This post was originally published on Audible.com.
Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match audio exactly.
Patty Rivera: Hi, listeners. I'm Audible Editor Patty K. Rivera, and today I'm excited to be speaking with bestselling author Brynn Kelly about her latest Audible Original, Some Like It Lethal. Welcome, Brynn.
Brynn Kelly: Thank you. It's so nice to be here in actual person. I'm used to sitting in my study by myself.
Listeners, you obviously can't see us, but Brynn and I are sitting in our headquarters in Newark, New Jersey, and we're about to have this amazing conversation about Some Like It Lethal, which follows Hope, a mob princess hiding in witness protection who goes on a blind date only to find herself face to face with Max, the father of the teenager she accused of shooting her. Before long, they're dodging bullets together through Las Vegas and trying very hard not to fall for each other.
Some Like It Lethal opens up with what I call a meet-scared—the blind date where a very apprehensive Hope first meets Max. Maybe a minor spoiler here, but Hope's trepidation only skyrockets when Max looks nothing like the photo on the dating website. What inspired you to open the story this way?
I guess it was the inevitable start when I came up with the concept. I was chatting with my editor about some ideas for the next book and I'm like, "How about a blind date that goes really, really wrong?" In my head, I was thinking of a situation where this woman nervously goes on a date that she thinks is going to be half an hour at the most. She can ditch him if it's too much. And it ends up being like a week-long life-or-death wild ride where everything happens, including falling in love.
Once I had that concept in place, it was natural to start, boom, right at that date. This is a woman who is in witness protection and is very obviously safety conscious, and so she's been set up by a friend and expects that this guy that she's meeting is going to be a very mild-mannered accountant. I think she assumes he's an accountant just from his photo, and he turns out to be a Jack Reacher character. And she's like, "No, no, no, no, no, this is all a mistake."
I'm sitting here laughing because it's true. He gets there and she freezes, and then they do begin to speak, and this tension, it feels almost immediate, right? Even in those initial first conversations where they're going back and forth and he's trying to explain himself, it felt palpable. The tension between Hope and Max is electric, even while she's deciding whether or not to trust him. How did you balance building genuine romantic chemistry between the two of them against the very real reasons that she does have for not trusting him when she does figure out who he is?
That's always the really fun challenge. Book after book, I've set out to do an enemies-to-lovers trope, and I never manage it because they always get along too well. To be enemies-to-lovers, you've got to have really strong reasons for them to be enemies, and it can't just be that they annoy each other or something. You've got to have a really strong thing keeping them apart. So, for these guys, it was easy because, of course, they're on different sides of this legal case and she's testified and put his son in jail for a crime that he's convinced his son didn't do. So, automatically, you've got this very, very strong conflict where they can't both win. He wants to get his son out; she wants her freedom.
In order to get his son out, he's got to convince her to look back through the evidence and second-guess herself, and she doesn't want to do that. So, you've got this wonderful external conflict, but meanwhile, they're immediately physically attracted to each other. But they very quickly find that there are so many other qualities that the other one sees in them that no one else sees. It's just constant surprise after surprise as to how well they click and get along and understand each other, even though they're from such different worlds with different goals.
At points, I'm like, "Man, how are they going to end up together?” I was really trying to figure out how, because they really did seem so different at the beginning. The more we learn about Max, his background is really interesting because it really adds a layer. We do find out throughout the story that Max left Las Vegas to France specifically to escape being roped into the mob and being brought into that world. He was kind of preemptively trying to be like, "No, I will not be involved in this." And then he somehow ends up falling for the mob boss's daughter, which I find so funny. Did you always know that that was going to be his backstory, or did that irony reveal itself as you were writing?
I knew I needed a backstory that gave them a lot of conflict. I wanted them to be on different sides of it. So, I guess that must have come out gradually as I worked on their backgrounds. For me, my characters kind of walk into a room fully formed or they walk onto the page fully formed, even if it's not how I had it in my notes or thought they would be. The minute I write that scene, the character is declaring who they are, and I'm like, "Okay, that wasn't what I had in mind, but let's go with that."
"[I'm a] lifelong audiobook listener, but now it's just reached a whole new level thanks to the tech, thanks to the explosion of what's available. I love that you just don't ever have to put the book down."
