The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The House on Prytania (A Royal Street Novel) by Karen White

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

The House on Prytania (A Royal Street Novel) by Karen White A woman is haunted—both literally and figuratively—by ghosts of the past in this second novel of the Royal Street series by New York Times bestselling author Karen White. Nola Trenholm may not be psychic herself, but she’s spent enough time around people who are to know when ghosts are present, and there are definitely a few lingering spirits in her recently purchased Creole cottage in New Orleans. Something, or someone, is keeping them tethered to this world. And not all of them are benign. But with the sudden return of Sunny Ryan, Beau Ryan’s long-lost sister, Nola has plenty to distract her from her ghostly housemates. Especially when the tempting—yet firmly unavailable—Beau, wanting to mete out justice to those he blames for Sunny’s kidnapping, asks Nola for a favor that threatens to derail her hard-won recovery and send her hurtling backward. He asks her to welcome Michael Hebert back into her life, even though Michael is the reason for Nola’s bruised heart. Beau is convinced that Michael’s powerful family was behind Sunny’s disappearance and that Michael is the key to getting information the police won’t be able to ignore—if Nola is willing to risk everything for which she’s worked so hard. Torn between helping Beau and protecting herself, Nola doesn’t realize until it’s almost too late why the ghosts are haunting her house—a startling revelation that will throw her and Beau together to fight a common enemy. Assuming Nola can get Beau to listen to what the spirits are trying to tell him, because ignoring them could prove to be a fatal mistake...

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 the ChrisVossShow.com, the ChrisVossShow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate it.

All of you that join us every day for the multiple books and authors that we have on the show, the brilliant minds, the CEOs, the billionaires that have been on the show, the astronauts, the governors, all those wonderful, smart people on the show. And as we all know, I'm not one of them. I'm just the host of the show, and I just direct traffic. I think that's my job. It's on my business card. The director of traffic, and sometimes he's a little funny. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing, prolific author on the show.

She's coming out with her newest book, May 9th, 2023. Karen White is on the show with us, and she's written 30-plus books. We'll get an exact number out of her in a second uh she's the author of the newest book coming out the house on britannia and it's part of her series of a royal uh street novels and uh we'll talk to us from the other uh books and stories and things that she tells in her novelistic way it Is novelistic a word? I don't know, but I just made up. It works for me. I call that poetic license. English teachers call me stupid, but that's another matter.

Anyway, we'll be talking to her in a second. But in the meantime, as always, with the plugs, go to youtube.com, Fortress Chris Foss. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Foss, and LinkedIn, YouTube, all those crazy places that you find the Chris Voss Show. And you can learn so much more and stalk what we're doing. And refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Remember, the Chris Voss Show isn't an MLM, but you do need to have five people in your downline of your relatives and neighbors that you may refer to the show.

I'm just kidding. You don't have to do that. But please, I beg just kidding. You don't have to do that, but please, I beg of you. Anyway, Karen White is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of 34 books. Is that still right, Karen? 34, 35, somewhere around there, yeah. Yeah, there you go. And it includes the Trad Street series, The Last Night in London, Dreams of Falling, The Night the Lights Went Out. Was that in Georgia? Anyway, there you go.

That was a tricky question, yes. There we go. I win, Alex. Questions about Georgia for 100. Flight Patterns was another book. The Sound of Glass and A Long Time Gone, which is probably my brain. That's about my brain. She is the co-author of The Lost Summers of Newport,

All the Ways We Said Goodbye, The Glass Ocean, and The Forgotten Room with New York Times bestselling authors Beatrice Williams and Lauren Willig. And she grew up in London and now is her husband near Atlanta, Georgia. Wow. There you go. The night

the lights went out. Welcome to the show, Karen. How are you? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. Thank you for coming. Thank you for coming. It's fun to have you. Congratulations on the new book. Give us a .com or wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs. Karen-White.com there you go

just put that dash in there used to the karen white when i first got that was a porn star so um but she's apparently she's not active anymore but but that's why i have a little dash between my first and last name there you go i'm still trying to there's still a hitman looking for the other person who stole my namesake um under ch Voss, I think we all know who it is. But anyway I mean, I had sort of on a whim, I had started writing my original series, the one set in Charleston, the Tragedy Street series, and it was very popular. People really loved it. But I realized after seven books that we were coming to the end, you know, I tortured the characters enough. And yeah, but I wasn't totally ready to leave that world. And I know my readers were just, they wanted it to go on and on and on.

