOVE this book is an understatement. This book is like ordering a piece of chocolate cake, and then discovering a layer of cookie dough in the middle. It's a delicious surprise, with hilarious banter and oh-so-relatable characters. I recommend this book to anyone who loves a fun mystery. In fact, I just recommended it to my dental hygienist.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Girl Who Died by Ragnar Jónasson. I love the cold hues of this cover and the girl who is either falling or floating, reaching for a skeleton key. It gives me chills just looking at it. I haven't read it yet, but it's high up on my TBR!
Book you hid from your parents:
I never really had to hide any books from my parents. I will say, however, that I read the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon when I was pretty young and if they knew how sexy those books are, they might have encouraged me to read something else. Not that I would have listened, haha.
Book that changed your life:
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton is my favorite book from when I was a kid, and it stands the test of time for me, today. It made me fall in love with creating characters and exploring fictional worlds one word at a time.
Favorite line from a book:
Can you do it? When the time comes?... Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? --The Road by Cormac McCarthy
I love the weight of this thought, the sparring idea of killing the person you love most in this world because it's better than what will happen if you don't. Cormac McCarthy is a master at accomplishing rich, painfully evocative emotion in sparse words.
Five books you'll never part with:
I feel like each of these books has something new to offer every time you read them:
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
Mr. Dickens and His Carol by Samantha Silva
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I read an interesting thing about sequels, that they exist because we want to experience something for the first time again. If there was a book I could truly read again for the first time, I would choose Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. She really got me with that twist.
Book with a perfect ending:
I have two: Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett and Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. I won't spoil the endings, of course, but by the time I read the final sentence of each of these novels, I felt like I could look back and see how instrumentally everything had been laid out with total perfection.