What is Kelli Stanley reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Kelli Stanley, author of The Reckoning (A Renata Drake Thriller, 1).

Her entry begins:

Well, because I’m on a deadline to finish the second Renata novel, I can’t read fiction. That’s a huge frustration for me, because I’d like to start plunging into Cara Black’s Huguette and James L’Etoile’s Illusion of Truth and Rhys Bowen’s Silent as the Grave, to name a few.

I make it a practice to avoid reading current fiction while I’m actively writing (as opposed to researching) a book, because I’m afraid that I’ll unconsciously start imitating it. So….

Non-fiction is my getaway, and I’m currently reading a delightful book...[read on]

About The Reckoning, from the publisher:

SHE KILLED A MAN.
HE DESERVED IT.
BUT JUSTICE ISN’T YET DONE.

First in an explosive new thriller series set in the eighties from the author of the critically acclaimed Miranda Corbie series introduces the fierce feminist Renata Drake—on the run from the FBI for the execution-style murder of her little sister’s killer.

California, Southern Humboldt County, 1985. Renata Drake steps off a Greyhound bus and into small-town Garberville, hoping to disappear. She checks the papers. She’s not headline news. Not yet.

But she’s made a mistake. The FBI have the cannabis-producing “Emerald Triangle” town— and its corrupt residents—in their sights. Even worse, a teenage girl is missing, and when she turns up dead, the third in three years, it’s clear a serial killer is living among them.

Renata knows about murdered girls and the burning desire for justice—and for revenge. Her younger sister Josie is gone, and now, so is the man who killed her. Renata didn’t stay in Washington, D.C. to be arrested for executing a murderer, and she shouldn’t stay here either. But Renata decides to investigate, and what she uncovers will trigger a final reckoning: For herself, for a killer, and for all of Southern Humboldt.

This powerful, page-turning thriller explores the human cost of corruption and the psychological toll that violence takes on women.

Visit Kelli Stanley's website.

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The Page 69 Test: City of Ghosts.

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The Page 69 Test: City of Sharks.

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Writers Read: Kelli Stanley (March 2018).

The Page 69 Test: The Reckoning.

Writers Read: Kelli Stanley.

--Marshal Zeringue