He has published two novels, “Strange Victims” and “Ramifications,” but coming out Aug. 20 from Catapult is the English language translation of his first essay collection, “Planes Flying Over a Monster.” Through 10 personal essays, Saldaña París takes readers through Havana, Montreal, Madrid and other cities, reflecting not only on the character of each place but also on the memories we form and how writing and reading in the process can transform our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. He talked to SCNG Premium through an email correspondence about his reflections on travel:

Do different places allow us to discover, or rediscover, parts of ourselves that would remain dormant if we stayed in familiar locales?

Yes, absolutely. Visiting a new city, a new culture, opens up a whole new set of possibilities for oneself. There’s an alertness in traveling that sharpens the senses, forcing us to pay attention to details that we would otherwise overlook. Even if we carry our own memories, our personal history, the novelty of a different city creates a break in the routine.

Cities across the world of course all have their different characters, but what for you makes a city great, someplace worth returning to?

I like to think of cities as palimpsests: layers upon layers of history, individual stories, and meanings assigned by the fictional representations of that city (movies, books) as well as by its inhabitants. For me, a great city is one in which all those layers are more or less legible or apparent to an attentive visitor. A city that, instead of imposing a monolithic image of itself, invites you to create a personal relationship with it. Thus, a great city, to me, doesn’t hide its contradictions, no matter how uncomfortable these may be.

What is a hack you have learned for navigating a strange place?

Even if I’m in a place for only a few days, I like finding a place to return to — a café, a park, an intersection. Humans also find meaning in repetition, and sometimes it’s worth going back a few times to the same space to create a meaningful relationship with it instead of running around trying to see as much as possible. I also practice walking a block or two at an unusually slow speed, paying attention to the signs offered by the city: its stores, graffiti, architecture and even its trash. I love getting a sense of a place by overhearing conversations and writing them down in my notebook.

“If, as Plato believed, knowing is remembering, then I’ve been remembering Cuba forever…” you write in a memorable essay on visiting Havana. That city is central to your own origin story, and yet you’d never been there, at least as an adult. Is it fair to say that the places we traveled to become part of our personal mythology?

Some of them do, and sometimes it’s hard to say why. I spent 10 days in Port of Spain, Trinidad, some 15 years ago, and I still think of that trip as a defining one for no particular reason. I also think that literature enhances the experience of visiting a place: if you have read books by local authors, you perceive a different, deeper reality, more nuanced. I will always choose literature in translation over tourism.

What are some travel writings that have influenced your own, and that you think any traveler must know?

I love the diaries of filmmaker Jonas Mekas, his sense of place and intimacy. I love the journalistic work of Jon Lee Anderson, the way he can talk to anybody and get something important out of the conversation. I also recommend the travel writings of Belgian explorer Alexandra David-Néel. “Stranger on a Train,” by Jenny Diski, is another favorite of mine.

Do we have to leave home to fall in love with it again?

I often have the feeling that there is no such thing as returning: the person that leaves is never exactly the same as the one that comes back, and the place we come back to has often changed as well. Yet, the distance allows us to look at our home with fresh eyes, to rediscover details of it that we take for granted. We find the exotic in the domestic and vice versa. Love can definitely grow out of that estrangement.

We’re not talking about the kind said to haunt houses. Tomlinson’s ghost is the publishing industry’s workhorse – a ghostwriter, the unnamed, well-paid but often hidden scribes hired to do the real writing for those celebrity memoirs or the blockbusters credited to business moguls.

It’s a world Tomlinson knows intimately: This L.A.-based writer is a well-known “ghost” in publishing circles, having ghostwritten or co-written 21 books, including the New York Times bestseller “Fast Girl,” with Suzy Favor Hamilton, and four other New York Times bestsellers for which she was uncredited. Tomlinson began her career as a journalist and became a popular music critic and columnist for outlets like Spin, Billboard and the Los Angeles Times (hence her social media handle, @duchessofrock).

In her debut novel, “The Last Days of The Midnight Ramblers,” Tomlinson blends her years of experience as a ghost and a music journalist to create a tense drama about a desperate ghostwriter named Mari hired to pen the memoir of a rock ’n roll courtesan who had a front-row seat to life with The Midnight Ramblers, a mythic, epic rock band in the style of the Rolling Stones, The Beatles and The Who. The death of the band’s charismatic leader Mal has only added to their legend. In trying to balance keeping her ghostwriting gig while also digging into the mystery of Mal’s death, Mari falls into a twisted world of fame and power, where nothing is really what it seems.

