Take Five With Author L.A. Starks

*Breaking news--I’ve just learned The Second Law won a Texas Authors’ award for best international thriller.

Welcome back to An Indie Adventure, L. A. Starks. Your news is thrilling. Congratulations!!

Tell us, what inspired you to write your book, The Second Law, Lynn Dayton Thriller #3?

The energy business is—unknown to most—massive, global, and high-stakes. Economies of entire countries rise or fall on their production revenue or their energy costs, so it attracts powerful players worldwide whose motivations and desires inevitably conflict.

Thus, the global energy business provides a rich vein of plot possibilities.
And in a bonus for a fiction author, I can write in vivid, terrible explosions at any time.

How do you use setting to further your story?

I find the use of settings magical in propelling the plot forward. International scenes in The Second Law, like those in Poland, Curaçao, and Vienna, immediately set up language/communication difficulties and cultural/behavioral conflicts.

You’re having a dinner party. What character from your novel do you hope doesn’t show up? Why?

Comrade Mei Jin. She’s a bitter, unpleasant buzzkill of a character. She smokes, is fault-finding, and although a senior government official, is untrustworthy in the extreme. And those teeth! So unappetizing.

If you were not a writer, what vocation would you pursue?

I actually have a second vocation that involves writing: energy investment analysis. It progressed from my engineering work to talking about the energy background of my books at various events, to my own financial analysis, to a website, and now at the request of the editors, writing articles on two different platforms at the crowdsourced investor site, Seeking Alpha.

Do you prefer to read in the same genre you write in, or do you avoid reading that genre? Why?

There are few authors who write in precisely the same genre (international thrillers with a business/science thriller aspect—Michael Crichton is the closest) but I enjoy reading many, many authors across the mystery, suspense, and thriller genres.

What is the first thing you do when you begin a new book?

I take two approaches that are at odds with one another. When I wrote the first book in the series, I wrote scenes as I saw and heard them in my head, out of order, and then patched everything together. This is an inspired but ultimately very inefficient way to write—too much has to be removed that doesn’t serve the plot, and too much has to be rewritten or added. So now I preserve the initial inspiration of hearing and seeing scenes, but outline with plot progression, settings, characters, and narrative arc in mind. Indeed, I’m about to test this approach again with my fourth book.

Give us a brief summary of The Second Law, Lynn Dayton Thriller #3:

TriCoast Energy executive Lynn Dayton is visiting the company's San Francisco refinery when it comes under attack. Saddened by the fiery deaths of several workers, she traces the explosion to software malfunctions and contacts cybersecurity chief Kanak Singh to track it back to the source. The second law refers to the second law of thermodynamics: it means that in an isolated system everything tends towards chaos.

Lynn is still reeling when a TriCoast lease bidding manager is killed in New Orleans. The seeming motive is the theft of his computer containing billion-dollar secret offshore bid plans. Then her long-time mentor and good friend is gunned down in front of her in a Louisiana swamp. What terrible plan lies behind all these crimes? Lynn races against time to uncover a complex plot that stretches from murder in Vienna to a natural gas terminal attack in the Baltic to a major Caribbean oil installation off U.S. shores. Lynn is baffled as she learns of a high-stakes takeover bid by a mysterious group called the Second Law.

Who are these people? Worse, who is the mole inside TriCoast that is feeding them so much deadly information? Unless she can find out, thousands more are scheduled to die.

Buy:
Barnes & Noble | Amazon (Print and Kindle) | IndieBound (for independent bookstores)

Bio:
L. A. Starks was born in Boston, Massachusetts, grew up in northern Oklahoma, and now lives in Texas. Awarded a full-tuition college scholarship, she earned a chemical engineering bachelor's degree, magna cum laude, from New Orleans' Tulane University, followed by a finance MBA from the University of Chicago.

On energy investing and related topics she's multi-published at two Seeking Alpha platforms and in several print publications. Her engineering research was recognized when she was included as a co-inventor of a US patent for lithium alumina.

Working for well-known energy companies in engineering, marketing, and finance from refineries to corporate offices prepared her to write accessible, award-winning, and reviewer-praised global energy thrillers 13 Days: The Pythagoras Conspiracy, Strike Price, and The Second Law. Strike Price won a first place award as the best mystery/thriller from the Texas Association of Authors.*

In addition to her books, two of her short stories have been published in Amazon Shorts, a third in an anthology, and a fourth independently at KDP. Altogether she's appeared at over 150 book marketing events. Additionally, she served as development co-chair, investment oversight chair, and treasurer of the Friends of the Dallas Public Library. She's run sixteen half-marathons and--similarly--looks forward to working on her fourth Lynn Dayton thriller.

Find L.A.:
Twitter | LinkedIn |Facebook | Goodreads | Website

Five Secrets From Author L.A. Starks and Her Novel ~ Strike Price

Dear Readers, you know me well enough to understand that I simply had to have L.A. Starks on this blog. After all, who can resist another L.A.?  Not me, and I'm glad I didn't. Her books sound awesome and her secrets are provoking and revealing. 

Please welcome L.A. Starks!

Brought to you by L.A. Sartor :)

Thanks for hosting me today, L.A.

You asked for a bit about me to start off the post. Well, I've learned my parent brain, left brain (engineering), and right brain (thriller writing) experiences developed in me the heightened ability to find (and sometimes deflect, but at least articulate) risky behavior and situations. How high is that zip line you’re hanging onto with just one hand? Which colorless gas is deadliest in a refinery? Would one of my characters accidentally lock herself into a cooling tower? Or could she have been murdered and left there?