So I did the next best thing and I did a spinoff series where I took one of the characters from that first series, a secondary character, and I made her the star of the show in the New Orleans series. And I knew I wanted it to be set in New Orleans. I went to Tulane. I'm familiar with New Orleans. I love the city. And I thought it was a great place for the protagonist, Nola Trenum, to sort of start her life anew. And so that's how we came up with The Shop on Royal Street, which was the first book in the series. And then The House on Britannia is number two. And I tell people that you don't have to have read the first book in the series to know what's going on. And you definitely don't have to read the first series. I mean, it's more fun if you have time. I mean, come on, the book doesn't come out till May 9th. You have plenty of time.

But because I do give you enough information, if you happen to pick up the book on its own, you will not be lost. And then you can always go back and fill in any details you think you might have missed. There you go. So what's, tease out a little bit. One of the things with novels,

we can't give away the middle and the ending, of course, which is different than like, you know, political historical books, but tease us out a little bit, maybe some adventures or different uh issues she ends up confronting that she's got a resolve sure so um some people okay so they're they're

no the main character um she has a graduate degree in historic preservation so of course to start her new life in new orleans what does she do she buys an an old fixer upper Creole cottage in the Maroney neighborhood of New Orleans. And it is pretty much a dump. She can't live in it yet because it's a dump. No running water, et cetera. So she actually lives in an apartment uptown, which happens to be the apartment I actually lived in when I lived in New Orleans during college on Broadway. So Nola, she's 26 years old. She has had a little bit of a journey getting to where she is. She's overcome quite a bit, including about with alcoholism. And she's got that. She's gotten help. She's clean. She's doing great. The only thing she's not prepared for is the past residents of her house who are no longer living,

but have not moved out of her house. And one is quite angry, does not want her there because he's hiding a secret to an eight decades old murder. And he doesn't want her getting close to her finding out because it will have repercussions on his family who still lives in New Orleans. So she's not prepared for that at all because she cannot communicate with dead people like her stepmother can, but she knows someone in the world who can, Bo Ryan, who they sort of have a love hate relationship. So of course she needs his help, even though she is very reluctant to ask for it.

There you go. She could have called Ghostbusters though. She could have, she could have, but yeah. So is there a little bit of a psychic activity and we've got ghosts and, and murder? There is. So Bo Ryan and, and murder is so,

um, Bo Ryan can, uh, can communicate with ghosts, but you know, I, I'm always careful when I talk about these books, because even though there is that paranormal element,

these are not paranormal books. This is still very much a woman's journey. She, none of the main characters has so much baggage and she's trying so hard to overcome everything and to move forward. And it's fun to see her struggle. I mean, nobody wants to read a book about a perfect person who always makes the right choices.

And I think that's why people root for Nola because, you know, she's got a great heart. She's a great person, but she's like the rest of us, you know, she's got a great heart she's a great person but she's like the rest of us you know she's got her weaknesses and to see her fight and fight to do the right thing and to fight for her friends and um to see her relationships uh grow um is really and and for her to get stronger mentally and physically um is really what this book and the series will be about. There you go. Empowerment. I mean, certainly if you live with ghosts in your house, last time I checked, they don't respond to eviction notices very well. Yeah, they don't.

Yeah. And they're always causing problems and stuff. But, you know, I mean, if you can get them to pay rent, then you're really in business. That would be awesome. Yeah. With your dog. If you could only get your dog to pay rent. Dude, if I could get my dogs...

