Q&A: Michelle Chouinard, Author of ‘A Tour to Die For’

We chat with author Michelle Chouinard about A Tour To Die For, which follows Capri Sanzio who is giving a true crime tour her guests won’t soon forget. After all, a tour guide who specialises in serial killers knows better than most that San Francisco is a city with killer charm.

Hi, Michelle! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?

Hello! I’m just a girl with a true-crime obsession that prompts my brain to manufacture murder mystery stories, and who spends her days writing those stories down in an on-going attempt to free up space in her head. That has resulted in a police procedural series (the Jo Fournier series, starting with The Dancing Girls), a standalone psychological thriller (The Vacation) and my most recent amateur sleuth series, The Serial Killer Guide to San Francisco mysteries.

When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?

I honestly can’t remember a time when I didn’t love to make up stories and write. The first real memory I have of thinking I might actually be decent at it was age eight, when one of my stories got published in the local newspaper. They’d run a contest for young writers, and it’s possible that they just didn’t get very many entries—but I won a little stained-glass eye catcher kit, and I’ve been chasing the dragon ever since.

Quick lightning round! Tell us:

• The first book you ever remember reading: Rupert the Rhinoceros
• The one that made you want to become an author: I can’t remember which book kicked that off, but reading the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxymade me want to write something funny, and watching The Sixth Sense made me want to write a twist that would make people gasp.
• The one that you can’t stop thinking about: Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth. I’d never read anything like it—the multi-generational storytelling, the way he developed characters, the way he structured the story. I read my copy of it so many times it fell apart. My second copy was well on its way to a similar fate when I saved it by getting a Kindle version.

A Tour to Die For is the second installment in your Serial Killer Guide to San Francisco series and it’s out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?

The imp on my shoulder wants me to say it’s about ‘A Tour to Die For’ since that’s five words, and the title really is fitting…but let’s go with ‘What Mrs. Kostrika Maybe Saw!’

What can readers expect?

Family drama, gold-rush history, true-crime tidbits, code breaking, buried treasure, several close calls with death, and a very handsome homicide detective.

Where did the inspiration for A Tour to Die For come from?

Two inspirations collided to create A Tour to Die For…It started when I discovered there’s a mini fleet of gold-rush era ships buried under San Francisco’s downtown financial district, because that part of the city is built on landfill. Every once in a while as some building is being torn down or retrofitted, they construction crew stumbles onto one of them, and I knew I wanted to explore that in book two of the series. Then, as I was doing a Barbary Coast walking tour to learn more about San Francisco’s founding and her gold-rush history, I happened to look up at an apartment on a side-street off of Broadway and noticed I could see partially into someone’s apartment. I didn’t see anything nefarious, but my brain said ‘hold my beer,’ and we were off to the races…

Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?

There are several scenes where Capri has to get inventive to get the information she needs, and I always love writing those—in this case my favorite is when she tricks a suspect into saying too much in a café, but then has to extract herself from his advances. I also really enjoyed writing the finale to this one, although I can’t say much about that without giving important details away!

Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?

The main challenge in this book was bringing to life a character that the reader never gets to meet directly. This was a central challenge for Capri, too—one of her investigative superpowers is the ability to pick up on details that don’t fit with a person’s character, but since she’d never met the murdered woman, Leeya, she had to develop a picture of who Leeya was from what people told her about Leeya, and from what she observed in Leeya’s apartment, etc. Writing those contradictory descriptions and having Capri chisel away what doesn’t fit became a puzzle she and I solved together.

What’s next for you?

I just turned in book three in the series to my editor. In that book, Capri travels back in time to solve the cold-case murder of a runaway in summer-of-love Haight-Ashbury, and a contemporary murder of an armchair detective who went missing while working the cold case.

Lastly, what books have you enjoyed reading this year? Are there any you’re looking forward to picking up?

I really enjoyed For Your Own Good by Samantha Downing, and can’t wait to dive into her newest, Too Old for This. I also really enjoyed Follow Me by Elizabeth Rose Quinn and She Didn’t Stand a Chance by Stacie Grey.

Will you be picking up A Tour to Die For? Tell us in the comments below!