Tomlinson joins Friday’s episode of Bookish, the Southern California News Group’s free virtual program about authors and the literary life, starting at 5 pm. Register here. In advance of the program, she corresponded over email about the novel and her career. The conversation has been edited for clarity.

Q. Your novel gives the most insightful depictions of the job of ghostwriting I’ve ever seen. It made me curious; you’ve had such a successful career doing it. How did you fall into this specialty, and what kept you in the role through so many books?

It’s very accurate to say I “fell into” this job. In the early aughts, I had wrangled my way into a successful career as a music journalist, mostly for daily newspapers like The Boston Globe and The Los Angeles Times. But after moving to Los Angeles in 2006 and feeling the pains of freelance budget cuts, I knew I needed to expand my writing well.

A friend-of-a-friend was up for a ghosting project for reality TV star Tila Tequila, and it ended up getting passed to me. I found Tila to be professional and was honored to have the chance to publish a book, and we worked with an excellent editor, Brant Rumble, at Scribner (an imprint of Simon & Schuster). So, I had a very positive experience and learned a great deal about book publishing. My agent came to me through that job, and he began finding me other ghosting projects. Like my ghostwriter character, Mari, who was loosely based on me, I found I was particularly well-suited to the work, in terms of the intimacy it requires in the inner life and creative process of clients, and the fast metabolism of the deadlines, which can often involve writing several books in a year. In between ghosting projects, I was able to buy myself time to work on my own fiction, screenplays, and personal essays.

Q. You credit your agent Kirby Kim in the acknowledgments for giving you the idea for Mightnight Ramblers. What’s the deal there? Had you not wanted to write fiction before?

I had wanted to write fiction since I was 16 and took my first creative writing class at the early college Simon’s Rock. I went to journalism school in my 20s as a trade that was an alternative to waitressing. Kirby had read my three earlier novels and didn’t feel he was a good fit to represent them, or that they were right to be my debut. Knowing fiction was my first love, he gave me his blessing to show them to other agents and editors. For a variety of reasons, none of them found a route to publication. In 2016, over drinks in New York, Kirby suggested I should write a thriller about a ghostwriter because he knew all of my crazy, secret stories from the job, which I would never be able to tell unless I fictionalized them.

Like many people, it takes me a while to heed good advice, but I finally saw the wisdom of his words and started writing in 2018. One of the first questions was, what kind of memoir would my ghostwriter pen? And as soon as I decided to set it in my old world – rock ‘n’ roll – the whole book came together.

Q. The (weird) world of publishing has been showing up a lot lately – in the movie “American Fiction” and novels “Yellowface” and “The Other Black Girl.” What for you makes it an interesting backdrop for storytelling? 

I loved all of those stories (and I chose my wonderful audiobook narrator, Helen Laser, in part because I adored her narration of “Yellowface” so much.) Not to make it seem like Kirby is my puppet master, but he and I spend a great deal of time thinking and talking about what makes fiction work, and he had the astute observation that readers (and viewers) love to learn about a whole new world.

While those of us who work in media may be drawn to these stories because they’re deliciously familiar, for readers (who, obviously, also love books), I think it’s an exciting opportunity to learn about all of the Sturm and Drang that can go on behind the scenes. I also happen to adore coming-of-age stories, and I feel like most author characters go through some version of losing their innocence and achieving greater wisdom (or at least perspective on life), while in pursuit of their deepest dream, which is the stuff of great drama.

Q. This is your debut novel but you published an excellent memoir, “Good Girl,” in 2015, and of course, you’ve written many successful books for others. How did writing the novel challenge you?

Not to draw the ire of other writers, but I don’t usually get blocked when I’m writing, even for myself. The years when I literally wouldn’t eat if I didn’t hit my journalism deadlines has given me an ingrained discipline that was very helpful when I faced my own creative work, especially on days when I felt anxious about whether or not it was any good.

I’ve always been drawn to character-driven stories (that’s really what most celebrity memoirs are, isn’t it?). So, that aspect of my novel was the easiest and most satisfying for me to write. I struggled the most with the plotting of the book’s mystery, as this is a new genre for me. I was lucky enough to have an excellent thriller mentor in the form of my friend Steph Cha (“Your House Will Pay”) who lent me books and let me ask questions like: “But how does a person get to the point of murdering someone?” I probably devoted the most revisions (I had 13 drafts in all) to trying to land the pacing, red herrings, and resolution of the book’s mystery, which involves the drowning death of Midnight Ramblers founding member, Mal Walker. Mari’s client Anke was married to him at the time of his death, which becomes a central part of Anke’s memoir.

