The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Hunter’s Daughter By Nicola Solvinic

Episode Date: May 19, 2024

The Hunter's Daughter By Nicola Solvinic https://amzn.to/4aqP9q6 A hypnotic, sinister debut mystery about a seemingly good cop who is secretly the daughter of a notorious serial killer. Anna Koray escaped her father’s darkness long ago. When she was a girl, her childhood memories were sealed away from her conscious mind by a controversial hypnosis treatment. She’s now a decorated sheriff’s lieutenant serving a rural county, conducting an ordinary life far from her father’s shadow. When Anna kills a man in the line of duty, her suppressed memories return. She dreams of her beloved father, his hands red with blood, surrounded by flower-decked corpses he had sacrificed to the god of the forest. To Anna’s horror, a serial killer emerges who is copying her father – and who knows who she really is. Is her father still alive, or is this the work of another? Will the killer expose her, destroying everything she has built for herself? Does she want him to? But as she haunts the forest, using her father’s tricks to the hunt the killer, will she find what she needs most…or lose herself in the gathering darkness? ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nicola Solvinic has a master’s degree in criminology and has worked in and around criminal justice for more than a decade. She lives in the Midwest with her husband and cats, where she is surrounded by a secret garden full of beehives.

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 rollercoaster 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, ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, this is Ben Mixon, official. Welcome to the big show. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Big Show. For 16 years, 2,000 episodes, we've been bringing the Griswold Show. And boy, my back is tired. Is there a joke there somewhere? It sounds like vaudeville. I just pulled a joke out of, I don't know,

something that somebody would do from black and white TV. Anyway, guys, we love you and appreciate you guys as our family. As always, for the show to your family, friends, and relatives, go to goodreads.com, 4chessgriswoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisvoss, chrisvoss1, the TikTok, and all those crazy places on the internet. The great, wonderful young lady we have on the show today, her newest, hottest book is just hitting the shelves. May 14th, 2024, it's here as of yesterday.

It's called The Hunter's Daughter by nicola sylvanek she's got her new book out we're going to be talking about her insights what's gone into it and why you should get on amazon or wherever you find bookstores are sold and order it now damn it get it now just do it before we even talk to her because it's that good nicola has a master's degree in criminology and has worked in and around criminal justice for more than a decade. She lives in the Midwest with her husband and cats, where she's surrounded by a secret garden full of beehives, which we'll get to more about what that is. Welcome to the show, Nicola. How are you? Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to get

a chance to chat with you and your viewers. There you go. And we mostly wanted to have you on, you know, because your book is so great, but we also want to know about these darn beehives. So we'll get to that. Give us your dot coms. Tell us where we can find you on the interwebs. Sure. My website is nicolasolvenic.com. And from there, right at the top, there's Facebook, Instagram, and X.

So you can just click and follow me there. There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview of your new book The Hunter's Daughter. Yeah this is my new book. It just came out yesterday. Super excited for it. It finally feels real in tangible form. The Hunter's Daughter is about the secret daughter of a prolific serial killer who must catch his copycat using the tricks her father taught her in the forest long ago wow that's a hell of a plot it was so much fun that's a hell of a plot now is this your first book is this your debut this is my debut i mean i've got some other books thank you i've got some

other books that are living in shoeboxes under my bed that nobody needs to see because they're that bad. But this is the only one that is fit for public consumption. You know, you may be able to tap into those for storylines and characters, maybe. You know, there's always those practice ones. What motivated you to come up with this very interesting and intriguing plotline? One of the things I've learned about working in criminal justice is that when a crime happens, there are ripple effects that affect the victim, the victim's family, the people who work in criminal justice, bystanders. These are substantial effects that really impact people for many years to come. So I wanted to kind of explore that in book form. You know, then, you know, this story, the original killer may be gone, but his daughter has to grapple with what he's done.

