Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

I'm Laura Owens and I'm Jan Black.

And we are so excited to be talking with our guest on this episode, award-winning mystery author Simoneone st james whose new york times and

usa today best-selling book the sundown motel has just been released in paperback it's been said

that simone writes the kind of eerie and unnerving stories that keep you looking over your shoulder

and leaving all the lights on while and after you read. Simone, thank you so much

for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Tell us how you became a mystery

writer. I became a mystery writer because I wrote three romance novels and I couldn't get them

published. Oh my gosh.

And then I came up with this idea, which was just the idea of what if a woman was working for a temp agency and her temp agency assigned her to be the assistant to a ghost hunter, what would

happen.

I had this idea and I just really loved it.

And I had no agent. I had no publishing contract. I was still a beginning writer. I had this idea and I just really loved it and I had no agent. I had no publishing

contract. I was still a beginning writer. I had nothing but rejections. And I sat down and I just

wrote it because I wanted to know what would happen. That was the book that got me, my agent and my

publishing contract and it just went from there. Why do you think it is that people are so fascinated

with stories of murders and people disappearing and ghosts, even though they're very frightening, they seem to sell more newspapers and books and they're obviously the subject of just about every TV show that's popular right now?

I think there's a lot of reasons. I mean, I think that in the back of all of our minds, it's like, well, what if that

happened to me? That's a big universal thing. And so we kind of like to explore that. When you

explore sort of something that's scary, it makes you feel like maybe you're sort of facing it down

and you're making a little less scary and you're like, okay, so I, you know, I've kind of been through this in a fictional way. So maybe, maybe now I can, you know, maybe now it seems less frightening to me. That's one of the things that I think people do. And it's also just, you know, when you're going, looking at people who love to read about crime or true crime or mysteries, it's also just an exploration of human behavior. And it's not just the behavior of the

murderer, but like it's the behavior of everybody, of the police and the people who are around

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