Q. What’s the pressure like publishing under your own name? 

Because I had wanted to publish a novel for three decades, and I am extremely passionate about the novels I have loved in my own life (from “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt to “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin) I cared deeply about writing something good enough to be in conversation with my favorite writers. While I wanted my book to be a juicy rock ‘n’ roll romp, I also hoped it would do what, for me, is the point of accomplished writing: to explore what it means to be human.

Also, I had to majorly manage my expectations around publication, as almost all of my clients are automatically invited to promote their books in splashy ways like appearing on “Good Morning America” and being featured on the jumbotron in Times Square (a secret dream of mine, for real). So, I had to prepare myself for the fact that my book promotion journey was going to look a little different.

That said, I’m not sure they ever get asked the kind of thoughtful questions about their work that I get to answer about mine, so I’m happy with my own experience of introducing my book to the world.

Q. Without giving too much away, one of the things I loved about “The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers” is that our protagonist, Mari, ultimately learns important lessons for her own life in the process of entering this glitzy world of fame and trying to unravel the mystery of what happened with this epic rock band. Certainly, your ghostwriting and music journalist experiences informed the novel – what have you personally taken away from your own rock ‘n roll writing experiences that have influenced your life?

Ooh, this is basically my dream question, so thank you for asking it! I purposely wanted Mari’s clients to be exceptional iconoclasts who could teach her (and through her, the reader) how to lead a remarkable life that allows you to discover who you are and how to live as authentically as possible. My belief that such a life is possible, and is worth seeking out and pursuing, definitely came to me through musicians, writers, and artists I have interviewed, befriended, and come to love through their work.

Culturally, we hold up rock stars for their tendency to rebel against a staid, conventional life. Having grown up unconventionally (in a family that was part of an intentional community in Maine; while getting my college education as a teenager; as part of the punk and alternative rock worlds when I was a young artist and music journalist) maybe I was seeking beacons in a life I was already living. I do think musicians and artists I admire have modeled curiosity, passion, and original thinking, as well as creative discipline.

Q. Last question: What’s next for you, writing-wise? 

I was fortunate enough to sell two novels to Flatiron Books, so I am working with my brilliant and lovely editor Zack Wagman on my next novel, “Occupancy.” It’s a mystery set at an Airbnb in the Pacific Northwest. I’m also continuing to ghostwrite and work on my own original screenplays, and I hope to have the opportunity to adapt “The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers” for the screen.

Now Los Angeles-based author Deanne Stillman shines a light into a little-known corner of this tale with “American Confidential: Uncovering the Bizarre Story of Lee Harvey Oswald and his Mother,” publishing Nov. 7 from Melville House. 

Stillman is best known for her evocative nonfiction that explores brutal histories in the West, with such titles as “Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines and the Mojave,” “Mustang,” “Desert Reckoning” and “Blood Brothers: The Story of the Strange Friendship Between Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill.”

“American Confidential” continues Stillman’s oeuvre exploring the dark side of the American psyche. It delves into the troubled life of a man who, she argues, was the prototype of the disturbed “lone gunman” behind current mass shootings. But it also examines the peculiar and powerful dynamic between Oswald and his mother, Marguerite, who seemed consumed by a need to matter and was fueled by resentment toward society.  

Stillman says she has been “reading and thinking about” the JFK assassination for years, and waded through thousands of pages of conspiracy coverage and testimony before investigative commissions to “find things that were of interest to me regarding Oswald’s family coming from family members themselves. That’s where the keys are buried and revelations are to be found.”

Recently, I emailed with Stillman, whom I have known since “Twentynine Palms” entered the zeitgeist in the ’00s. Here’s our exchange, edited for clarity and space: 

Q. Why does this event continue to capture our collective imagination?

Oswald was like Brutus, the assassin of Julius Caesar, or even Pontius Pilate, who ordered Christ’s killing. Killing JFK was a betrayal of tremendous magnitude, not that Oswald knew Kennedy or was in his orbit, like the others, but it was an act of unfathomable treachery, a shot in the heart of the country, it shattered all manner of checks and balances. 

