Your first three books span three very different genres, from the thriller mystery Echoes of the Ancients, to the historical fiction Twilight of Democracy, and now the dystopian murder mystery Secrets and Murders. When you start a new book, does the genre come first and shape the story, or does an idea come to you first, leading you to discover the right genre for it?

I really don’t think what genre I want to write in, instead I focus on what story would be interesting. Does the story have legs? Needless to say, my state of mind and whatever captured my interest at a particular point in time always played a significant role in shaping what I wrote about.

To quickly illustrate what I mean, in my first book, Echoes of the Ancients, I wanted to tell a story that felt genuinely new and different from what came before it, so I turned the convention of traditional thriller stories on its head. My lifelong love of science fiction and paranormal stories made it easier to tell the story in that genre. In many ways, Echoes of the Ancients became the book I wish I had read as a young adult.

In Twilight of Democracy, I wanted to take political ideas that had become increasingly normalized over the past decade and explore, through a thought experiment, what might happen if we fully embraced them and followed them to their logical extreme. Historical fantasy offered a natural way to explore that idea, drawing on my background as a student of history and my longstanding fascination with "what if" scenarios. 

What was the original spark for Secrets and Murders? Was there a particular idea, image, or real-world situation that made you think, “There’s a story here”?

In a way, the idea really started when I moved from a typical city environment to the suburbs and became fascinated by how gated communities, HOAs, even quiet cul-de-sac settings could subtly create divisions between people. Debates over border walls and school vouchers seemed driven by a similar belief that separation could solve society’s problems.

A theme that runs through your work seems to be taking real social and political problems and twisting them into fictional worlds that force us to look at those problems differently. What draws you to that approach, and what do you hope readers recognize about our own world when they see it reflected in your fiction? 

You really hit the nail in the head. In my work, I always like to take normalized ideas and familiar concepts, yet somehow absurd and push them one step or more and see what happens to the world. Take Secrets and Murders for example. I thought: what if we took the idea of gated communities and HOAs to the extreme? What would happen to our world? Is it really going to be a better place? What if a large population lives behind walls and those who could not afford protection were left outside fending for themselves?

At the heart of Secrets and Murders is a murder investigation, but the story opens up into much bigger questions about power, privilege, and truth. What made a murder mystery the right vehicle for telling this particular story?

Yes, the murder is what unravels a shaky society built on social discrimination. As the truth comes out, it exposes the ugly underbelly of that society. The status quo works until it doesn’t. Everyone is exposed, and some of the worst human instincts come out into the open. I wanted to explore that and encourage readers to question seemingly harmless social norms that can have a lasting impact on society.

If someone reads all three of your books, what do you think they’ll discover is the thread connecting them, even if the stories themselves are very different?

Very good question. I really didn’t plan for all my books to have a common thread, but now that you mention it, there is one. I think the protagonists are all somehow similar, even though they exist in different times and have different ages, marital statuses, and places in society. They’re all imperfect and could easily be swayed by fame, money, or other materialistic desires. However, at some point, they all want to do the right thing, for different reasons. I didn’t want to romanticize human nature or try to find everyone’s inner Anakin Skywalker, but it was important for me to show that, despite everything going on in the world, there is still some goodness in people.

Preo-order Herman Forwood's new book Secrets and Murders: Walls Dividing Truth