There you go. I mean, it's got to be hard being raised as someone who's related to a serial killer. I've often wondered that. I think it was Jeffrey Dahmer that I first looked at where I was like, I think his mother, you know, said she still loved him and she still cried for him in the courtroom. And I think that was what, I was like, hmm, it's kind of weird. Your mother loves you in spite of everything. My mother doesn't. No, I'm just kidding.

But, you know, it's kind of, I've just kind of looked at it and said it's interesting about human nature that, you know, a mother and father will still love their son, even though they've done some heinous acts. And I mean, maybe they're just doing the acting in court because they want to get the book rights or the movie rights. No, I'm just kidding. I'm sure that's not what it is. But it is interesting, like you say, the fallout of people who are the survivors, I guess, of a crime like that. I imagine there's technically multiple victims of a crime like that. I imagine there's technically multiple victims in a family like that. And one of the fun things about this book to write was that the protagonist, Anna Cork, doesn't know that she's the daughter of a serial killer. She was subjected to some interesting psychological experiments that kind of wiped her childhood memories. And in the first

chapter, she kills a man for the first time in the line of duty. And in the first chapter, she kills a man for the first time in the line of duty. And this opens up the memory she has of her childhood and of her father. So when his copycat starts working in her rural county, she has to kind of plunge the depths of her memory and try to put two and two together without revealing her identity to the people around her. Wow. So she becomes aware that she's a daughter of a serial killer at that time, and she doesn't want to out herself to anyone else. Do I have that correct?

Yes, absolutely. Because it would be kind of the end of her career. She's working a conflict of interest on this copycat case, and she'd be hounded by the press forevermore. Yeah. Wow. of interest on this copycat case and you know she'd be hounded by the press forever more yeah wow and she's already on that on the copycat case so she's she's kind of stuck there and now it looks it would look bad if it came out wow this is gonna make my hair stand on end a little bit this is a hell of a plot twist i mean we've had hundreds of novels on the show but i think this one is very unique and so what what your your background is in criminal work and and and some of their stories and we've had a lot of great novels like yourself on that

you know they come from that era they come from maybe working for the cia the fbi or they come working from local police stations or a lot of times they're they're journalists who their beat was the you know the crime page and so they would see all the you know the horrors and and and things that people do to each other sadly and it would give them you know different material that they could use for books and make up great dramas in fact i think i think we had one guy on who worked for the MI6. No, he worked for France's version of MI6 in the CIA. And he pretty much told me he's got a lifetime of stories he can remake into fiction. There you go. So it sounds like that's kind of what you've done with your background in criminal behavior. Yeah, I never really did anything, you know, that was super exciting.

You know, I was never a murder investigator or anything like that. I was mostly in the background, you know, working with data and, you know, policy and those kinds of things. But it was just kind of, it was a big help to be able to just absorb some of the things that become background information for this book, like the radio chatter, or kind of one of my favorite anecdotes is when there's a police dog in the back of a police car, everybody tries to convince the rookie to go up and tap the glass, which is a really bad idea because the dog goes crazy. You know, just little tidbits like that, but help to kind of, I hope, make the story ring true. Wow. Yeah, there you go. So you've got the antidotes and the behaviors and the way to make it sound like an authentic police story.

My mom loves this show that has a police dog in it that's a big German shepherd. I don't know what show it's on, but I've been around a lot of police officers. I'm not going to say whether they were, what the context was of being around police officers. No, I'm just kidding. But where they have the big German Shepherd police dogs.

I had a friend who was one of my first clients who, he trained them for the police officers and stuff. And so I would go down to his shop and he would put the arm sleeve on me. And I get to find out what that's like to have a dog rip your arm out of your socket. And those things are, you know, you're not allowed to pet them, touch them, get near them. They have, they have a big sign on do not pet me because they, you know, they're, they're kind of unsocial or something. I don't know.