It has also led to a wave of conspiracy theories without end – and given that the government was lying at the time about Vietnam and many other things, that was understandable – but this ongoing conspiracy madness regarding any consequential thing that happens is now destabilizing the country. When it comes to Oswald, Norman Mailer, whose book “Oswald’s Tale” informed mine, has said that people couldn’t believe that a figure who mattered little, a cipher like Oswald, could take down JFK, a man of great stature and value. This guy? You gotta be kidding me. Yeah, this guy.

In my view, there was what I call an inadvertent “conspiracy of one,” formed by Lee and his mother together, in a desperate and inadvertent campaign to matter. So in the end, Oswald is Travis Bickle [the main character in the movie “Taxi Driver”], posing with his rifle for a Polaroid taken by his wife, essentially saying, “You talkin’ to me? Ma, do you see me now?”

Q. As you note in the book, it is thought that the assassination of JFK has been written about more than any other single day in history, including more than a thousand books and innumerable essays and articles. There have only been a few that concentrated on Oswald and his mother’s unique and seemingly toxic relationship. What more did you feel needed to be uncovered?

Actually, there’s just one that’s about Oswald and his mother Marguerite, not counting mine, and that’s called “A Mother in History” by Jean Stafford and like most of the other major books on the JFK assassination, it came out decades ago. It was foundational to “American Confidential,” and just one of two of the many about the assassination written by women, not counting mine. 

What is missing from all of these books is a placement of the Oswalds in a deep cultural context, in the way that I like to look at things. For instance, buried in most of the coverage is the information that Marguerite Oswald’s father was a streetcar conductor in New Orleans. What streetcar exactly? I started to wonder and as I looked into this thread – and bear in mind that we’re talking about Lee’s grandfather – I realized that for various reasons, he was probably a conductor on the Desire line, immortalized by the Tennessee Williams play, “A Streetcar Named Desire.” And then I started thinking about how that echoed in the Oswalds’ life. The play is about a family of little means brutalized by Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando in the movie) and the more I thought about this, the more I knew that there were parallels to what was going on between Lee and his wife, the beatings and emotional violence, as I recount in my book, who lived in shabby apartments in New Orleans and elsewhere. 

There was also the fact that Lee loved riding the subway while he and his mother lived in the Bronx. He carried maps and marked out routes and spent a lot of time riding those rails. I suggest that this was possibly a way of connecting with his grandfather, who died before Lee was born; most likely, he had heard tales of his service on the Desire line, which went right past their house.

Also, I realized that Marguerite had grown up during the Depression – something that I haven’t seen explored elsewhere – and in particular, during the time of Huey Long, the populist demagogue who was governor of Louisiana, a smarter precursor of Donald Trump. His famous slogan was “Every man a king, every woman a queen,” and that was all about the fact that many in the country were destitute. 

Marguerite herself worked a series of menial jobs and was a single mother with three sons. One of her jobs was as a greeter for the Fort Worth Welcome Wagon in the 1950s. I placed her in such a scene, recreating what this task entailed and the desperation of a woman who would never be welcomed anywhere – and she knew it. Her class resentment festered over the years and she passed it on to Lee, who defected to the “worker’s paradise” of Russia, then saw that workers were being exploited there as well, and returned with a deep need to take down the king. And this was JFK. The focus on conspiracies in most other coverage has led people far afield from this central truth about the Oswald family.

 Q. What other realizations did you have about Lee while researching this book?

In my view, Lee foretold the mass shooters of today. [“Taxi Driver” director] Martin Scorsese recently said that nowadays, there are many Travis Bickles. This is what I say in my book. In a way, it all started with Oswald; the famous image of him with his rifle is not unlike Bickle in front of the mirror with his. It should be noted that Artie Bremer, who tried to assassinate Alabama governor George Wallace in 1972, cited Oswald in his diaries, and he was the inspiration for Travis Bickle. Since then, some of today’s mass shooters have also referenced Oswald, and many now pose for selfies with their weapons just before they go on a rampage or stream it live.  

Q. Another recent book, “The Final Witness” by Paul Landis, suggests Oswald was indeed part of a conspiracy. Does that matter to you? 

Yes, it does. It will be interesting to see if this new book by a former Secret Service agent, which throws “the magic bullet” theory into question results in a new appraisal of what happened. But I think what we know for a fact still points to Oswald as the lone assassin. After killing JFK and fleeing, he killed a cop who confronted him in the streets, and then – and this isn’t something that is often talked about – he tried to kill one of the cops who was trying to arrest him in a movie theatre where he was hiding. Had he succeeded, it would have been his third murder of the day. All of that speaks for itself and certainly is not the behavior of an innocent man. 