So, from that moment, I guess I just start to peel back the layers on them and it's a question of figuring out, “Okay, if they’re like that, why are they like that? What is it that's happened in their past? What wound is it that's made them wary or whatever their character issues are?” It's always that kind of process where I'm just digging into their backgrounds and thinking, "Well, what is it about their background that gives them these strong internal conflicts?" And then also it's a case of trying to make sure that the two main characters, while they are obviously well suited to each other, there is a lot of stuff from both of their backgrounds that's going to conflict. So, they've got the internal conflict and they've got that interpersonal conflict when their issues come together.
I do have to touch on this, because Hope, she's not just a mob princess, she's also a former therapist. She had this life where she was a therapist. I find that we do really get to know more about Max and his background just through those moments where they do connect and those moments where she's like, "Hey, don't be so hard on yourself." We see Max grapple with his identity as a father. I feel like a lot of that connection that they made together was just those small moments where they were talking, and for me, I'm like, "Oh, they did fall in love in those small moments." And, yes, there's some steaminess, but I found those moments really, really, just truly beautiful.
One of the things that really makes those moments just pop is the fact that it is in audio. We have Sean Masters and Christine Lakin, whose duet performance was, for lack of a better word, so damn good. The chemistry between them just jumps out from the first few moments of the book. What was it like hearing their performance, and did they bring anything to Hope and Max that surprised you?
Well, you're in a bit of an advantage over me here because I haven't heard the whole thing yet because it just released yesterday while I was on a plane. But the samples that I've heard, what I loved about Christine was that she brings this real cool sexiness to Hope. As well as being able to portray that real vulnerability, she can be take-no-prisoners when she wants to be, which is Hope. She's grown up in this pretty tough environment, so she knows how to handle herself, but at the same time, it broke her. So, you've got to have that fragility there as well as that strength. So, she was perfect.
"All of my characters are very real to me. They are real people. They exist. But as soon as I heard Sean [Masters] voicing Kenny, he existed on a whole new level."
In fact, when we were considering narrators, both my editor and the producer immediately thought of Christine. She's one of these narrators who you feel like it's the actual person, just telling you their story. She's not an actor. It is the real person. The duet plays out really well. It's the first time one of my books has been a duet, and that's fantastic because I get really concerned that when the narrators are doing each other's voices, I can't stand it when male narrators put on a squeaky voice for the heroine. That's my biggest fear. It doesn't happen with Audible books, obviously. So, having the duet just means that they can stay in these wonderful, rich voices that they have cultivated.
With Sean, what I really was blown away with was when he voiced my secondary character, Kenny, who's this aging mobster with a conscience. He’s quite vulnerable. And all of my characters are very real to me. They are real people. They exist. But as soon as I heard Sean voicing Kenny, he existed on a whole new level. He came out of that recording, and I could see him and he was just this complete real entity. I think that's a reflection on Sean's ability to do characterizations across the spectrum. So, yeah, putting those two together, Sean and Christine, it was just leaping off the page in fireworks.
Also, I found it really adorable that, throughout, Max is cursing in French. I found the random use of “merde” so funny.
Yeah, we had to make sure we had a narrator who could curse in French.
10 out of 10. No notes. Again, I had such a fun time. I've had an opportunity, candidly, to listen to it twice, and both times I pick up on small things that I've been like, "Ooh, maybe a third listen to see if there's anyone else that I can fall in love with." But while I'm here talking about things that I am in love with, we have to talk about Kenny and Dolly. I love Kenny and Dolly. They felt like a found family for Hope. They took care of her, they protected her, and without too many spoilers, they really are a big part of the resolution, because our girl Hope finds herself in a bit of a pickle at the end. I love how their dynamic just added this warmth to this story. Because Hope, at the beginning, she talks about how she doesn't have her mom, and how her dad, things are different, and she has this stepmother, she's there, but not like a mom—
She's not warm. She's not a maternal figure, no.
She's not. So, it's beautiful to see that warmth that Kenny and Dolly bring to the story. I have actually noticed that in your other Audible Originals, too, that your secondary characters really do tend to bring warmth and this delightfulness to the story. I am curious, how do you balance secondary characters like Kenny and Dolly so that they feel essential rather than just supportive?
I think for me, they are real people in my head. Actually, with Kenny and Dolly, who are not their real names, by the way, these are the code names that Hope has come up with for them because they're all in witness protection and they're not supposed to even know each other, let alone know their names, so she takes to calling them Kenny and Dolly. I actually had to cut them back a bit because—the look on Patty's face right now [laughs]—because they did like to take over. There were pages of banter between them that I was like, "Guys, I know you're having a good time here, but it's not really essential to the story." They were two characters who really did appear on page when they first walked in, they were a little bit different to what I thought, and I just gave them room to take off while having to rein them in because, yeah, they are larger-than-life people.