I don't know. That's mean to say about dogs. But my mom watches this movie where the guy, there's no harness on this police dog and he just kind of roams whatever he wants and do and people pet him and stuff. And I'm like, that's not how that works in real life like that just broke the fourth wall for me watching it but she likes the movie this show so i you have you gotta let something slide to fiction i guess yeah you've got to kind of compress everything to make sure that you kind of wrap up the case in two weeks in real time it might take two years yeah i mean they

just have this dog just roaming every now and then and then sometimes when someone shows up with a gun the dog runs off and i'm like that's not how those dogs work they'll go for the arm and it's kind of interesting so it's good to have those factual experiences that you have that you can put into the book of how things really happen, as opposed to, you know, I don't know what's going on in this video. Maybe they were just this TV series. They're too cheap to hire a police consultant. So tell us about your upbringing. What were some of your influences, I guess? And then when did you start writing or think, you know, you had a knack for writing? And then when did you finally reach the point of this book

where you got this thing into a publisher and now you're an author? Congratulations. Thank you so much. It still doesn't quite feel real. I keep pinching myself thinking, you know, this isn't quite real yet. But when I was a little girl, I read every Nancy Drew book that was on the library shelves. And at that time, they were the ones with the yellow spine and the painted covers. And I was just enthralled by those, you know, the girl detective going out

and catching that guy. And, you know, I really enjoyed reading that genre, you know, as an adult, I read a lot of Jennifer McMahon, Laura Nasset, Catherine McKenzie, Georgina Cross, Karen Dion. You know, I really like the trying to guess who done it. You know, I like an intricate story where I don't know who the killer is in the first chapter. I want to be surprised. And that's one of the things that I love about reading in the genre. And I hope that I've accomplished in writing it is I want to surprise the reader. So how did you get your, how did you get your deal? How did you, did you, did you have a, did you write this particular draft and you're like hey i really need to get this shopped out to someone how'd you how'd you pick up the publishing and

and you know turn turn this story into the great over some of the ones you had in your box boxes you know the ones i have in my boxes are in entirely different genres and i thought i'm just gonna write this book for myself you know I might wind up self-publishing it and maybe, you know, my mom would read it. I don't know. My husband will read it. I really didn't have high expectations for it. But like my previous books, I just plotted the heck out of it.

I have outlines and post-it notes stuck up on the wall. Like, you know, those crime scene things that you see in cop shows. Straying and, you know. But this one, yeah, yeah. And this one, I just pantsed. You know, when writers say they pants a book, they don't use an outline. They just fly by the seat of their pants and just do a stream of consciousness thing.

And so, you know, that's what I did this time. And I had approached my agent with it. And she, you know, had minimal editorial things to change about it. And it sold within a week i was shocked totally shocked this is not how this is supposed to work i mean you've practiced and and made a few that made the boxes and you know it sounds like you finally found one the plot is i mean it does make my hair stand and it's a great great plot. Thank you. We sit and have two to three guests on a show, and I don't know, probably five novels a day. Probably hundreds we've had on the show over the years,

and a lot we repeat, too. But yeah, this is a really twisty, twisty-turny sort of plot. And yeah, it's definitely worth it. It would make a great movie, too. I mean, most of these tend to do that. Oh, that'd be fun. That would be really a lot of fun. If there's any movie people out there.

I think it's funny how you've, you, you know, I've seen people try and write and I've been in a few writing accountability groups. That's how I got my book written on business. And, and, you know, I've seen people write and they try and do the the stream of consciousness dump which is how i wrote mine but most of mine were stories of my life so i was just putting them on paper it wasn't creating characters and and the work that you guys do and but then i saw other people that were trying to they would write like i don't know two lines and then they would try and edit the f out of those lines and you're just like you're

gonna do a lot of editing just get on the page man and work it out and then i saw other people trying to i mean i don't think they ever got anything written they just tried to write the structure of the thing and you're like you should really write some stuff like maybe yeah you're focused on being perfect and it's not going to be perfect. Any thoughts on that? I definitely agree with that. With the previous books that I've written, I was feeling very much like my inner editor who is just really obnoxious and was just in my ear about how this has to be perfect. And like you said, going back and revising this paragraph and trying. And now you just kind of kill the creativity and the spirit of the work that way.