Both books in my Lynn Dayton thriller series-to-date, 13 DAYS: THE PYTHAGORAS CONSPIRACY and STRIKE PRICE, have received 5-star reviews. STRIKE PRICE also received the Texas Association of Authors’ First Place award for best mystery/thriller. I’m writing the third book in the series. Four of my short stories have also been published.

Hi, L.A., very cool news about your awards. Will you please tell us Five Secrets we may not know about STRIKE PRICE or you, but will after today!

1) History secrets: Strike Place is all about secrets. Since it’s a current-day thriller, I had to relegate some fairly stunning history to endnotes. For example, while I thought I had a good grounding in Oklahoma history—I grew up there, heard stories from relatives, and was even required to take a high school class on the subject—a long-held secret I learned in the course of researching this book was the Tulsa Riot of 1921. A riot supported by the Ku Klux Klan. Part of that secret was the range of groups the KKK opposed—African-Americans, Jews, Catholics, Asians, Republicans, Congressional “radicals”, and union members. The uprising was shamefully provoked by a local newspaper that no longer exists. In several days of rioting, white citizens destroyed the Greenwood area of Tulsa that had been known as a “Negro Wall Street.” At least three hundred people, mostly African-American, were killed. Many thousands more fled town. The city government refused outside rebuilding offers but did nothing. African-Americans who remained eventually rebuilt Greenwood. The rioting was covered up and the stories of the survivors silenced until Tulsa state representative Don Ross pushed for and led the Oklahoma Legislature to authorize the Tulsa Race Riot Commission in 1996.

2) Cherokee language secrets: The Cherokees are one of the biggest and most influential tribes in the Oklahoma, with a tribal budget of nearly a billion dollars. Their rich history and language includes the continuous publication since 1828 of North America’s first bilingual newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix (published in Cherokee and English). Cherokee leader Sequoyah is honored as the inventor of the written Cherokee syllabary. Out of respect to the nation and to my readers, I thought it was important to authentically represent this language in Strike Price. In fact, use of the Cherokee language gives rise to key clues. Not only was I able to use actual Cherokee syllabary in the print edition thanks to the Cherokee Nation and to the first editors of the book at L&L Dreamspell, but I was also able to include the syllabary phrases in the most recent e-book edition, thanks to the efforts of my fearless book designers at 52 Novels.

3) Business secrets: What goes around comes around: Oklahoma first attracted attention from the United States government as a candidate for statehood when oil was discovered near Tulsa in 1901. More than a century later, the shale revolution again awakened interest in Oklahoma’s oil and gas reserves with prospectors even drilling some of the same areas that made the Osage the richest people on earth in the 1920s.

4) Osage murder secrets: The story of the Osage has attracted much interest. Among the nearly thirty Native American nations now headquartered in Oklahoma—most forcibly moved there at the tip of a gun—only the Osage retained their mineral rights. When oil was discovered on their land in the early 1900s each member of the Osage tribe, through his or her “headrights,” received a share of the royalties. The headrights became so valuable that outsiders married Osage women and then killed them to inherit the headrights. The newly-formed Federal Bureau of Investigation took on the Osage murders as its first case.

5) The final secret is that: Jesse Drum, one of the lead characters of Strike Price initially came to life in my short story, “A Time for Eating Wild Onions” under a different name, Mitch Oowatie. (Digging for and eating wild onions is a Cherokee tradition.) The short story is set much earlier than Strike Price: the early 1970s as the Vietnam War is winding down, and in a very different place: the intellectual cauldron of San Francisco with its war protests, Alcatraz occupation, and mix of the country’s most idealistic, and in some cases most dangerous, dreamers.

For example, Jim Jones and his cult were in San Francisco at that time and they appear in one of the scenes of A Time for Eating Wild Onions. Later Jones and his group moved to Guyana where, in 1978, Jones directed the massacre of over nine hundred of his followers. In A Time for Eating Wild Onions, Mitch/Jesse’s deadly interaction with his fellow soldier is foreshadowed when they cross paths with Jones. The events and culmination of the story serve as hidden (for a time) background between Jesse and another key character later in Strike Price.

Blurb :
Murder disrupts a billion-dollar oil deal. Strike Price is a story about a business deal turned deadly, concluding with a plot to destroy a hidden, crucial US oil center and bring the US into confrontation with another global power. To stop the plot and save lives, up-by-the-bootstraps Lynn Dayton must trust a Cherokee elder who carries a corrosive secret.

Strike Price features authentic Cherokee syllabary text in clues that tie fascinating Native American history to global high-stakes drama today.

Endorsements:
"If you're looking for big business wheeling-and-dealing, international intrigue, murder, mayhem, and high-geared action, you've come to the right place. Toss in a charming and nervy protagonist like Lynn Dayton and L. A. Starks' Strike Price is right on the money. Well-written, well-plotted and well worth a reader's time."--Carlton Stowers, two-time Edgar winner
                                 
"Strike Price takes the reader from Oklahoma Indian reservations to the streets of Florence, in an imaginative and well informed fusion of oil refining economics, Native American politics, and the potential for lethal mayhem in the global energy market."--Michael Ennis, author of New York Times bestseller, The Malice of Fortune

Buy: 

Amazon | Barnes & Noble |  Amazon - A Time For Eating Wild Onions

Find L.A. Starks:

Goodreads | Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook Author Page