And take off they did, to the point that, next question: Kenny and Dolly, do we get one? Do we get a story?
Will they, won't they?
I feel like those two have a story to tell. Tell me a story. I'm here. I'm listening.
You could easily write a full story about them because, again, they've got this incredible background. With Kenny and Dolly, we don't get the full story of their background because they can't talk about it, and there are hints of their very useful, slightly dark skillsets throughout the whole book, as well as being these quite cute maternal and paternal figures. It's like grandma and granddad, if grandma and granddad were aging mobsters who turned their life around and were very sweet and very, very charming. They've still got that skillset to draw on if they need to.
They're willing to take it there if they need to. Several parts throughout the story, Dolly would just say something and I'd be like, "Same, girl."
Yeah, they just wanted to wisecrack the whole time. Sometimes I had to remind them that, “This is a serious moment. Guys, this is life or death. Rein it in.”
So, we're just here talking about things we love, right? So, one of the things I love about your Originals are the character pairings. You've combined a librarian with a movie star, an English teacher with an operative, and now in Some Like It Lethal, a therapist-mob princess and a paratrooper, which feels a bit darker than your previous couples. What inspires these combinations?
Oh, that's a tricky question. So, I shouldn't really give this away, but I think all of my female characters are a side of me. And it's kind of a conscious choice, actually, to make them very grounded, very regular people who find themselves in these extraordinary situations. Some of them are a little bit less sheltered than others, but I really love the fun thing of taking someone who's fairly sheltered and thinking, "Okay, well, what's going to really fire her up?" And introducing her to this wildfire of a guy who is going to draw so much out of her at the same time as she's going to draw a lot of out of him.
I think that's that lovely contrast of backgrounds you get where especially a lot of the time with an alpha hero, they've never had someone draw them out before. So, this can be an uncomfortable situation for them. I guess it's that push and pull of having those contrasting characters. It's not even necessarily something that I consciously choose. It just seems right. It just seems like the right pairing. I might start thinking, "Okay, I want her to be a librarian. What's he going to be?" And she's not just a librarian, but she embraces the introvert librarian archetype, and she loves it. She doesn't see any reason to come out of her shelter. So, obviously, pairing her with a movie star was going to be the ultimate thing that was going to force her out of that. So, I think it's that contrast that I love.
I love that. And on behalf of the regular girls, thank you for letting us imagine it, because regular me with, like, a movie star, I could maybe see myself in those shoes. I don't know.
Yeah, that's the fun bit, right? That's where the fantasy comes in.
Yeah, why not? We can all imagine a little bit more. So, in writing Audible Originals, have you become more of an audio person?
Yeah, I have. I mean, part of that is because since I've been writing Audible Originals, audio has just gone off as a genre. But I remember listening to books on record player, LPs. I had Star Wars on LP, and I had The Muppet Show on LP. I remember getting books out of the library on the smaller records. Even as a kid, I was a devout audiobook listener, not that we called them audiobooks back then. My aunt was blind and she used to get the audiobooks as well. It was definitely a genre that I loved. I loved listening to audiobooks right from when I was a kid.
I've often paired the audiobook with the print book. That's what I love doing. I do that more and more these days. I love that you can continue on with your chores, you never have to put the book down anymore. That's what I love about this era, especially. It's all on your phone as well, so you can switch so easily. Yeah, lifelong audiobook listener, but now it's just reached a whole new level thanks to the tech, thanks to the explosion of what's available. I love that you just don't ever have to put the book down.
Nice. What do you listen to? I'm curious.
What am I listening to at the moment? Well, I listen to a whole range of genres, and I’ll tell you what I loved listening to recently was The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. So, obviously, it's a very atmospheric book, and I started off, I'd read, I don't know, the first third on the actual print book, but then I had to go and do something else. So, I found the audio. I went through what was on Audible and found the audio. When it's a classic book like that and there've been a few productions of it, I listen to all the samples. It takes me quite some time to select the perfect voice. I selected this guy, and, oh, my God, it was just fantastic.
