The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Beautiful and the Wild by Peggy Townsend

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

The Beautiful and the Wild by Peggy Townsend https://amzn.to/40HStd3 The dangers of Alaska aren't limited to storms, starvation, and grizzly bears. Sometimes the most dangerous thing is the person you love. It’s summer in Alaska and the light surrounding the shipping-container-turned-storage shed where Liv Russo is being held prisoner is fuzzy and gray. Around her is thick forest and jagged mountains. In front of her, across a clearing, is a low-slung cabin with a single window that spills a wash of yellow light onto bare ground. Illuminated in that light is the father of her child, a man she once loved. A man who is now her jailor. Liv vows to do anything to escape. Carrying her own secrets and a fierce need to protect her young son, Liv must navigate a new world where extreme weather, starvation, and dangerous wildlife are not the only threats she faces. With winter's arrival imminent, she knows she must reckon with her past and the choices that brought her to the unforgiving Alaskan landscape if she is ever going to make it out alive. A story of survival in the wilds of Alaska, The Beautiful and the Wild explores the question of whether we can ever truly know the person we love—or ourselves. About the author Peggy Townsend is an award-winning journalist who has panhandled with street kids, taken to the skies with pararescuers, and once chased an escaped murderer through a graveyard at midnight. Her first mystery, "See Her Run," was listed as one of "13 Thrillers to Keep You Up at Night" by Kirkus Reviews. Her second book "The Thin Edge," arrived May 14, 2019 and was called "an outstanding" novel by The Associated Press. She has rafted rivers, come face-to-face with grizzly bears in Alaska and has twice lived in a van for seven weeks — which makes her seem more adventurous than she actually is. She divides her time between the Central California coast and the Sierra Nevada mountains.

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. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

The Chris Voss Show. There you go. Thechrisvossshow.com. When a fat lady sings. That's when you know the opera iron lady has introduced the show to the thing. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys being here.

Thanks for being part of the show, as always. For 15 years, we've been bringing you the most smartest people, the most brilliant minds, the coolest authors, all the greatest stories, life lessons out there in the map. And we just keep doing it. What is it, like three to four shows a day we do now? Just like a radio, we do 15 to 20 shows a week.

And you are getting just this distilled, this concentrated, distilled, super wonderful data given from all the different people on the show as well and today we have an amazing multi-book author uh her newest book is billed as a pulse-pounding novel of captivity survival and deceit i didn't want to end anna rays from new york times best-selling author of the house in the pines bills it it's called the beautiful and the wild a novel by peggy townsend she joins us on the show and she's going to be telling us about her latest this is her believe her third book that she has out she's an award-winning newspaper journalist who has covered stories that range from the capture of a serial killer to a holocaust survivor's quest for justice once she chased an escaped murderer through a graveyard at midnight.

Well, there's a story. She's the author of two critically praised mystery novels. Her newest survival thriller, The Beautiful in the Wild, is an Amazon editor's pick for best mystery, thrillers, and suspense books in November and is set to the wilds of Alaska. A book list predicted the beautiful in the wild will keep the most avid suspense readers on the edge of their seats where they love to be. Welcome to the show Peggy, how are you? I'm doing great Chris, thank you for having me.

I really appreciate it. It's wonderful to have you as well. I'm excited to talk about my book and talk about my career as a journalist and my other books so yeah thanks for having me thanks for coming uh and congratulations on the new book give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs well the best place to find me is on instagram peggy towns and writer on instagram my i have a web page but that's where you can find me and find out what i'm doing and what's up next there you go peggy so give us a 30,000 overview or at least, you know, what details you can tease out about the Beautiful and the Wild book. Okay. So the Beautiful and the Wild is a survival thriller, a domestic suspense book.

It starts out with my protagonist, Liv Russo, who is a single, a mom and working as a house cleaner and mourning the death of her husband when she gets a cryptic text that suggests that her husband might still be alive in Alaska and with a horrible job and going to lose she can't pay the rent she decides to head north with her developmentally delayed son Xander and finds out sure enough her husband is not only live, but has a second family. Oh, wow. Holy crap. And the, go ahead.

Needless to say, she's pretty surprised and pretty outraged. And her husband tries to persuade her to join the group by locking her up. And she has to figure out a way to escape. Winter's closing in. She's starving. Her husband's getting more paranoid. She has to get out of there. There you go. And according to the Amazon page, she's locked in a shipping container?

