8 October 2023
Sometimes, urban legends and nightmares are real.
That’s the best description of Minnesotan Jess Lourey’s new dark thriller and first police procedural, “The Taken Ones.” It begins in 1980 when two sisters and their girlfriend go into the frightening woods near their Minnesota homes. Only one returns. Something terrified this girl so much that she could only stand, mute and with no memory, in the middle of the street. What happened? Did the girls encounter the legendary but never-seen Bendy Man? Was the girls’ disappearance related to a woman found 22 yeas later, buried alive, clutching a heart charm necklace?
“One critic told me he didn’t know how to write about this book because revealing anything would be a great, big spoiler,” Lourey said happily about this first in a series introducing forensic scientist Harry Steinbeck and Evangeline “Van” Reed, a cold case agent for Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
“Harry is fussy, brilliant and decent; Van is messy, intuitive and made of steel. Van goes with her gut, Steinbeck trusts facts,” Lourey said in a conversation from her Minneapolis home. Both characters have secrets in their personal lives. Van’s is her cruel, violent childhood in a commune where children were tortured if they broke the dominating man’s rules.
“They are up against the most terrifying villain I have ever written,” Lourey says of the partners, hinting only that she did a lot of research on the unlikely topic of human mutations.
“The Taken Ones” grew out of a short story Lourey wrote at the urging of her editor, even though she didn’t want to do it. But she was poolside in Costa Rica when “Catch Her in a Lie,” the first story about Van and Harry “poured out.” Then her editor asked for a series.
Lourey admits to having a crush on Harry: “He’s the first major male character I’ve written and I love how he turned out.”
“The Taken Ones,” published in mid-September, has already found love from critics and fans of Lourey’s previous stand-alone novels, “Unspeakable Things,” “Bloodline,” “Litani” and “The Quarry Girls.” So she’s sure to draw readers during her current promotional tour that takes her to cities in Minnesota as well as Chicago and Charles City, Iowa. On Oct. 8, she’s at The Bookstore at Fitgers in Duluth.
Jess Lourey
Book tours can be exhausting, but Lourey isn’t complaining.
“I am literally living my dream,” she says. “I am still working on saying ‘no.’ It’s a lovely problem to have, this embarrassment of people who want to host me. This is what I have been working on for two decades. Independent bookstores hosted me when my books were not selling well. Now, I want to return because they were so loyal.”
We talked to Lourey in late September, when she’d just returned from leading an 11-day women’s writing retreat in an Italian villa an hour south of Florence.
“The villa was so beautiful, the whole time I asked myself if such places really exist,” she recalled. “There were 20 women from all over the world at the retreat. I’ve been teaching these for more than a decade and during this one everything clicked. The women’s writing was amazing.”
September was also a good month for Lourey because she won an award at the Bouchercon world mystery convention in San Diego for Best Paperback/e-book and audiobook for “The Quarry Girls,” also winner of a Minnesota Book Award.
“I am so proud of that book,” she says of her chilling story based on the two — possibly three — serial killers operating in St. Cloud in the 1970s when she lived there.
A journey to publication — and kittens
Lourey, 53, grew up in Paynesville, Minn., in what she describes as “an unsafe home.” She taught writing and sociology for 11 years at St. Cloud Technical and Community College where she received the Loft Literary Center’s Excellence in Teaching fellowship.
Jess and her future husband, Jay, a successful DNR ecologist, welcomed daughter Zoey and she was pregnant with their son, Alexander, when her husband took his life in 2001 after 24 days of marriage.
Left a single parent, Lourey turned to writing. Her 20-plus books include crime fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, young adult adventure and magical realism. Her crime novels have different plots, but underlying the stories is Lourey’s assertion that “all my life I have seen women and children abused,” and the abusers are often “broken men.”
Lourey was living in Alexandria in 2006 when Minnesota publisher Midnight Ink brought out “May Day,” first in her humorous Murder-by-Month mystery series featuring a small-town newspaper reporter who’s an amateur sleuth. The series, in which she even killed off the State Fair dairy princess, received starred reviews from Booklist and Library Journal.
Her breakout came in 2020 with her first domestic thriller, “Unspeakable Things,” based on the 1989 abduction of 11-year-old Minnesotan Jacob Wetterling.
“I had my own problems at home, some childish, others much more serious, but the rumors of a man hunting children became the backbeat of my preteen and teen years,” Lourey writes in her author’s note, adding that the arrest of Jacob’s abductor and recovery of the boy’s body has “haunted many of us in the Midwest, upending what we thought we knew about rural communities and the safety of children… It was the emotional repercussion of those evens that I needed to give voice to. I needed to create coherence out of my memories of growing up in chronic fear.”
Lourey is in the Big Leagues of authors now. She was a toastmaster at the 2022 Bouchercon in Minneapolis and one of the authors hundreds of fans were eager to meet.
Those who don’t follow Facebook might not know that Lourey is also a local internet favorite because she posts pictures of the kittens she fosters, referring to them as her “little goobers” with paw pads that look like jellybeans When she returns from the book tour she’s taking on a new batch.
“While I was traveling I looked at pictures of new ones I could have,” she said. “My secret to being a good foster for 12 years is that I make everybody I know adopt the kittens so I can visit. There a couple hundred all over Minneapolis and a bunch in St. Cloud.”
These days Lourey is single again, after what she calls “a COVID divorce” from her second husband “that was really the best for me and for him, too.”
Alexander is living with her while taking college classes online through the University of Minnesota Duluth to become a therapist “because everybody in my family needs one, myself included,” his mother says with amusement. Zoey lives in Chicago, working in child day care while she looks for a job in journalism.
What’s up next?
Lourey returns to young adult readers with “A Whisper of Poison,” a teen survival story scheduled for publication in February 2024. And she’s working on the next Steinbeck and Reed thriller, “The Reaping,” scheduled for October release. Lourey says it will be told from Harry’s point of view and the secret he has been hiding from the world will be revealed.
Ever the thriller writer, Lourey teases us with this dark promise: “I am introducing in this book a creepy new villain, the Finnish Blood Witch.”
Lourey launches “The Taken Ones” (Thomas & Mercer, $16.99), with a party at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 10, at Once Upon a Crime mystery bookstore, 604 W. 26th St., Mpls. Other appearances: 1 p.m. Oct. 11, Comma bookstore, 4230 Upton Ave. S., Mpls.; 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 11, multi-author signing, Plymouth Public Library, 15700 36th Ave. N., Plymouth, 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 12, Washburn Public Library, 5244 Lyndale Ave. S., Mpls.
Related Articles
8 fresh paperbacks to kick off fall reading season
The Nobel literature prize goes to Norway’s Jon Fosse, who once wrote a novel in a single sentence
Literary calendar: Curtis Chin discusses ‘Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant’
Readers and writers: Sandford’s latest, plus fiction and nonfiction with eyes on the water
Kate DiCamillo celebrates new fairytale — and an anniversary for ‘Despereaux’