Title: Blood Music: A Thriller
Author: Jessie Prichard Hunter
Genre: Thriller
Publish Date: February 24, 2015
Publisher: Witness Impulse an imprint of HarperCollins Publishing
ISBN: 0062389289
ASIN: B00MMG19ZU
Pages: 320 pages
List Price: 2.99 USD

~ Synopsis ~

Chilling…A riveting thriller.” NEW YORK MAGAZINE

New York City is caught in the cold grip of a brutal serial killer who savagely rapes and murders his young, blonde victims. While ravaging them, his mind whirls with symphonic images and raging desires–rarely giving thought to his loving wife and child.

Young, blonde Zelly Wyche has a new baby and a happy life with her dependable electrician husband. She, too, is petrified by the madness and the unthinkable tragedy of the murders. While the serial killers’ sole survivor and a victim’s brother mount a desperate vigilante hunt for the “Symphony Slasher,” a chill runs up Zelly’s spine. She is beginning to wonder if the killer could be closer than she thinks. But no. Impossible. She has to be dead wrong….

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Why I Wrote Blood Music

After Blood Music was published, several people I knew, mostly from my daughter’s preschool, came up to me and said, without rancor, “I thought you were a nice person!” If by that they meant a person who is not devoured with curiosity about the darkest parts of the human psyche, then no, I am not a nice person.

Several years before I wrote Blood Music, I dreamt I’d written a book of that name. Now that, I thought, is something I’m going to do one day. I had no idea what it was about, but it certainly was a good title.

Some time later, on a lovely spring afternoon, I was sitting with my baby girl on a park lawn at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, where I was living at the time. It was quiet and calm, with perfect sun. Suddenly I thought, What if there was someone in the bushes with a knife, watching us, and he decided to kill me if I turned my face his way? Yes, this is the sort of thing I think regularly, even to this day. I absolutely loved it. That’s Blood Music, I thought, and hurried home to write it.

I knew it had to have music in it, of course, so I put some, right at the beginning. The first chapter of Blood Music is among the finest things I have ever written, and I am proud to say it was a first draft that took about twenty minutes to finish. It was then that I knew this was a book I absolutely had to write, although I had only the foggiest idea of what it was going to be about.

At that point I had studied abnormal psychology, and specifically serial killings, for some twenty years, since I was fifteen. I had just finished another novel, Like Love, which I still adore and want to see published, in some form, one day. But although I had taken great care and love in the writing of it, it lacked one thing: a plot. I had studied dialogue, I knew how to write a sentence and create a scene. But a plot is something that sadly escapes a great many first novelists.

To make up for it I decided to write a completely plot-driven book, a thriller. Now, thrillers have a rather bad name, although I have met very few people who don’t (at least secretly) love them. They’re considered second-rate as far as writing goes, and I consider myself a literary writer. So I decided to write a plot-driven literary thriller.

It took me eight months to write the first draft, all the while raising my baby, Leah. At eight months she would crawl across the floor, pull herself up to the computer, and try to tear my hands away from the keyboard. (Later, my boy would crawl across the floor, pull himself up to the computer, and try to type with me.) I would tape Sesame Street and play it for Leah so that I could have an hour to write, which I ended up doing, in small notebooks, at a counter in the kitchen. As long as she couldn’t see what I was doing, I was all right. Heaven help me if she figured it out, though, and she was one smart baby. She wanted me all to herself, all the time; but that’s just being a mother, and now I laugh at how guilty I felt about those Sesame Street tapes.

I wrote Blood Music because I had to; it really was that simple. A name, a scene, a creation being born. That’s one of the things I love most about writing: It has its own agenda.

I did change one word for my sister’s sake (I forget which), but when it went into Editorial at Turtle Bay, Random House’s newest imprint, I stipulated that not one word of it could be changed. Not one was—although of course that had nothing to do with me!

About the Author

Jessie Prichard Hunter is the author of the psychological thriller Blood Music, forthcoming from Witness Impulse. She currently resides in New York’s Hudson Valley with her husband and two children.

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