Right. For a time, when she tries to leave at first and threatens to divorce her husband and report that he's alive, he locks her in a shipping container as part of his persuasion, right? There you go. Yeah. That's not fun. We do the show from a shipping container, too.

It's cold in here. I bet. But no, I was just reading the description on the Amazon there, and it's chilling just to read the description alone. You're like, holy crap. It just sucks you right into the story. Well, that's what I hope. I hope to draw readers in with thoughts of the secrets we keep,

whether we really know the person we love, which is a big question, right? Mm-hmm. I just assume I have no idea who they are and I ignore them most of the times. That's probably why I'm single. I just figure I'm always living with a stranger. That seems to work out for me. And there's some of her own secrets and different things that she has to deal with. She has to protect her son like a mother would.

And, of course, you know, she's in the wilds of, of, uh, Alaska, which isn't always the safest place to be, you know, lions and tigers and bears, all that stuff is running around. Yeah. My husband and I spent seven weeks in Alaska in our van and, uh, yeah. This test drive a story. Yeah, that's dangerous, but we did you gave this test drive a story. Yeah. Yeah, that's dangerous. But we did. We actually ran into a couple of grizzly bears out in the forest when we were going fishing.

And that was quite a frightening experience for me, I'll tell you. There you go. Right now, people in the audience are going, there's no lions and tigers in Alaska, Chris. Well, if your husband's kind of a paranoid guy with a second family, maybe. Maybe. You never know. They could be paper tigers or whatever they're called. So this is really interesting. So what

set you down this road of coming up with a story? What led you to put this together? Well, a couple things, Chris, you know, I'm a former newspaper journalist and newspaper journalists. We deal with secrets all the time, right?

Oh yeah. Yeah. So some of the secrets people try to conceal some secrets people tell us. So I think secrets are a big part of my life. And I was thinking about secrets and we, we live in a little cabin up in Lake Tahoe. We have one. And I was stacking firewood for winter and listening to a podcast, of course. Wonderful podcast. And there was a story of a ex-Marine named Billy Sipple who prevented the assassination

of Gerald Ford in San Francisco. Oh, really? Yeah, and he was declared a hero. And then the media and a politician decided to out him as a gay man. Oh, wow. And, yeah, and so his family didn't know that he was gay. They didn't know anything about his sexuality. So they basically shunned him. And he died just a bitter, you know sad man um a few years later living in the tenderloin and here he did the great thing of saving a life i mean especially a president

jesus it's a it's a raw deal yeah totally a raw deal and it really ruined his life um from what the podcast said like he died alone in the tenderloin. Wow. And, you know, very bitter man. And once it came out that he was gay, the whole narrative changed and people were shunning him and yelling and screaming at him. And so I was thinking, like, what if you did a good deed and it exposed your darkest deepest secret and so that was the genesis um for the story so i don't know if you've ever stacked a cord of wood but it's a lot of wood yeah it's a lot of time to think yeah yeah and you got to watch out for like bugs and spiders and

and all that stuff in the woods. So make sure you're wearing gloves. Yeah. Oh my God. Don't talk about spiders in the firewood. Oh my God. Or, or what used to happen to me is when you go out to get the wood, uh, obviously I'm old.

Um, you go out to get the wood and like some mouse would jump out on you and about give you a heart attack. I don't, that usually happened to me. Um, there'd be some mouse in there and you'd be like, hey, I'm in here.

And, you know, thankfully I didn't find any spiders, but there was always spider webs. So, you know, that's a whole new novel on its own of horror. So what made you, as you developed the protagonist in the story, the female, what made you build her character the way you did? Well, I think I wanted to have a woman that was wounded but had a lot of grit. And, you know, I know a lot of really amazing, how being in the wilderness and surviving and facing hardship can actually make you tougher, make you stronger and can be a gift, actually. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. That which doesn't kill you will make you smell bad or one of the two will make you smell stronger. Something like that. Something like that. Something like that. So that was, you know, I love, I hate those books where it's, you know, women being chased by a serial killer in the woods, you know. I like my women to be strong, like most of my friends are, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, there is kind of that play on, like, where it's a movie scream where the girl's like, oh, no, don't kill me, you know, that sort of thing. So there you go. And the plot that you've set up is quite kind of elaborate in the details. I mean, was there any, does any of this come from your life or just right out of your imagination? It's a little bit of both. Like, I'm a, what they call, there's pantsers and plotters

pantsers right at the seat of their pants plotters outline everything ah and so i'm a plotter and so so yeah my plot my uh pages of plots it's kind of scary looking if you look at them like 20 30 pages of outline right and so i uh know, I just go from there. I sort of started going from there. And I probably have some of the other writers have talked about how this weird things happen sometimes when you're writing and the characters take over. Yeah. I've always admired that about novelists because they can build the whole world in their head. This whole world and their characters kind of become their own people.

