Between San Francisco and Silicon Valley exist a lot of small towns you’ve probably never heard of, sandwiched between the ocean and the bay, bordered by mountains and beaches. Each of these towns has its own climate, its own personality.
To the North is San Francisco, with is fog and frigid summers, its iconic bridges and artistic history. To the South is Silicon Valley—sunny, shiny, high-pressure, and rapidly evolving. Although my town is located twenty miles south of San Francisco, it isn’t a suburb in the traditional sense of the word. You can easily get lost in the hills, where there are no streetlights and no sidewalks.
When my family relocated to Paris in 2018, I had a complete draft of The Wonder Test, a suburban suspense novel inspired by the competitive, high-stakes vibe of my corner of the Bay Area. The protagonist is Lina Connerly, an FBI agent on leave from her job in New York City. In the aftermath of a family tragedy, she has returned to her hometown in Northern California with her teenaged son, Rory.
I planned to quickly finish the revision and start a new novel, which would be the second book in the Lina Connerly series. But soon after we arrived in France, the gilets jaunes protests erupted and went on for a year of Saturdays. Although the protests were mostly peaceful, during the most intense weeks of the unrest, cars burned just down the block, windows were smashed throughout our neighborhood, and tear gas drifted through our windows.
Sometimes, you don’t really get to know a place until you leave it. In our Haussmann apartment, with riot police lining up in formation on the street below and water cannons booming just a few blocks away on the Champs Elysees, the revision took on a new life. Immersed in a language I could barely comprehend, adrift in a noisy, restless city where I had no social ties, I burrowed into The Wonder Test and saw my tree-lined, peaceful Northern California town—not to mention the double-edged sword of American inventiveness and American competitiveness—with fresh eyes.
We were still living in Paris in April of 2020, the whole world on edge from the pandemic, when my agent sold the book to Grove Atlantic. Seven months later, just before the second Paris lockdown began, my family left France. I was back home on the Bay Area Peninsula when The Wonder Test was published in early 2021.
“A two-in-one winner: a gripping thriller set in a Stepford-esque California suburb, and a story of surviving loss and building family bonds...it will please readers who like their stories with action and heart in equal measure.” Liz French, Library Journal
Get The Wonder Test on Bookshop.org
Naturally, as soon as we got home, I immersed myself in writing a novel set in Paris. Once again, it took a distance of five thousand miles to see the place clearly. The new book—a spy novel set in Paris, featuring Lina Connerly, will be out in January. In the meantime, if you enjoy suspense with an intense emotional backbone and suburbanites behaving badly, I hope you’ll consider reading The Wonder Test.
About The Wonder Test
Reeling from a personal and professional tragedy, FBI Agent Lina Connerly returns home to Greenfield, California. With her teenage son Rory, Lina hopes to reassemble her life, reevaluate her career, and find a clear way forward. Adrift and battling insomnia, she discovers that her hometown has been transformed into a Silicon Valley suburb on steroids, obsessed with an annual exam called The Wonder Test.
When students at her son’s high school go missing, reappearing under mysterious circumstances on abandoned beaches, Lina must summon her strength and her investigative instincts, pushing her own ethical boundaries to the limits in order to solve the crimes. Meanwhile, an old espionage case called Red Vine keeps calling her back into the fold. While Lina struggles to balance her new role as a single mother and the complex counterintelligence puzzles she is so adept at solving, Greenfield’s shadowy dangers creep closer to her own home.
A searing view of a culture that puts the well-being of children at risk for advancement and prestige, and a captivating story of the lengths a mother will go for her son.
“A gripping blend of danger and sharp social commentary on high-stakes education, the 1%, and suburban tropes: imagine a coffee date with Lisa Lutz’s Spellmans and Tom Perotta’s suburbanites in a sun-drenched Twin Peaks.” Booklist, starred review
“Gripping, frightening, swift as a bullet…the last 100 pages could give you whiplash.” Dean Koontz
Thank you for reading The Caffeinated Writer. Have you ever traveled far from home to write about home? Please share your story in the comments.
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