I was going for a walk on the beach, beautiful, sunny day, and in my head, I was in like 1930s film noir LA, because this guy has a fantastic noir voice. It was one of those times where I already had the picture in my head of the book because I'd read a third of it, but then suddenly it got a whole lot darker and a whole lot grittier, and there was all this texture there just from the way he was reading it. I think I have so much respect for voice actors and how much depth and texture they can bring to a book. They're not just sitting there reading it. They're bringing it to life in so many layered ways.
Seriously, the magic of listening. Just listening to you talk about this book and how you were just transported makes me want to pick it up. So, now that Some Like It Lethal is out in the world, what is next for you?
I am finishing off my next Audible Original, which I'm very excited about. It's actually due in a couple of weeks. So, I'm in this crazy time where one book's coming out and one book is due. I'm very immersed in this world. All of my books for Audible are mashups of some kind, rom-com meets suspense/thriller/mystery in a different form. This one is a small-town romance—which is a genre I love—meets small-town murder mystery, which is also a genre I love.
"I think all of my female characters are a side of me. And it's kind of a conscious choice, actually, to make them very grounded, very regular people who find themselves in these extraordinary situations."
So, I'm just in the process now. The book's almost there, but I just need to make sure it's nicely woven together. I'm loving the process of writing it, and I'm sure that means you get a better book out of it, because if I'm not bored, hopefully the listener is not going to be bored. But with this one there’s so many fun things to play with, and it's a little bit meta because the female character is a romance editor. So, she's finding herself suddenly dropped into this small-town romance that she didn't expect, and meanwhile, she's analyzing it from the tropetastic point of view of a romance editor and saying, "No, there's a little dog. I can't deal with a little dog. No, you cannot be in this story. I'm sorry, it's not your story." All of these fun aspects of small-town romance tropes that I'm bringing in and having a lot of fun with. So, yeah, it's quite meta. It's cute.
I'm sitting here holding in my excitement, but also, I'm like, "Are my friends group texting you about my tendencies? Like, is that what's happening?" Because that sounds like me. For some reason, I have decided to romanticize life, so if I do see a dog, I was, "Oh, look, a dog. My day's going to go this way because I saw this dog." It feels very relatable already, and I haven't even listened.
Now, I do have two more questions for you, and listeners, we are in spoiler territory here, so feel free to skip ahead if you haven't finished listening to Some Like It Lethal yet. Towards the end of the story, Hope discovers that her own memory was manipulated by the person behind her shooting. I didn't see that coming a mile away. What inspired that specific twist? Because there are some twists there, but that one, I think that one's the one that got me the most.
I always find it hard to go back to the genesis of the whodunit. I think for that one, I didn't even know until I was about maybe a quarter of the way through the draft. I was keeping options open for who the ultimate villain was going to be. A lot of time in my books, there are layers of villains. There are people who are good people who've done the wrong thing, or there are people who are working with the main villain.
I think because I didn't even know myself for the first quarter of the first draft who that was going to be, I built up several characters that it could be. And then it was just a case of going through, actually, the possibilities with this character are greater for that emotional hit. So, that was the direction I went in. But then my editor and I went back and forth a little bit because she picked it quite early on in the early drafts. So, I did have to go back and obfuscate a bit and build up some of the other characters as well and make it a bit less obvious. So, I'm so thrilled that it was a surprise to you.
My money was on Sandra. It was Sandra, and then just “How did you do this to me, Brynn Kelly?” I was very pleasantly surprised there. And of course I loved the happily ever after. I won't spoil anything for anyone. One spoiler is enough. But I really love the happily ever after, so thank you for that. Okay, last question: If Hope and Max could recommend an Audible listen to me, what would it be?
Well, Max, I think, would be into your action-adventure spy thriller.
Something like a Tom Clancy.
Yeah. Or a David Baldacci, I think. I think he’d be a David Baldacci guy, actually. Hope, she would be a self-help addict, I think. She would be constantly trying to figure out the psychology. So, a Mel Robbins type or something, I think.
Oh, I love that. Mel Robbins, I mean, you can't go wrong with Mel Robbins.
Yeah, right? I think she would be hoovering up all the Brené Brown, or she'd be always trying to figure out herself and everyone around her.
I like that. Maybe I'll take a recommendation from Hope and cue up my latest Mel Robbins. So, it has been so much fun chatting with you today, Brynn. Listeners, you can get Some Like It Lethal, along with the rest of Brynn's titles, on Audible now. Happy listening!
