Perilous riddles and visions beyond the ordinary.
When I began Deadly College Murders and started to see the plot taking shape, I realized the main character had to stand apart from familiar tropes. She is neither an Anti‑Hero nor a simple victim; she is, above all, a survivor. At first she presents as shy and hesitant, frightened to speak up about the harassment by Professor Gonzalez. As the story progresses and she finds herself accused of terrible crimes, I wanted to explore not only the external mystery but the internal one: the strange riddles left at the crime scenes and, more importantly, Hannah’s recurring premonitory dreams. In those dreams she treads a forest path or walks down the college hallways, only to be struck down by a hooded figure while the tolling of a bell fills the air—images that haunt her waking life and push her to uncover the truth.
As the story progresses and Hannah goes to jail, she continues to have these dreams in which the hooded figure is playing cruel mind games with her, testing her resolve and unraveling fragments of her past. Then, after she unexpectedly receives a symbolic jail-free card and regains her freedom, the people Hannah once interacted with begin to repeat a brutal refrain: she was never able to be faithful to anything or anyone, not even to herself. The book examines the importance of paying attention to those persistent nocturnal visions and suggests that Hannah may—or may not—possess a rare, unsettling gift. Although she at first tries to keep the dreams secret, it is Raf who ultimately discovers that his goddaughter is experiencing visions that go beyond the ordinary and into the dangerous. Having cracked the case in Deadly College Murders, Hannah finds that the riddles and nightmares only grow more dangerous in Deadly Vows, while in Paris Noir one of those dreams may, perhaps, come true. The central message I want readers to take away is simple: pay close attention to Hannah’s dreams, for they hold the clues to the identity of the hooded figure.
With the dreams that she has in the third book, will she make it down the aisle? Or will her happy ending not come true?