Q. Throughout the book, you allow yourself to imagine dialogue and what people might have been thinking. Can you talk about the role you feel a writer’s imagination has in reporting nonfiction? 

I bring speculation into all of my books, as well as elements of fiction, such as how people are shaped by interior and exterior landscapes. Sometimes fiction is the only way to tell the truth, especially when the moment-to-moment facts about a particular scene aren’t known. I often imagine scenes involving my characters, as if they are in a play, which they are. In this story, such scenes are informed by how Lee and Marguerite talked, which I knew from reading many accounts including first-person statements to investigators and conversations with those around them. Place is also an element, as it always is in my work. Here we have New Orleans, Fort Worth, the Bronx, and Dallas where Oswald and his mother lived. I think they moved about 22 times by the time Oswald was 17. I wanted to take a look at how certain locations informed Lee’s life, and this hasn’t been written about elsewhere. Fort Worth – its slogan “Where the West Begins” – is a key element here. 

Q. What do you hope readers take away from “American Confidential”?

I never second-guess readers, but I would like people to stop dividing the question of gun violence in this country into one or another answer. We need to talk about what goes on in families and pathologies that are created and what happens when unfettered access to guns is thrown into the mix. We are now at an impasse – and we have just had another mass shooting.

It sounds like the plot of the latest streaming series, but that’s really what happened to the internationally bestselling mystery writer Tess Gerritsen, best known for her police procedural series featuring Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles (which inspired the TNT television series, “Rizzoli & Isles”).

Originally from San Diego, Gerritsen moved with her husband to a 5,000-person town on the rocky coast of Maine some 33 years ago – and what happened next eventually ended up inspiring her most recent novel, “The Spy Coast.” This novel also launches a whole new series for the author about a group of retired spies who called themselves The Martini Club.

Gerritsen makes a recorded appearance on Friday’s episode of “Bookish,” the virtual program produced by the Southern California News Group that goes live at 5 p.m. via Zoom with fellow guests David Ulin talking about his noir thriller “Thirteen Question Method” and author Sarah Blakely-Cartwright discussing her novel “Alice Sadie Celine.” Go to Bookish to get the link.

Meanwhile, here are some highlights from our forthcoming Bookish interview about the making of “The Spy Coast.” This has been edited for clarity and length.

On discovering her neighbors were spies:

“My husband is a doctor, so he opened up a medical practice. and when he brought in new patients he’d always taken occupational history. The patient would say, ‘I used to work for the government, but I can’t talk about it.’ And after I heard about it that for the third time, it was like, Who are these people? Where did we move to? We got the answer from a real estate agent. She said, ‘Oh, they’re all retired CIA.’

“It turns out it is the worst-kept secret in the state of Maine. We are packed with CIA retirees up here, not just in the mid-coast where I live, but also all over the state. I also found out that two of my neighbors living on the street were retired spies. I found out that my son’s best friend’s parents were married spies. And then there was a period of time where I was having dinner parties, I found out later that every time I’d had a dinner there was a spy at that table.”

On why spies settle in Maine:

“Why are they here? I’ve heard various explanations. One is that this used to be a location of safe houses; the CIA would send people up here to hide away. Another is that it’s far from any nuclear targets. And then I’ve also heard that Mainers, you know, we have a reputation for minding our own business. We won’t pry. And so we’re very respectful of people’s privacy up here. And then finally, you know, there was some CIA activity up here in the late sixties and early seventies. So I think a lot of spies came up here, found the state, loved it and decided, ‘This is where I’m gonna retire to.’”

On how she researched the world of espionage:

“You know it’s tough because [retired spies] can’t, or won’t, talk about it – although I heard that there was one spy up here with Alzheimer’s who wouldn’t shut up about it…

“Well, first of all, I did not want to write a James Bond book where people are running around with guns. I really was more interested in the emotional toll of being in espionage. What is it like to be in a career where you can’t really tell the truth all the time? What do you do? Can you tell the truth to your spouse? Can you really make friends without feeling like there is secondary gain involved? So I wanted to get into the nitty gritty of character for the kind of person who becomes a spy. To get that I went to memoirs. You know there are a number of memoirs written by former secret agents.

On why it took her this long to write about the world of retired spies:

“You know, it is funny that it took me this many years to write this story, but I think it’s because I had to be older to understand what retirees go through.