I say that to my two dogs all the time. They're Siberians, and so they just look at me. They're so gorgeous. They are. But I'm like, come on, you guys have been laying around the house all this time. You just sleep, eat, and drink. Can you get jobs? And they're like, we got no possible homes.

And I'm like... They sigh heavily like they're the ones going no possible and i'm like they sigh heavily like they're the ones going out and earning a living it's like what's so hard about your life it's a rough job it's a rough job so uh so she goes through this journey she's dealing with all this and the thing you know a lot of your a lot of your titles of your books deal with rooms houses the attics and things like that uh what do you feel the fascination is to draw from those sort of subject lines? You know, it's interesting. Since I was a little girl, I've been obsessed with old houses.

And I never lived in one until we moved to London when I was 12. But I remember my mom taking me to a dentist appointment and me saying, oh, can you just stop on the curb here? I'm going to look at this house just because it was old and it had interesting architectural elements. And I don't know what that fascination was. I got a clue when we moved into our flat in London. The building had been built in 1904. And so it had, you know, right in the middle of London in the West End. And, you know, it had seen so much history, including the London Blitz. And I remember when we moved in, you know, the porter telling us that the reason why some of the windows in the building were not leaded glass and some were was because during the Blitz, some had been shattered and they'd

been replaced with plain glass. And that was the first time that I understood my fascination with old buildings. And that was because that was a piece of history I could hold in my hands. And I've always loved history. I've always loved historical novels. I've always loved true history. My father was a huge history buff and would take us to, um, you know, when we traveled the world, you know, we would go to the castles and the old houses and the, the, the parts of our collective history that happened in old houses.

You know, I had my wedding photos taken at Washington's, the Thompson Neely House in Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, which is where Washington planned the attack on Trenton on Christmas Eve. And it's just, I love history. I love the way history is still present, you know, and old houses are certainly a way of almost like time traveling. And I think that's where my obsession comes with. And old houses have these nooks and crannies and these hidden rooms and these staircases. And it's all great. And so, of course, as an author,

I love to sort of hone in on that fascination and explore it a little bit more. They're almost a character into themselves, aren't they? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. All of my books, not just these series, but my single titles always have an old house, once an old movie theater, but that all represented a community or family or lives that had been lived. So definitely,

you know, the history element is, is alive and well in my books. There you go. I love that because, you know, old homes that I've been into, you know, there's, there's people that have passed through. When you move into a new home, you're like, hey, we're the first people here. But you're like, wow, people ate here. People raised their children here. They had their lives, their dreams, their passions. They lived, died, passed through. And then, you know, an old home has lots of creaks and noises and as kind of a personality, if you will, that, you know, I remember going into my grandfather's old.

I mean, it was an old home to me. It didn't seem to him. But, man, I never did like going to that basement. Oh, yeah. Creaks and noises. Oh, yeah. It has that damp kind of smell and there's not windows and yeah there are no walkout basements back in the day and there are places to this day yeah

yeah i i just always felt like someone was coming up or you would look down and he had these long stairs that would go into the basement is that that where they kept the freezer? Yeah, probably. Yeah, usually. There was usually a hole dug out too where, you know, puts lotion on the skin or whatever. No, my grandparents. Oh, wow. That's gross. That's a whole different house.

That's Silence of the Lambs. Silence of the Lambs reference. That always pays off well. But yeah, I mean, there's just a character to it. I mean, even like the beauty of like, you know, those giant banisters and the giant stairs that they would have and things like that. And there's a feel to them. And so I think that's cool. It's a character in your books and probably some personality that adds that flavor texture, especially with New Orleans and stuff stuff from the south those beautiful palatial

estates sort of things they had yeah they don't make houses like they used to for sure they don't and they're they're kind of uh you know they make those houses nowadays that are you know the levitt town sort of persona personality less the mcmans. The cookie cutters that you see. It's like, every house looks the same here. It's just so inspiring. I know. Yeah. And houses that are 100 years old or something are just incredible. And they're quirky, but they're fun quirky.

