by Victoria Helen Stone

Growing up poor in the Midwest, I still remember the awe I felt glimpsing California life in the movies. The beach was a big draw, sure, but it was more than just surf and palm trees. When I was ten, E.T. debuted and revealed a whole world I knew nothing about: suburbs, cul-de-sacs, sculpted landscaping, trails winding into the hills… and skateboards! As a city girl who lived on a busy street a few blocks from a big airport, those were the scenes that truly captured my imagination.

Since my first trip to California in my twenties, I’ve visited many times, at first to see my husband’s family in the L.A. area, but later to really explore. I rented a tiny cabin in Big Sur for a solo writing trip. I drove past the fields of the San Joaquin Valley, peering in fascinated wonder at pumpkin vines and potato plants and the people who grow the food we eat. After the worst of the pandemic, my husband and I packed up our car and set out to explore the back roads and retro motels of the California desert.

And I started setting my novels there. California is a suspense author’s dreamscape, because California is our whole country wrapped up in one state. There are cities of every kind, from the dry sprawl of L.A. to the Midwestern-esque riverside charm of Sacramento to the packed hills of San Francisco.

Victoria Helen Stone

But if you want isolation? My God, the possibilities are endless, and that’s the spooky sweet spot right there. The desert, obviously, the landscape itself a danger to your life, even before you add a murderer to the mix. The coast, a riot of deadly cliffs and icy water and deserted beaches. There are a hundred ways to kill a character on a coastline. The vast stretches of farmland and scrub where no one would hear you scream are another perfect setting. And what about the threat of mountain peaks and river gorges and forests so isolated you could never escape no matter how far you ran?

Even more important than setting, California is full of suspects of every stripe, in a way no other state can be. Glittering actors, hardworking migrants, tech billionaires, rich farmers, desperate suburbanites, drug runners, cabin dwellers, famous chefs, outdoor guides. Everyone converges there, leaving seams where humanity fits jaggedly together. In most other states, you’d need to contrive a White Lotus style retreat to put such disparate characters into close proximity. But in California? You can write your way into a story where any of these people is a suspect or a victim or both.

In fact, that’s the exact reason I chose Santa Cruz as the setting for my latest book, Bald-Faced Liar. The protagonist, Elizabeth May, is a traveling nurse who moves every six months. It’s her way of protecting her privacy after a traumatic Satanic-panic trial scarred her childhood. But when she moves to Santa Cruz, she feels safe. There are so many interesting characters to draw attention away from her, and with huge numbers of people moving through every year, she feels anonymous.

Unfortunately, that’s a recipe for putting a woman in danger too. Isn’t that what draws so many serial killers to the state? California is both isolated and crowded. Transient and rural. Familiar and vast. Rugged and sophisticated. Anyone can be anonymous there if they desire it. Anyone can move between worlds, becoming someone new just a few counties down the road.

And that’s exactly what makes it a treasure. It’s the possibility of California that always shines through, both for a writer and for the people who’ve been emigrating there for centuries now. Thank you all for giving me and my characters room to grow.

Bald-Faced Liar by Victoria Helen Stone

Traveling nurse Elizabeth May has a promising new home in Santa Cruz. And another new identity. It’s a pattern of reinvention for a woman escaping her traumatic childhood—and hiding from the decades of notoriety and destruction that followed the Satanic Panic. Invisibility has kept Elizabeth safe. Until now. After all these years, someone sees her for who she is.
Threat by threat, a vengeful stalker is dismantling Elizabeth’s carefully constructed lifetime of lies. And no one in her temporary circle can be trusted—not her fleeting new love interest, not her supportive online friend, and certainly not the police. They’ve never been there for her.
As fear sharpens to terror, Elizabeth soon discovers something about her past that even she didn’t know. The revelation could finally set her on a path of healing and redemption. Or, now alone in the dark, it could be Elizabeth’s worst nightmare.

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Wall Street Journal bestselling author Victoria Helen Stone, author of the runaway hit Jane Doe, writes critically acclaimed novels of dark intrigue and emotional suspense. Her work includes Follow Her Down, At the Quiet Edge, The Last One Home, Problem Child, Half Past, The Hook, and the chart-toppers False Step and Evelyn, After.
Victoria writes in her home office high in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, far from her origins in the flattest plains of Minnesota, Texas, and Oklahoma. She enjoys gorgeous summer trail hikes in the mountains almost as much as she enjoys staying inside by the fire during winter. Victoria is passionate about dessert, true crime, and her terror of mosquitoes, which have targeted her in a diabolical conspiracy to hunt her down no matter the season.

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