“I was interested in these people in these silver-haired people I see at the post office, or, you know, at the grocery store. They have ordinary lives. But what do they do now? What do you do after you’ve had an interesting job as a spy – do you have cocktail parties? Do you have book groups?

“I was writing my characters Rizzoli and Isles in their mid-to-late thirties back when I was that age. But now I am retirement age. I’m the age of some of [“The Spy Coast”] characters, and I understand what it’s like to get older, to suddenly be considered over the hill. To be overlooked. Maybe people think, ‘Oh, you’re not as capable as you used to be when you were 35,’ but my spies, they are capable. Maybe maybe they can’t run as fast, and maybe their joints have been replaced. But they haven’t lost their marbles, and that’s what I wanted to get into –  people who really still want to be useful, but are overlooked.”

More than a decade after that book was published, Lauren herself became a kind of Scheherazade in “Behold the Monster: Confronting America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer,” out July 18. But instead of spinning tales to keep a murderous king from spilling the blood of innocent women, she lured another murderous despot – Sam Little, who confessed to murdering 93 women – into telling the stories of those he had already killed, in an effort to save their memory from police cold case files.

By her account, that effort – which over the course of almost five years took her everywhere from maximum security prisons to courthouses and the homes of victims’ bereaved relatives – just about broke her.

“I really never anticipated the emotional depths it would take me to,” Lauren said, speaking via Zoom from her home in Los Angeles.

Named an Amazon Best Book of July 2023, “Behold the Monster” is Lauren’s chronicle of her complicated relationship with Little, who, as she writes, is “someone who is human, but just barely.”

‘The criminal we allowed’

Inspired by the “nonfiction novel” techniques Truman Capote pioneered to write the true crime classic “In Cold Blood,” Lauren creates a cinematically styled mix of gritty reportage and intimate memoir for “Behold the Monster.” She says she aims not to elevate the criminal but to expose the societal inequities that allowed him to get away with his awful crimes for so long.

“Bobby Kennedy famously said every society gets the criminal it deserves, and the law enforcement it demands. As I say in the book, I’m not sure that Sam Little was the criminal we deserved, but it was certainly the criminal we allowed,” Lauren said.

Over more than six decades, Little preyed on marginalized women.

“His rap sheet was over a hundred pages long. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” she said. “The former DA, Beth Silverman, who had prosecuted successfully four or five serial killers in Los Angeles said, ‘I’ve never seen a rap sheet like this.’ It was stunning. And the first time I saw it, I cried. I was like, wait, it’s not just that he was arrested again and again and again and again – not just for petty theft, which he was – but he was arrested for assault and murder.”

There was often a lack of physical evidence, but more than that, juries considered his victims and the eyewitnesses to his crimes not credible.

“It was a criminologist named Steven Egger who came up with the idea that we value our homicides differently based on people’s class. In the case of Sam’s victims specifically, he cherry-picked his victims for being clearly marginalized. People of color, addicted, often prostitutes – people who would be considered unreliable even if they lived. And that was exactly what happened.”

From fiction and memoir to true crime

Recasting herself as a true crime maven initially seemed to me like an unlikely move for Lauren (who, full disclosure, I knew from when our children shared some playdates as preschoolers). Gruesome murder wasn’t the literary terrain she covered: In addition to her breakout memoir, “Some Girls,” her previous books include the contemporary novel “Pretty” and a memoir, “Everything You Ever Wanted,” about the journey she and her husband, Weezer bass player Scott Shriner, went on in adopting a child with special needs from Ethiopia.

But Lauren contends that if you scratch the surface, everything connects.

“I am a bit of a wild child, and plagued with insatiable curiosity. I think in all my work you can see that I’m looking at fringe elements of society, exploring the underbelly and seeing how that reflects upon us as a whole. I think that there are these commonalities, though my books do seem so different,” she said.

The journey to “Behold the Monster” began innocently enough, with an attempt to write a mystery novel.

“I’ve always loved mysteries. I’ve been a true crime fanatic since I was nine years old. I had read every Agatha Christie book by the time I was 12. And, it just occurred to me that, um, why am I not writing a mystery? I love them. When I read to impress, I’ll go read some Dostoyevsky. When I read for myself, I’m going to grab a Michael Connelly off the shelf,” she said. (In fact, Connelly wrote the foreword to “Behold the Monster.”)

Research for that mystery novel led her to an interview with famed LAPD homicide detective Mitzi Roberts about historic LA crimes including the Black Dahlia, for which Roberts is the official custodian. “Mitzi’s passion is cold cases,” Lauren explained.