It's almost like my eight personalities. And it's just wonderful how they have this imagination and they can just build out a whole world and design it. Yeah, it's weird because all the characters in the book like i knew them they i mean they were as real as my next door neighbor which wow there's a little something about writers like where we are in the world right that's how we get the great stories that keep us entertained and in suspense as it were uh so you guys when you went with your husband to uh alaska were you going there for um to do uh you know study for the book or was this a previous trip and it ended up playing in into uh your book yeah it was a it was just a regular trip we're kind of mini adventurers I guess you'd say and van life before van

life was van life hmm so and we don't have a fancy van our van you know didn't have heat and it didn't have a shower didn't have a toilet or any of that stuff but yeah we went out and just were amazed by the the vastness of the state we'd go to a lake that, you know, otherwise would be crowded in California. There'd be nobody there. We'd camp on the shore. We met these wonderful people that were just hardy and tough. And there's one funny story I can tell you where we met this guy in this town of Haines. And we told him we were going to go hiking and he said well um you know that's a pretty berry stretch of country where you're going and I said oh I have

my bear bells and he said well in Alaska we call bear bells dinner bells and he said you might want to take my gun and uh my husband I both said uh well we could take your gun but we just have to throw it at the bear because we really can't shoot so wow haynes alaska i'm pulling up you're really out there yeah yeah we were in places haynes forest there's actually a small little There's a little town there It's really small Looks like you can throw a rock from one side to the other Maybe And there you go

Yeah you're out in the middle of six Where's Anchorage at Anchorage is kind of to the west A little bit north Oh okay Oh it's way over there You guys took the tour kind of to the west and a little bit north. Oh, okay. Oh, it's way over there. You guys took the tour.

We did the tour. We went all the way to Fairbanks. We went fishing on the Gulf of Alaska. That must have been fun. We rafted the Gulkana River and fished for king salmon. So that probably gave you a pretty good idea of isolation and snow and cold and dangers of environment and probably a lot of that stuff huh just totally you know a writer starts

with a little seed and just blows it up from there and um the the beauty of it was amazing. The forest, the wildlife, the rawness of it. And so when I was writing a book about secrets, I thought, where else? Right? Alaska. That's where you go if you have secrets. And I think that probably takes the suspense and the survival element to a whole new level because you know you just can't you just can't break out of the shipping container and like run to your local 7-eleven and be like hey you know our next door neighbor you're out in the middle of nowhere yeah you know i read a lot of books too about uh survival and living in uh out in the wilds in alaska you know growing your own food and

finding your own water and hunting and fishing and um it that's not for the faint of heart believe me you know oh yeah those guys are those people are tough as nails men and women there's a there's a couple guys that i see on tiktok and i think one's in alaska and he's like oh he's doing stuff like i'm gonna build a uh underground thing in the snow here and make a survival thing so i won't die tonight and you're just like wow that's that's a nice place to be you're up there on the the edge of everything and you know every day isn't like can we get through today and live and uh maybe get warm sure let's do that i mean just like it's almost like a masochism thing for the one guy i watch i'm like who hurt you man

but those people have to be tough and they just have to be tough as nails salt of the earth sort of people in that environment yeah you read about it like it and not only like wild animals, but storms that roar through, you know, the weather, and there's the rivers that ice up and then break up. They've got breakup up there that just is, you know, horrendous. That's how that guy in Into the Wild died. Remember him? He went out in the wilderness. Yeah. No, it's dangerous everywhere.

You can fall through stuff and fall through, you know, you can see snow, and it's like, oh, it's dangerous everywhere. You can fall through stuff and fall through, you know, you can see snow and it's like, oh, it's going to survive. So she's somehow got to resolve her dilemma with her husband and the other family and what's going on or she's got to try and escape.

I guess you can't tease this out as to which way she decides to go, huh? Not too much. I can't give too much away. Yeah, you can't give away the as to which way she decides to go, huh? Not too much. I can't give too much away. Yeah, you can't give away the middle and the ending. So I figure I see where we're at. Anything more you want to give away on the book? Maybe the husband, the characters, his whole other family.

