The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – How I’ll Kill You by Ren DeStefano

Episode Date: March 18, 2023

How I'll Kill You by Ren DeStefano Your next stay-up-all-night thriller, about identical triplets who have a nasty habit of killing their boyfriends, and what happens when the youngest commits their worst crime yet: falling in love with her mark. Make him want you. Make him love you. Make him dead. Sissy has an...interesting family. Always the careful one, always the cautious one, she has handled the cleanup while her serial killer sisters have carved a path of carnage across the U.S. Now, as they arrive in the Arizona heat, Sissy must step up and embrace the family pastime of making a man fall in love and then murdering him. Her first target? A young widower named Edison—and their mutual attraction is instant. While their relationship progresses, and most couples would be thinking about picking out china patterns and moving in together, Sissy’s family is reminding her to think about picking out burial sites and moving on. Then something happens that Sissy never anticipated: She begins to feel protective of Edison, and before she can help it, she’s fallen in love. But the clock is ticking, and her sisters are growing restless. It becomes clear that the gravesite she chooses will hide a body no matter what happens; but if she betrays her family, will it be hers?

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. And now, ladies and gentlemen, here is your host, Chris Voss. Wait, that's me. Hey, hey, it's Chris Voss from thechrissvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends.

We certainly appreciate you guys being here. As always, we have another amazing author, very prolific on this show. She's done a lot of different books. We're going to be talking about her new book that's coming out next week. But in the meantime, always remember that by listening to the show, you're contractually obligated to refer five of your family and friends to your downline of listeners on the show. No, it's not like that. I'm just kidding.

You know, I'm teasing you. But I also am guilting and shaming you. Tell your friends to go to YouTube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. LinkedIn forward slash Chris Voss. See the LinkedIn newsletter over there. It's really cool. So now that I'm done with my guilting, shaming, and trying to

wedge my audience into doing whatever they can. No, we really appreciate you guys. We love you guys, and we love you sharing the show, so thank you very much for that. Today, an amazing author on the show with us today. We have Rendy Stefano. She is the author of the newest book,

How I'll Kill You, which is something we all can learn from. It comes out March 21st, 2023. Your newest book is coming out. Give us a .com or wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs, please. Yes, so I am on Instagram at Lauren, L-A-U-R-E-N, D-S-O-F-N-O author. There you go. And you, this is your first adult novel, but you've been doing other books since. Tell us a little bit about your background in writing. Yeah, I was really fortunate to get

into young adult at the kind of big young adult boom of the Hunger Games era. And so I had my first novel, Wither, back in 2011. It sold in 2010 and it was just like more than I ever expected. I had just graduated from college in about 2008 and I had found an agent who believed in my work and I was thinking, oh, you know, maybe if I get lucky, I'll have a trade paperback in my local bookshop. That was kind of my biggest dream at the time, just not expecting to keep the lights on with writing. And I was just really blown away by the reception to, to my debut, um, young adult. And then I made the very silly looking back mistake of thinking, well, now I'm in publishing. Now I'm in, it's just going to be all cake from here. Every book I write will get sold. Not the case. It's an interesting marketplace.

I mean, sometimes, you know, some people like one thing and they don't like another. And you're like, but that was the same sort of genre. So you've written how many children's books? Off the top of my head, I want to say 14. There you go. That's a lot of children's books. That's pretty good. So what motivated you to want to switch gears and move to an adult novel? So I always knew, I've always really

been interested in true crime and thrillers and horror. Not that this is necessarily horror, but somewhere in that vein. And I knew that someday I wanted to write something really twisty and geared for adults. And, you know, with the F-bomb or two, right? Something I don't put in my children's books. And so for about five years, I had been attempting to write a thriller, but there's so many directions you can take, right? You've got the kind of gritty cop drama.

You've got the small town horror. You've got the really kind of poetic mystery, all sorts of different angles. And it was it was really a struggle to to find my voice and something that i really find interesting is um when we when we think about serial killers most of the time they're flying solo and so i thought what would bond two or more serial killers? And would there always be that fear of, well, you know everything about me.

Are you going to take us down together? What if one of us grows a conscience, right? What would make you work together? And all I could think was a really strong, really unique sibling bond. So you've made sibling sisters serial killers. Is that correct? Yes. It's, it's three identical triplets. And they're triplets.