Toward the tail end of their interview, Roberts mentioned that one of her greatest professional coups was convicting an under-reported serial killer by the name of Samuel Little, who she had brought to justice in 2014.

“I was like, ‘What?’ My antennas went up. I told her, ‘You buried the lede!’ and she said, ‘I’m not the one asking the questions,’” Lauren said with a laugh.

“When Mitzi said to me, ‘I believe he was responsible for many more deaths across the country,’ and that there weren’t resources in local law enforcement to find out more, that sank like a stone in my gut,” said Lauren. “Who knows how many families out there will never have answers? How many women out there will remain forever without their names, Jane Does? Due to my own history of domestic violence, some sex work, and a tough childhood, while it wasn’t so much I could have been one of these women, it was more that I felt a sense of fury at the injustice. I felt motivated by them.”

And, frankly, from a writer’s perspective, Lauren sensed that she just might have struck literary gold.

“It started more as, Wow, here’s a good story, a career-maker of a story. Here’s an underreported serial killer. And, you know, it’s one of my superpowers, to crack anyone. I’m a good conversationalist.”

She quickly went down a rabbit hole to learn everything she could about Little, eventually scoring the first of many interviews with the imprisoned killer.

“Be careful what you ask for in a sense, you know? I had been watching my true crime documentaries for years and years, late at night. I always would sit there with my popcorn, watch those documentaries and say ‘Ask him this’ and ‘Ask him this.” I was finally going to get to do it,” she said.

“It seemed like a wild and audacious thing to try. And then when it succeeded – and this is sort of the story of my life – I said, now what do I do? I mean, really, now he’s confessing, what do I do? It pivoted my entire life. I didn’t think it would turn into my life’s passion. I mean, what grabbed me was the injustice. What kept me in it was this really complicated, and interesting, and destructive, relationship with a pernicious, vicious killer.”

Hurdle after hurdle

Writing a book is hard enough, but in the midst of her research, Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger got wind of Lauren’s project and approached her to do a series about her work to track down all of Little’s victims. The result was the 2021 Starz series, “Confronting a Serial Killer.”

And let’s not forget, there was that small complication of a pandemic.

“I mean, my family was falling apart. I had a documentary crew in my house for weeks. That’s in the middle of Covid. We were all stuck. It was awful…you know, there was so much hypervigilance for so long.”

Did she think about giving up? Lauren shakes her head no.

“I had to make it work. I had real contracts to fulfill. I have a performing musician for a husband, which means he didn’t have work for two years. And I can’t leave the house to keep getting the stories [for the book]. And waking up at four in the morning to set up homeschool…I just feel fundamentally changed by the process of that time.”

But finish the book she did, and in a weird twist of fate, Little ended up dying of Covid in prison – essentially dying by suffocation, the same method of death he had used to kill so very many women. Because of their ongoing relationship, he named Lauren his next of kin. She had hoped to donate his brain to science so that researchers at Standford and UCI might be able to gain more understanding about what creates the type of dangerous psychopath that Little grew up to become. But that was not to be.

“I was trying to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse. I was going to do some good with it. But we were in the middle of Covid; there were meat trucks lined up at the coroner’s office. And because I’m not actually a next-of-kin, the paperwork was a legal mess. By the time I got it straightened out, that brain was useless. And now he is in my garage. There’s just a big bag of dirt that used to be a guy. But I’m going to do something really good with it. I just don’t know what.”

Maybe she already has.

Fighting for the voices of the victims

If the real goal was to give voice to women robbed of life by Little, “Behold the Monster” attempts that. But Lauren says that after five years of working on this, she’s just now realized that the true voice she found was her own – as a writer, a journalist, an advocate.

Lauren says she hopes that she has invited “everyone into the work” of learning about the forgotten women by featuring the most comprehensive known list of victims, as well as listing resources for victims of violent crime and resources for reporting crime tips to law enforcement.

“I’m so proud of this book, partially because it almost killed me,” Lauren said. “I do think that there’s a possibility this could bring more visibility to this issue of how we value people and what we expect from our law enforcement. I think we have to insist on the Harry Bosch motto of ‘everybody matters or nobody matters.’ We must fight for the humanity of these women and for their visibility.  And because I am lucky enough to still be above ground and speaking, I’m going be the one to do it.”

