Lynn Slaughter Novelist
Blogger
Creative Writing Instructor

Having heard stories about homeowner’s association boards, it’s clear to me that they offer plenty of material for mystery authors! Susanna Sullivan does a terrific job of setting her novel at a condo complex with a “challenging” board. 

First off, congratulations on the release of DROWNING IN DECEPTION, the first book in your Lily Gallagher Mystery series. Can you share with our readers a bit about the book and what inspired it?

I’d love to! When the book opens on a sunny Central Florida Monday morning in June, Lily is tired. Exhausted. She’s been a nurse for over 40 years, and her retirement party was the previous Friday. She’s looking forward to her three Rs – resting, relaxing, and reading.

Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen for her.

Lily and her husband Michael live in a small over-55 condo complex. Michael has gotten himself elected to the condo board, which is pretty dysfunctional, and he comes home from the condo office absolutely steaming.     

One of their friends and neighbors has been stuck in rehab for weeks because she lives on the second floor and needs an architectural waiver to put in a stairlift. When Michael was at the office, the board president came in, opened the mail which included Lottie’s formal waiver application, and threw it in the trash.

 Michael rescued it and logged it into the system, but with the president adamantly opposed to granting the waiver, Lily decides she needs to help her friend. So instead of resting and relaxing, she spends her first couple of days of retirement going around and talking to all the neighbors, trying to drum up support for Lottie and her stairlift. 

Then Lily’s best friend finds a dead body floating in the community pool. . .

I think anyone who’s ever lived in a place with a homeowner’s association will see where the inspiration came from! In one place where we lived (not an over-55 condo community), my husband was on the board, so I heard lots of insider stories about some of the craziness that goes on. And I lived in Central Florida for about 30 years, so that was a comfortable setting for me to use. I placed the fictional condo community in Winter Park, not too far from a house we lived in during the early 2000s.

You’ve called DROWNING IN DECEPTION an “edgy cozy mystery.” What do you mean by that?

I started out calling it a cozy, but the more I got into it, the more I realized it didn’t quite fit the pure cozy vibe. There’s a little more darkness there, but it still reads like a cozy, and there’s no graphic violence or sex on the page. I was casting about for another label, and someone on social media used the phrase, “edgy cozy.” I grabbed it and ran with it. 

Tell us more about your protagonist, Lily Gallagher, and why you decided to make her a retired nurse living in a 55 + condo community.   

I played around with several professions for Lily, and realized that everything I considered was a “helping” profession. I almost made her a teacher, but I wanted something to explain her level of exhaustion. Forty-plus years of twelve-hour shifts worked better than teaching.

You’ve written a great deal of nonfiction in your career. What led you to make the decision to try your hand at writing a mystery?

This is where I tell you, with a straight face, that I’ve wanted to write mysteries since I was in the third grade. 

My mother bought me my first Nancy Drew after a visit to the dentist for a filling. After that I devoured every Nancy Drew book ever written, as well as the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, the Boxcar Children, and every other mystery I could find. When I was a little older, I discovered Agatha Christie. 

Over the years I started writing a couple of mysteries, but gave up when I reached my first hurdle. Back then, there was no internet to consult, no YouTube videos or podcasts, no easy way to find help and instruction without going back to school. And with a husband, five children, and a full-time job, that felt impossible. 

So I did the next-best thing and scratched the writing itch through writing for newspapers and magazines, technical, and later content writing online. After I finally wrapped up my freelance business in 2021, though, I decided I was going to write that mystery, no matter what. 

As I discovered with my own work, writing fiction is very different from writing nonfiction. What steps did you take to develop your skills as a fiction writer? 

I really thought, now that I didn’t have a job or children at home, writing fiction would be easy. Alright, you can stop laughing now. . . I have to say, I got really lucky. I had finished my first draft, pretty much knew it was awful but didn’t know what to do about it, when I met someone in an online group who was looking for guinea pigs – her words. She’d been a book editor for quite a while, was looking to start a book coaching business, and wanted some volunteers. 

Raising my virtual hand was the smartest thing I could have done. Over the next year or so, I got an incredible crash course from her in fiction writing. She also introduced me to several craft books that were important for me to read, and gave me valuable feedback. 

I also found a local in-person critique group. Just being able to hang out with other writers on a regular basis was helpful, and I always learn from the feedback I get, even when I disagree with it. It’s also helpful to read other writers’ drafts because it helps me spot issues with my own. 

A related question: What advice would you give someone who aspires to write a mystery, especially later in life?

Don’t wait! Your life experience gives you a huge advantage, so put it to good use. The process of writing and publishing is long, so start now. Find other writers, either in person or online, who can help you. Writing is solitary, so interacting regularly with other writers is really important.

Then have fun with it.

Tell us about your writing process. 

I’m planning my third book in the Lily Gallagher series, and I don’t know that I have anything as organized as a process yet. I can share some pieces of it. 

First, I start my drafts in Google Docs because it’s platform agnostic so I can use it on my laptop, my phone, or my tablet. In other words, I can write wherever inspiration strikes.

After the initial drafting stage, I pull it into Scrivener. I write in scenes, so each scene has its own Google Doc, and my Scrivener index is scene by scene.

I’m a pantser, so I don’t outline until after it’s drafted. I do maintain a character bible, so hopefully I never give a character blue eyes in one place and brown eyes in another.

Before I start, I know who my victim will be, and I’m trying to plan a little more than that before I start actually writing the third book. We shall see.

Have there been particular authors who’ve especially inspired your writing journey?

Well, of course the golden age greats like Agatha Christie, especially for her dialogue and some of the ways she busts convention.

Rhys Bowen, author of the Evan Evans, Molly Murphy, and the Royal Spyness series, has been an influence in a bit of a different way. Back in the mid-90s, I joined the Sisters in Crime chapter on Compuserve. (I wonder if any of your readers are old enough to remember Compuserve. . .) Rhys joined a while after I did, and she was looking for feedback about choosing her pen name. I look at her incredible output since then and think, wow, if I hadn’t chickened out back then, where would my writing be today? 

Another major influence has been Elizabeth Peters, specifically her Amelia Peabody series. Amelia is probably my favorite literary/mystery character of all time, and Peters’ writing for that series is witty, and snarky, and intelligent – all qualities that I aspire to.

What’s next for you writing-wise?

I plan to continue with Lily Gallagher for the foreseeable future.

Anything else you’d like to add, or wish I’d asked that I didn’t?

When I started working on the second book in the series, I decided to challenge myself. In Drowning in Deception, the victim was a twisted, dislikable person. So I decided to make the victim in the next book, Chords of Deception, someone without any enemies. It was much harder to write!

*********

BIO: Susanna is the author of the Lily Gallagher Mysteries series. The first book, Drowning in Deception, was released on December 1, 2025.

It took her over 60 years to write it.

She always wanted to be a mystery writer, ever since she read her first Nancy Drew in the third grade. A few things got in the way, small things like raising – and needing to feed – five kids, for example. So she spent decades writing for newspapers, magazines, and websites. When she finally “retired,” she immediately started writing her first mystery.

Her second, Chords of Deception, is scheduled for release in July, 2026.

Susanna divides her time between Florida’s panhandle and a small beach town in Panama.

 ************

 Contact link: author@susannasullivan.com.

 Universal buy link: https://books2read.com/lilymystery .  Amazon link: https://amzn.to/3Kul69V .