Why I’ll Never Stop Writing Thrillers Set in Louisiana
Growing up in Louisiana, the idea of “setting as character” feels like an understatement: for us, setting might as well be the whole cast. Take my hometown of New Orleans, for example. There’s the wild debauchery of Mardi Gras, our world-famous cuisine, and music that feels woven into the city’s DNA. But whenever anyone asks me to describe New Orleans, the fun festivities and “laissez les bons temps rouler” attitude aren’t always the first things that come to mind. Most of the time, it’s the ghosts.
In a city that’s over three centuries old, it isn’t unusual to feel like you’re bumping elbows with the past. We’ve even turned our haunted history into a tourist attraction: just look at any French Quarter ghost tour, where you can sip your to-go daiquiris and Hurricanes while wandering a path once tread by the dearly—and often violently—departed. Our cemeteries, too, have become a source of morbid fascination, thanks to their beautiful architecture and unsettling history: in New Orleans, we bury people in above-ground mausoleums because, due to the city’s below-sea-level status and frequent flooding, anything buried underground is liable to float back up.
As an author, understanding New Orleans has felt like both a compulsion and a calling. Sometimes, I literally can’t stop thinking about it—I’ve even found myself spewing that macabre cemetery factoid at a Christmas party, which, I can tell you from experience, is not the proper setting. Still, it wasn’t until my second novel, The Debutantes, that I was brave enough to actually write a book about it.
The Debutantes is a young adult thriller set in the world of Mardi Gras debutante culture—an aspect of New Orleans with which, as a recovering debutante, I am intimately familiar. Even before I was a part of one, debutante balls have always both fascinated and disturbed me: they’re glitzy and glamorous, yes, but also tinged with a dark history of exclusion, elitism, and prejudice. There are beautiful ballgowns and white gloves, but also creepy masks, secret societies, and hidden identities—basically, the perfect setting for a thriller.
As well as I knew this strange little corner of New Orleans, though, writing The Debutantes was incredibly difficult for me. For one thing, my feelings about debutante culture are complicated and often negative. At the same time, writing a book set in New Orleans felt like a massive responsibility: I love my hometown so much, and I wanted to get it right. I wanted people to understand my city with all of its weird and wonderful contradictions. Even after finishing The Debutantes, though, I knew I wasn’t done writing about Louisiana. There was still so much to explore.
Enter Final Cut—my newest young adult thriller, which will be released on October 28th, 2025. With this book, I’ve gone two hours west of New Orleans to the fictional town of Pine Springs, an amalgamation of other real-life towns in St. Tammany Parish and the Acadiana region of Louisiana. Final Cut also leaves the debutante world behind for the set of a low-budget slasher movie, where reality blurs with fiction as a killer starts to pick off the cast and crew.
Like The Debutantes, Final Cut was inspired by personal experience: while I’ve thankfully never been stalked by a slasher-movie killer, I did act in a feature film in 2021, and we spent a few days shooting on the Northshore of New Orleans. Even though we weren’t too far from the city, I was struck by how different it felt. Abita Springs, one of the towns where we shot, has a population of just under 3,000, where New Orleans sits above 360,000. We were also much closer to the swamp, which is a thrilling setting of its own. With Final Cut, I wanted to explore a place even smaller and closer-knit than New Orleans, with its own strange and wonderful culture—one where nights are pitch-dark, and dangers lurk as close to the surface as the swamp creatures.
Even now, I know I’m not done writing stories about Louisiana. From its vibrant beauty to its hauntedness, there’s so much rich ground to explore, especially for a thriller. I don’t think I could stop even if I wanted to—but I don’t mind. Actually, I think I enjoy being haunted. It’s easy when you grew up well-acquainted with the ghosts.
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On the surface, these three debutantes don’t have anything in common except their exclusive private school and their ties to Les Masques. But soon, they realize why Lily brought them together: something dark is lurking beneath the glamorous surface of the debutante world, and it might be the reason she disappeared. And the further the girls dig, the more they begin to suspect that Margot’s death may not have been an accident–and that Lily may be next. When the Jester starts threatening to expose their own secrets, this unlikely trio must team up to uncover the monsters behind the Mardi Gras masks–before they’re left with another dead debutante.
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