Lauren will discuss “Behold the Monster” on Bookish, SCNG’s free virtual program, on Friday, July 21 at 5 p.m. The program also features Eliza Jane Brazier, author of “Girls and Their Horses.” To register, go to Bookish.

“I feel like it’s a rebirth, a renewal,” Escandón said of the paperback edition that arrived in September with the Spanish edition (titled “El Clima de Los Angeles”) just published.

When the novel was first published in 2021 during the depths of the pandemic, she — like thousands of writers whose books were published during COVID’s worst days — couldn’t go on a traditional book tour or promote it with in-person events. That’s what she’d done with her first two books, “Esperanza’s Box of Saints” published in 1999 and “Gonzales & Daughter Trucking Co.” in 2005.

But pandemic or not, “L.A. Weather” still managed to create a stir.

Not only did the novel hit the New York Times bestseller list, but it was also a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick and on numerous “Best Of” lists (including those of Real Simple, Harper’s Bazaar, Barnes & Noble, CNN, Ms. magazine and “Good Morning America”). Set against the backdrop of a turbulent year plagued by political upheaval, drought and wildfires, the fast-paced story follows the lives of the Alvarados, a modern Mexican American family navigating a series of upheavals and betrayals.

“It’s actually been surprisingly well-received because it’s a very local story,” said Escandon, who started calling LA home after moving there in 1983 from Mexico City. “I have had people say to me, ‘I wasn’t interested because you talk so much about the freeways that I’ve never been to because I’m not from LA.’ And I respond that, well, there are different kinds of readers — readers who gravitate towards the familiar, things that they know about that they’re comfortable with. And then there are other readers who like to be taken to new places and explore other worlds. I don’t hold it against anyone if they feel alienated by the fact that it is about a very local culture. But at the same time, other people have really, really enjoyed it because in one way, and that was kind of my aim, it does debunk some myths about LA.”

Like what?

“You know, there are people out there who’ve never been to LA who think that we all live like the Kardashians!” Escandón laughed as she said this. “And we don’t. We suffer regular, plain old lives. We do the dishes. We have our own aches and pains and torments and things that happen to us. We struggle with paying the bills. So, I wanted to make a metaphor with the weather in LA and the regular people’s lives because there’s also the myth that it’s always 72 and sunny. We do have weather, and we do have terrible weather.”

Another of those myths she said she works hard to dispel — not just in this novel but in all her writing — is a stereotype about Latinos. The characters in “L.A. Weather” include a father descended from a family that has been in California since before it was a state; a mother who is from a Jewish family that emigrated from Poland to Mexico; and three young, urban professional daughters engaged in their successful careers.

“I did want to make these characters far away from the cliché to complicate our views about Latinos,” said Escandón, reeling off stereotypes she wanted to overcome.

“There’s this idea that all Latinos are just one big monolith,” she said. “That’s not true. We are so many. We have the whole spectrum of society, just like any other group.”

She said another of her aims with “L.A. Weather” was to “change the narrative” around Latinas.

“I wanted the three sisters in the book to have successful careers because that is the trend. That is what is happening now. Latina women excel in college. They are the number one ethnic group starting businesses in America; they’re coming with full force,” said Escandón, who may as well be describing herself.

After arriving in the States with no money or contacts, she and her then-husband managed to build a thriving advertising agency representing national brands such as Wells Fargo. She also has worked as a screenwriter and film producer — the film “Santitos,” based on her first novel, became a huge success in Latin American countries and helped launch the vanguard of modern Mexican cinema, garnering 14 international prizes to boot.

Still, she believes there’s a problem. “There is this cliché that we have to fight against — this mindset that Latina women are always stuck at home with a bunch of kids. Which some are, of course — I mean, I myself have two kids and all of that. But we have to work harder to get to where we want to go because we’re kind of swimming against the tide. I did want to add my two cents to contribute to changing this narrative a little bit.”

Her success in rendering a nuanced portrait of Latinos in the United States was no doubt part of what earned “L.A. Weather” the honor dearest to her heart, the prestigious Rudolfo Anaya Fiction Book Award from the International Latino Book Awards.

“This is the first award I’ve won for my writing,” said Escandon, who has also taught writing through UCLA Extension Writers Program for more than two decades. “I was so humbled because there were writers coming in from Chile, from Argentina, from Mexico, from Colombia, from all over the Spanish-speaking world.”

After all these years, she said, it was sweet validation.

“I guess, finally, I know what I’m doing!”

Samantha Dunn is a reporter for The Orange County Register.