Ellen here, and I’m so excited to welcome bestselling author Karen White to Chicks today. Not only is Karen a fellow Tulane University alum, we discovered that we both lived in the same apartment across from the campus – a decade apart – and Karen uses it as a setting in her popular Royal Street series!

In addition to her solo career, Karen writes New York Times best sellers with authors Beatriz Williams and Lauren Willig – Team W. Today, she shares about how the partnership came about and led to their recent hit mystery, An Author’s Guide to Murder. And one lucky commenter will win their choice of a book from Team W!

Three Authors Walk into a Bar (and Plot a Murder)

  Roughly twelve years ago, at the end of a writer’s conference, I found myself in the hotel bar pounding back, um er, delicately sipping an espresso martini (among other beverages) alongside bestselling authors Beatriz Williams and Lauren Willig.  We knew each other from the writing circuit and had become admirers of each other’s books, but up until that point—sitting right there elbow to elbow in a back booth—we hadn’t yet realized how much we had in common.  And not just our penchant for wooly wooly baaad sheep jokes and nine-year-old boy humor.

At that point in time, Lauren and I had about ten books each under our belts and had just completed grueling book tours where we woke up in a different city and  hotel room each night, unable to recall where we were or what our names were.  Beatriz was the nubile ingenue of our trio, her debut novel having just been published that summer .We began discussing how much fun we were having together as opposed to the lonely slog of book tour where it’s just you, your battered itinerary and an embarrassing amount of room service.  Then, in a moment of shared madness, we began to play that old game that writers have—the What If game.  What if? we asked each other, after the second bottle of wine. In an alcohol-infused haze, we started throwing around ideas for a book set in Scotland (because why not?), packed with men in kilts and playful sheep.  We wanted to call it Fifty Shades of Plaid. 

In the end, we wound up writing a book set in New York, the New York Times bestseller, The Forgotten Room—and then one on the Lusitania—and one in France—and one in Newport.  It seems this wild and crazy idea of writing a book together was perhaps not so wild and crazy.

But even after four books together we never completely forgot our OG idea.  Maybe not Fifty Shades of Plaid but perhaps Scotland.  And maybe a sheep or two.  And definitely kilts. So while we were together in Newport working on final edits for our fourth collaboration, The Lost Summers of Newport, we were getting a bit loopy over caffeine and sugar on an editing break, laughing over how often readers ask us if we’re just pretending to be besties, or if we’d really been put together by our editor like the Spice Girls. 

What if, we asked, as writers do, leaning together over our coffees.  What if we put three authors claiming to be besties on a Scottish island in an equally Scottish castle (complete with its own murderous history, poison garden and secret passages), supposedly to write a book together, and then the current owner of the castle was found murdered in multiple, creative ways?

Although the three of us write a variety of genres from historicals to Southern fiction and we each dabble with mystery and suspense subplots in our own books, it would be a far stretch to call any of us “mystery writers.”  Yet there we were, already beginning to outline what was definitely a whodunnit, with an expanding cast of characters, suspects, and motives, and an alarming amount of plaid.  There was even a twisty ending—the twistiest, according to our editor—that surprised even us.  And thus was born our fifth collaboration, The Author’s Guide to Murder.

For the plotting, we took inspiration from the world of the cozy mystery—think Murder, She Wrote and Father Brown.  While none of us had experience writing in this genre, at least one W is a devoted fan of Golden Age mysteries and their many variations, and we each enjoyed putting our own spin on the tropes of the genre. 

In addition to immersing ourselves in the world of murder and mayhem and enjoying ourselves immensely while liberally sprinkling red herrings and clues throughout, we also relished writing about female friendship.  It gave us the chance to explore our own experiences of discovering and nurturing our “found family” in each other, while navigating the complexities of the publishing world.  Just like our intrepid protagonists Cassie, Emma and Kat, we know the importance of having someone who’s always got your back.  (And who also knows where the bodies are buried.).

With The Author’s Guide to Murder, we’ve come full circle, revisiting our own origin story of “three authors walk into a bar”. It’s a satire of the publishing industry, it’s a locked castle mystery…but, most of all, it’s a book about friendship and found family.

Because, sometimes, you walk into a bar and find your people… and then you write five bestsellers with them.

Readers, do you think you could work on a project with your close friends?

BIO: With almost two million books in print in fifteen different languages, Karen White is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of 34 novels.

Not entirely convinced she wanted to be a writer, Karen first pursued a career in business and graduated cum laude with a BS in Management from Tulane University. Ten years later, in a weak moment, she wrote her first book.  Her books—referred to as “grit lit” (Southern Women’s Fiction)—have since been nominated for numerous national contests including the SIBA (Southeastern Booksellers Alliance) Fiction Book of the Year.

Karen’s latest releases include The Author’s Guide to Murder (November 2024), a collaboration with bestselling authors Beatriz Williams and Lauren Willig,and the soon-to-be-released That Last Carolina Summer (July 2025) and The Lady on Esplanade (November 2025), the third book in her New Orleans-set mystery series.   

When not writing, Karen spends her time reading, birdwatching, and avoiding cooking. Karen and her husband have two grown children and a spoiled Havanese dog, Sophie, and she divides her time between Atlanta, Georgia and the northwest Florida coast. Visit Karen at karen-white.com.

SYNOPSIS for THE AUTHOR’S GUIDE TO MURDER: There’s been a sensational murder at historic Castle Kinloch, a gothic fantasy of grey granite on a remote island in the Highlands of Scotland. Literary superstar Brett Saffron Presley has been found dead—under bizarre circumstances—in the castle tower’s book-lined study. Years ago, Presley purchased the castle as a showpiece for his brand and to lure paying guests with a taste for writerly glamour. Now it seems, the castle has done him in…or, possibly, one of the castle’s guests has. Detective Chief Inspector Euan McIntosh, a local with no love for literary Americans, finds himself with the unenviable task of extracting statements from three American lady novelists. 

The prime suspects are Kat de Noir, a slinky erotica writer; Cassie Pringle, a Southern mom of six juggling multiple cozy mystery series; and Emma Endicott, a New England blue blood and author of critically acclaimed historical fiction. The women claim to be best friends writing a book together, but the authors’ stories about how they know Brett Saffron Presley don’t quite line up, and the detective is getting increasingly suspicious. 

Why did the authors really come to Castle Kinloch? And what really happened the night of the great Kinloch ceilidh, when Brett Saffron Presley skipped the folk dancing for a rendezvous with death? 

A crafty locked-room mystery, a pointed satire about the literary world, and a tale of unexpected friendship and romance—this novel has it all, as only three bestselling authors can tell it! 

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