Yes. Triplets serial killers. I think you've struck upon something that no one's ever really plumbed. At least I know of, uh, you know, a serial killer serial killers teaming up you're right usually these are their lone wolves uh so why do they i mean i don't want to give away the plot of the book of course but uh can you tease out anything on why they uh down this road so i think a big part of their story ended up being that they grew up in the foster care system so they were abandoned their parents never came forward to claim them they still don't really know their their origin um

and when they were babies it was this novelty wow abandoned triplets people love multiples on the news you know all over kind of the talk show circuits and then as they grew up their lives were very real and they became wards of the state and had very different and very difficult upbringings where they often felt that they were not in control of themselves or their surroundings. And then as they, as they became adults, as they were 19, 20, they started dating, looking for some stability in life and found men that broke their hearts. They realized, you know know and that's you know the heartbreaking the reality of dating is something we all kind of deal with right our partner cheats on you

leaves you just isn't interested anymore but for them after so much it was like a final straw situation yeah well i mean you push your you know it's it's loss you know you you find love you lost and you know if you grew up i suppose in that environment of you know not being around um uh you know people uh you know accepting you or loving you you you kind of feel probably a bigger loss yeah i think it was it was just very much a cumulative lack of control and they took it to a just a very deep extreme where one of them got this idea and the others said well you're we're all each other has, so I guess we're all going on this together. We're all going out of murderous rage. Pretty much.

With lots of murdering. And because you have three people, it's three different approaches, right? So they're checking their tracks and they're making sure that they don't get caught.'re being very careful that's one way to do it i like that um so this is this is quite an interesting story one of the uh i don't know if you call this a byline but the description it's there's a line here that says make him want you make him love you make him dead can you tease out a little bit about what that's... My, oh my gosh, my agent came up with that. That was in her pitch and it worked.

It worked. Yeah, so the rules because they can't just be stabbing people willy-nilly, right? It's got to be very organized. And you have... I'm writing this down too to keep notes. Yeah, so two of the sisters are... This is not a self-help book.

Oh, oh, oh, I thought this was a self-help book. No, it's a self-help book. No, you're going to get us in trouble. No, so two of the sisters are kind of the reckless and impulsive ones, and they just want to go in and do what they're going to do. But the other sister, our narrator, she's the more cautious one and she makes sure that everything gets cleaned up she sets the rules this is how we make sure that we don't end up in jail right and so one of the rules is we we move to a town we scope out we don't stay in one

place for long we scope out a place that's kind of a small town. People don't lock their doors, not a lot of security cameras or internet necessarily everywhere you go. And then you fall in love. You make a man fall in love with you. And you kind of, you sustain your alibi. You get some character witnesses. You get people to like you. And then this mysterious boyfriend just disappears one day. And then you're gone so in the story

are the protagonists basically the three uh young girls yeah so it's it's one sister in particular does all of the narrating um but she i picked her as the narrator because she's the one who observes and sees what everybody else is doing ah so is there a point is there an antagonist is there is it anybody who uh i mean i'm not sure you can tease out but is there is like anybody who comes after them or you might you might i think well the narrator a lot of the time and you don't learn her real name until the end. She goes by many ways. They're very careful about that as well. But I would say that she refers to herself as the predator because she happens upon this really sweet town,

this really nice kind of warm community that takes her in and welcomes her. And she meets her, you know, her mark, this man that she's planning to kill and he's really kind and he's vulnerable and he's pretty much what i think what she'd be looking for under normal circumstances yeah she's the only one that's gonna ruin it wow that's just unfortunate he seems like a nice guy i don't know so they go through this whole thing and i suppose the adventure of everything they go on uh any any other and I suppose the adventure of everything, they go on.

Any other tease-outs of how the plot goes? One thing with novels, we can't give away too much, or else we give the whole thing away. I think we can tease out quite a bit. But I think it's more, you have to kind of decide whose side you're on, right? Because a lot of things would lead to her facing justice, and lead to her and her sisters ending up in jail and her her objective is to keep that from happening and so it's who are you rooting for really and then you decide who the antagonist is from there wow this sounds pretty interesting i've never heard a concept of this of putting serial killer killers together and and and triplets of all things.