Anything you want to tease out that way? Well, yeah, I'll tease out one thing. Besides Secrets, it's about um how love is a part of survival um do you ever watch that tv show alone uh yeah yeah so if you don't you if you don't know it they drop off a bunch of people in the wilderness in the middle of nowhere with like 10 items to survive right no food no nothing and the interesting thing for me watching that and what became part of the book is that idea that a lot you know some of them drop out because they starve and some of them get hurt but a whole bunch of them drop out because they miss the people they love right really

yeah that's not the reason you go on one of those things to get away from the people you love because you're just like i need some space man yeah the people that win it are seems like not always but seems like one of the most misanthropic guys i've ever heard about he's he wanted he could have stayed out longer than than they you know they hauled him in after everybody else quit and he was like wow i'm just getting started yeah he was really trying to get away from somebody. There you go. But, uh, there's,

I mean, there's some people that are just really good at it. They just, they just like their own space. Like some of these people that I watch. So story of survival and everything else. Um, how do you feel this was different than as you wrote it or maybe some of the techniques that you use that you've improved since your last two books?

Well, um, this book is totally different than the other two books. The other two books were based on a woman who was a disgraced journalist in San Francisco. Excuse me. I'm sorry. And she was trying to make up for her disgrace, right? So she's solving mysteries. And in this book, this is more a book about survival. It's about relationships.

It's domestic. It's more psychological, I would say. Excuse me while I take a drink of water here. No problem. No problem. Okay. Ready to go again. Thank you. There you go. So more psychological problem. Okay. Ready to go again. Thank you.

There you go. So more psychological then. Yeah. And isn't that the scariest thing? Yeah. I mean, if you've seen my psychology, my psychiatrist says it's pretty bad. He's recommending a full lobotomy probably next week or something. Going in for the surgery.

You're just going to run around and just destroy everything and i'll probably just sit here and smile on the podcast more your psychiatrist is a brave person sounds like there you go uh what's what's coming up in the future for you uh are you having any thoughts on new books yet, or maybe a continuing of this character that's in this book? I actually, so I got a two-book deal, which is very wonderful. So I just wrote another book. It's also based in the wilderness, but it's set in Oregon this time. Oh, wow. And I just turned it into my editor, so we'll see what happens.

It's a story about a runaway and a recluse that lives in the forest so wow it's a forest thing going there yeah i i love the outdoors i mean i spend a kind of a mini adventure there you go yeah i i that's that's uh i mean it's it gives you plenty to play with especially having that that huge amount of, you know, the scenarios and the environment that you can play with. Definitely. And, you know, so many of us don't get out in nature anymore. Like, who does? We stay in our cars, stay in our houses.

Yeah. I mean, I couldn't survive in Alaska. I get a hangnail. It's pretty much the end of the world for me. I'm just like, yeah, I'm not doingnail. It's pretty much the end of the world for me. I'm just like, yeah, I'm not doing all that. So there you go. Well, final pitch out for people who order the book

as we go out and all that good stuff, Peggy. Oh, yeah. So yeah, buy the book. People say it's a page turner, which I appreciate. People say that it kind of haunts them after it's done, which is my plan, which I hope to do, right?

There you go. It'll stick with you. So there you go. Peggy, give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find out more about you and your authorship stuff on the interwebs? So, yeah, I have Peggy Townsend writer, Peggy Townsend books.com, but find me on Instagram and Peggy Townsend writer.

There you go. Thank you very much for Peggy for coming on. We really appreciate it. These are always fun. And, and boy, I'm just, I'm in suspense already just from reading the page.

I'm like, holy crap, what's going on over here? Sucks you right in. Yeah. Well, I'm glad, I'm glad. I hope you read it. I hope you, holy crap. What's going on over here? Sucks you right in. Yeah. Well, I'm glad. I hope you read it. Don't get too afraid. I hope it doesn't keep you up at night.

I hope it keeps you up at night reading. I guess. I'll make sure to leave the lights on when I read it. Thank you very much, Peggy, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. This has been super fun. Thank you, Chris. Thank you very much, Peggy. Thanks to Arnis for tuning in. And hopefully you'll have some fun with it as well.

It sounds like incredible suspense. Order up wherever fine books are sold. The Beautiful and the Wild, which is kind of like the story of my life every day. November 7th, 2023 by Peggy Townsend. Folks, go to goodreads.com, forteschrisfoss, linkedin.com, forteschrisfoss, the big LinkedIn news group, the big LinkedIn

group. There's a group and a newsletter. Whatever. I blended the two. YouTube.com, forteschrisfoss, chrisfoss1 on TikTok, chrisfossfacebook.com. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.