According to the Association of Canadian Publishers, more than 10,000 books are published each year in Canada. That’s a sea of novels, an ocean of pages, and to be seen as more than a mere drop takes a certain special something.
As a debut author, the challenge of getting writing noticed is that much tougher. Not that Lynn Valley’s Lee-Ann McGuire Whitlock would know anything about that.
The author’s first ever book On the Surface, a popcorn thriller set in the sunny Bahamas, was published in June. Just weeks after, it was named as one of the best mystery, thriller and suspense books of July by Amazon, cementing McGuire Whitlock as award-winning writer within just a few weeks of being a published author.
“I didn’t really know what to expect, it’s my first time experiencing anything like this,” said McGuire Whitlock.
“It’s like it’s all been happening in slow motion. It’s been a fun journey, but a slowly unwinding one.”
The novel, a collaboration between McGuire Whitlock and friend Rachel Graham, is a modern day whodunnit complete with all the bells and whistles of a young, juicy drama. Drugs. Domestic violence. Internet sleuthing. Influencers.
It follows Sawyer Stone III and Dani Fox, a Youtube famous couple whose adventures travelling the world via sailboat are streamed daily to their colossal online following. When Dani Fox vanishes after a particularly unruly boat party while anchored off the paradisiacal island of Exuma, it’s presumed she drowned in the clear blue waters of the Bahamas.
In the weeks that follow, pre-recorded video posts reveal a darker side to her seemingly faultless relationship with Sawyer. Accident morphs into murder, and the couple’s countless followers are determined to discover the truth of what happened to their social media star.
McGuire Whitlock said On The Surface is meant to be “entertaining, fun, with commercial appeal.” She’s always been partial to those types of stories herself – “something that is just entertaining and not quite so… literary,” – and has long wanted to create an easily digestible, gripping beach read that she would be proud to have on her own bookshelf.
After all, the debut writer never set out to win a Pulitzer Prize. The book had been a passion project written with a close friend, one neither of them ever expected to take off in the way that it has.
McGuire Whitlock met Graham while living in the riverside Arkansas city of Little Rock. The home of her husband, she spent 12 years there raising their two children and juggling her career as a lawyer. In the end it was the joining of a local book club, ironically, that would set her on the path to becoming penman.
“I met Rachel through this great local book club and we just stayed friends over the years, even when I moved back here, and she moved to California,” she said.
The pandemic carved out the time for the two to kickstart a book project they had discussed for years, and long catch ups over Zoom turned into story meetings discussing plots and protagonists and potential crime scenes.
To even have the book, written under the pen name Rachel McGuire, published is a feat they are both still coming to terms with, she said.
“It feeds into my imposter syndrome in some ways, we have this thing of wondering if it’s all just some sort of clerical error,” she said.
“It’s so atypical from the normal path to becoming a published author, where you see years of toil and thousands of rejections. I just didn’t have to go through that. Which is good,” she laughed, “because I’m very thin skinned.”
With such unbridled success to come from the debut, thirsty readers will likely be asking questions of a follow-up. The two authors are “well into” writing their second novel, said McGuire Whitlock. She does offer a warning however: it does stray in theme from the first.
It will still be a thriller, but this time with an element of … the undead.
“There might be a few more zombies this time,” she laughed.
“Everything is improved by adding zombies. I remember being given Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as a gag gift one year because I loved the original, and I read it and was like… ‘Oh my God, this is so much better.' That’s what inspired me this time around.”
With both writers still in the process of pinpointing the plot, McGuire Whitlock is unsure of the release date for her follow up. In the meantime, fans will be able to catch the author at West Vancouver’s upcoming Harmony Arts Festival this Aug. 6 and 7, where she’ll be signing copies of the book in the Artspeak tent.
July might be over, but the furor over On The Surface isn’t ready to die down just yet.
Mina Kerr-Lazenby is the North Shore News’ Indigenous and civic affairs reporter. This reporting beat is made possible by the Local Journalism Initiative.