I would, I would, I'm going to be wary of ever dating anybody who's a triplet from here on out. You've. One of the, one of the things that was a lot of fun too, is, you know,

this is to say, you know, a 25 year old woman, just pretty honest, just looks like your average person walking down the street. And so she mentions a few times in her narrative. It's not just the the dark shadows at night it's not just the the creepy man that's following you out to your car

in the parking lot it could be anybody anywhere yeah anybody anywhere and uh that's the danger very interesting and a great tease um so i mean when you wrote the book uh did you base the characters on any maybe movie stars or people in your life that you uh kind of peeled some of the characters off of i didn't um i did so there it's a it's a small church town that she scopes out and i think like a lot of a lot of creative types and writers i ended up having one of those religious upbringings um and I grew up in sort of a church community that I don't I haven't I don't necessarily associate with so much in my adult life but I learned a lot in my time there and I really did put a bit of that into this did you have to study triplets and twins and how they, I don't know, interact with each other?

Oh, a little bit. I have a lot of twins in my family. Oh, do you? Not triplets, no triplets, but twins. And so I think what I aimed to make unique about this is that even though they're identical triplets, they grew up in different homes, in different environments because of the foster system. So our protagonist, she grew up in kind of a nuclear foster home that really tried to help her and cared for her. And her two sisters were not as fortunate. They ended up in a lot of group homes or kind of toxic situations.

So they were all very much impacted by the different ways they were raised. Note to self, cancel that adoption that i was oh no don't do that no there's no self-help in this at all i don't i don't advise anybody to do anything that i want to get your triplets anymore you've uh you've scarred me for that so i'm kind of getting at this point going, I don't know about triplets or twins anymore. But, you know, it's an interesting story and setup you have. What made you feel, in the structure of this novel, doing an adult novel as opposed to a children's novel, what was different for you in writing it or maybe how you approached it differently?

So I think in, and this isn't true for all children's authors so i'm only speaking for myself here but in my children's books i really aimed to have a clear um parable maybe a moral message so here's the character here's the spunky teenage girl that's going to save the world for example right um a lot of this is good versus evil and really kind of at the end of the day, a clear villain. But I think in adult, I was aiming not only for adult, but also this is my first time not really writing a fantasy. I was writing about kind of the modern day here and now. And so I was really trying to capture the world we live in today, but maintain some escapism.

Understand people don't necessarily want to read about what they see on the news every day but i i really it's it's very morally gray it sounds like it the the hero of the story is a serial killer so you decide whether you want her to fail or succeed do you think this will identify with a lot of women? I've had girlfriends tell me that when we were breaking up, they were like, I wish I could kill you because I don't want to ever see you with another woman. No, I really...

I always felt that disturbing. I think that if they were serious, they wouldn't tell you. Well, that's probably true. That probably explains why my coffee tastes like arsenic right now. Just be careful. Starting your car, I guess i guess yeah starting my car and and uh and we had someone on recently who did a book uh an author who did a book on a true story in hungary i believe it was of arsenic murders and there was like there was like 160 to 300 murders and uh this this lady was like a drug dealer for arsenic.

She would make arsenic and give it to the wives in the area. And they all have a ton of husbands. So there's a lot of murder going on with wives and girlfriends, evidently. So this should just help as a manual. Well, statistically, I think that women are more likely to, to murder using poison. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure why that is, but that seems to be the case. Uh, maybe they like, maybe like the slow death of it where you get sick and somebody, um,

it might just be that it's cleaner. You walk away. You're not necessarily true. That's true. Much more smarter sort of there well there was that back in the 80s the reason we have those safety seals on aspirin now is a woman poisoned her husband with cyanide she put it in his aspirin but she put in a few other random bottles just to make it look like a sort of a

fluke at the factory yeah and now we all can't get the lids off And You almost have to have Like a butcher knife Just to get into the seal pack And there's that warning Do not use this if this is punctured in any way So I guess Probably some boyfriends were hurt in the writing of this book Then

I mean, I actually I've been fortunate enough that all my breakups were pretty Pretty peaceful I was referring to the how it worked out? I mean, I actually, I've been fortunate enough that all my breakups were pretty, pretty peaceful. I was, I was referring to the, the, the, the boyfriends in the book.