Like you live with quirks. Yeah. Yeah. But sometimes I'd probably keep the lights on. Yeah. Because you're probably going to have a ghost. You have a better chance of a ghost in those homes than you do in some new Levittown thing that just got built. Unless it's built on a burial ground or something.

There you go. One can only hope. Now we're going full Steven Spielberg poltergeist right there. Pet cemetery hour. Yeah. So how often do you write books have you written 34 35 set of books uh what's in the works for you coming up and uh and and what do you hope people will come away from this book um so what i'm working on right now obviously the the third book in this this series, um, which will be out in 2025. I don't know when yet. Um, I, we just finished

another collaboration with, um, Beatrice Williams and Lauren Willig, and the title is super, super secret, but that will be out in, um, September of 2024. Um, so yeah, definitely sign up for my, for my mailing my mailing list because lots of exciting stuff coming coming up with that and then um i've just started working on a new single title um i don't i can't give anything away yet but um and i don't know when that will be out i'm thinking also in 2025 so lots of projects i i had to take a little bit of a break on the single titles just because my personal life was going a little haywire with stuff, including my, you know, we had a wedding and a funeral within a month and that was sort of a little bit of a whiplash, but

things are settling in and I'm eager to get back into the saddle and write that next single title. My single title books are a little more emotional and, and, and then the, the series books and the series books, I get to have a lot of fun. I get to play with ghosts. I get to be a little more funny, you know,

show my sense of humor a little bit more. So these have been sort of a balm to the soul to write. And I've enjoyed writing the series books, but I'm eager. I call them my palette cleansers and I like to write them in between my bigger single titles. So I'm eager to get back into a regular publishing schedule. So we'll see how that goes. There you go. You know, a lot of authors that we have on the show that do a lot of books like yourself, you know, they have these different strains or different, you know, rails or however you want to call it, different avenues of different books and characters and they're doing.

And yeah, it helps kind of keep things fresh for them because they can mix and match. 100%. Yeah. Like having that survey, you know, between your, your starter and your main course, you just kind of need that,

you know? Yeah, there you go. There you go. Well, this should be exciting and I'm sure your fans are going to love it. Anything more you want to tease on the book before we go? Yeah.

So there is a mystery that is solved in this book that there is a new mystery that is introduced as well as a new character who is very mysterious that we won't find out more until the third book. And I don't know what's going to happen either because I haven't written it. So we'll all be surprised and excited. And again, that third book, no title yet, but that will be out in September, excuse me, in 2024. Yeah,

there you go. Oh, 2025. Excuse me. Yeah. What, what year are we in now? We're in 23.

I, last time I checked, but I'm having a hard time. I'm still in 2022. So I'm still in denial about it about halfway through the year. I wake up and then you go, well, I guess I'm going to accept. Oh my About halfway through the year, I wake up and you go, well, I guess I'm going to accept this. Oh, my gosh, yeah.

Yeah, I can accept this new year, June 1st. I'll accept it. Usually I get to about December and I'm like, what happened? What the hell? I can't believe we're in April. But no, the next book in the Royal Street series will be out in 2025. I do know that because it's not next year. It's the year after.

There you go. Well, thank you very much, Karen, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris. It's fun. Thank you. I do appreciate it. Thank you.

Give us your.com so we can find you on the interwebs. Karen-White.com. There you go. Order it up, folks, wherever fine books are sold. Remember, stay away from those dirty alleyway bookstores. I got a tetanus shot the other day when I was in one. You only, wherever fine books are sold. Remember, stay away. There's dirty alleyway bookstores. I got to get a tetanus shot the other day when I was in one, the only go over fine books are sold. Uh,

the title of the book, the house on Patania. It's part of the, a Royal street novel series available May 9th, 2023. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe.

And we'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out. Karen.