So you won't hear from them because they're dead. Because they're dead. They're dead. Wow, man. You only get one side of things, unfortunately. Wow.

Do you see yourself doing a follow-up novel using the same characters, maybe? I, you know, never say never. Never say never. Right. At the moment, no, but the way, the way same characters, maybe? You know, never say never. Never say never.

Right. At the moment, no, but the way it ends, it would be a little difficult. This would be kind of an interesting movie. It'd be like Carrie times three. Yeah. I think there's...

I loved Carrie. I grew up on horror films and I love Stephen King, so... Uh-huh. So did any of that have an influence then on you? Probably. You know, my dad was really into like the classics. So Hitchcock, you know, and things like that.

And he would show me these old horror movies. And I would think, oh, I was 10 years old, 11 years old. What kind of father is this? The best. The best. And I would say, dad, these are really slow. slow these are really boring and he took that as a challenge he's like we're gonna get a scary movie we're gonna show you something and so we watched like pretty much everything the shining hairy the birds kujo whatever it was and i you know for me it was actually it was scary, but it was really fun. And I always had that sense in horror that you don't see anywhere else is what is going to happen next.

Like, this is so preposterous. I don't think I'll ever be trapped in a car with a rabid dog. But what can, how can this possibly end? I need to know, you know, so I think that did impact probably. There you go. Do you think that contributed to maybe your writing is setting up that next, that next, what might happen next sort of scene? I have, I have been told that that's the case with my writing. Sometimes that a lot of people will, even in my, in my children's books that I take things in a direction that they, they weren't necessarily expecting.

There you go. Now you use a different name on your children's books, don't you? I go by Lauren. Yeah. Okay. All right. So that helps people. They can find your books. Do you think you might have some transfers that they'll discover that you've written a different book from your children's books? Maybe they're old enough now where they can make the jump? I would imagine. Yeah. Because I began in 2011 and that was my most well-known book the one that i published in 2011 and the readers now are in their 20s 30s they've reached out and let me know that they're always they're always looking for my next book that's good they've finally grown up so now they

can uh they can just get your next book and run with it there are a lot of i think when i was a teenager i read a lot of teen books but i also read a lot of books kind of geared more towards adults. So I think there's always that, that crossover audience that will find you. Yeah. And that would be good for you because, you know, you can just get that original audience going. We've had a few people that have used different names for romance novels crossing over into normal novels. I don't know, normal novels. That sounds weird to say. But we've had people that have done that

and their audience usually finds them out and they're just like, I don't know why we're bothering doing this. It's not really meant to be a secret. I decided to go by Ren just because I don't want some excited 12-year-old who loves my books to pick this up and then be

startled. Mom's calling you. Yeah. Upset parents. Murdering people too. Yeah. So delineation, you know, I think it's important to have the two. I can acknowledge one, but also separate the other.

There you go. There you go. Well, this has been really insightful. Anything more you want to tease on the book before we go? Oh, you know, I think I'm going to write more books about the people next door who seem safe and then they're not.

That seems like a good plot. I've had a lot of people next door to me that aren't safe and are not. In fact, we were next door one time to someone. Here's a plot for you. We're next door to somebody who is a real big, what they like to call a Karen. And she was the head of the Homeowners Association in Las Vegas. That's a novel right there. Yeah, if you ever come up with a murder story for

people like that. I definitely, I've known some Karen. You might be tapping a vein, you know, uh, kill the, either the killer could be the head of the HOA or maybe the neighborhood just gets sick of them. Then the neighborhood gets together and that's probably the more like, it's like Caesar. They all murder him. Maybe I just got a book. You're writing your book right now. Don't give it away.

Don't let somebody steal your idea. Well, it's been very wonderful to have you on. Thank you for coming on and sharing your story and this amazing new book launch we've got coming up here. This has been so fun. There you go. That's what we try and do. The book is out next week, so order it up

so you can be the first in your book club to brag that you read it first. How I'll Kill You is out now. Thank you very much, friend, for coming on. Thank you so much. Thanks, Monitz, for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Foss, youtube.com, Fortress Chris Foss,

and all those crazy places we are on the interwebs. Stay safe, be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time.