And, you know, just getting it down is better. You know, the perfect is the enemy of the good, like they say. The perfect is the enemy of the good. That's why this show is such a train wreck on how we do it is because perfection is just bad. So that's why we're not perfect, folks. I think after 16 years, my audience has figured out that I'm an idiot. What other aspects of the book can we tease out? One thing with novels, we can't tell the middle and the ending, of course.

It's unlike when we do nonfiction where we can talk about, you know, how'd that presidency turn out? You know, we can kind of talk about that. Is there anything we can tease out or flush out that maybe we haven't talked about to tease out people to pick up the book? One of the things that was a lot of fun in the book was writing an unreliable narrator. It's written in a very tight first-person point of view, so we have Anna's perspective from when she was a child and when she was an adult. And another thing that I wanted to do with this book

is I'm a huge fan of The X-Files, and one of the things that I loved about that show was that you have one character who's come up with a scientific explanation for things. And this is this explains the lights in the sky or the monster of the week. And the other character has a completely supernatural explanation for. And so it's up to the viewer to decide for themselves. And that's what I very much wanted to happen with this book.

You know, the reader is going to have to participate and decide for themselves which version of reality that they believe. Wow. There you go. It sounds like most people I know on Facebook are still deciding which version of reality. I don't know what that is. But we've seen those people. And Twitter.

Twitter's full of them. So this sounds like quite the journey that people go on. So they've got to do a little bit of their own mystery solving. Is that accurate? Yes. Yes. I wanted it to be something of a of their own mystery solving. Is that accurate? Yes. Yes. I wanted it to be something of a puzzle. So I hope people enjoy that.

People love puzzles. They love novels. They love these books. Why are people so intrigued with all the murdering? What's going on there with all the murdering? A lot of our novels that come on the show, there's lots of murdering. What's up with that? It's kind of terrifying because, you know, when you read, you know, The Police blot or whatever, you think there, but for the grace of God, go I.

I mean, you think that sometimes things like this can get very close to home, especially, you know, with random victims. I mean, somebody gets killed in the grocery store parking lot. Hey, I was at that grocery store, you know, two days ago. So I think that it's in a way it kind of plugs us into that fear that we all have just existing in a society. Fear of something happening to us, getting some murdering done to us. And you don't want that, folks. Trust me, it's not good. It doesn't feel good either. And it's pretty final.

No do-over. No do-overs. It's not like on the video games where if you die, you just respawn in. I hope people know this because I'm not sure if I'm enlightening people at this point or not. Or if this just sounds funny to me in my head. And that's really the only place it's sounding funny. But I'm sticking with it. I'm just going to roll with the people.

So this sounds like a lot of interesting, people love suspense of course did you did you find that writing the suspense was fun and trying to set up the scenarios of i imagine there's a lot of pressure you know since the character you know she's the daughter of a serial killer that doesn't that doesn't create a whole new thing that you spend 10 years in therapy over. And then they might discover her secret, and she's just discovered her secrets. I imagine there's a lot of suspense and compression of suspense, I guess. Yeah, she actually acquires a stalker who knows her identity, so she's got to deal with that.

And then also these bodies keep coming up that are copycats of her father's murder. And her father was called the Forest Strangler. And he would murder women and then take them to the forest and arrange these very elaborate scenes. You know, they'd be holding bouquets and have flower crowns and have stones over their eyes and just these very macabre fairy tale kind of scenes and now somebody's doing it again and the body count is increasing so she's got to catch her guy stones over her eyes and scenes and who hurt you nicola no i'm just actually it's probably it's probably just my cat i don't know cats have a way of doing that they're kind of like

they're lovey half the time and assholes the other half the time i think they hate they're like kind of my hate my huskies they hate you most of the times does your husband sleep with his one eye open after this book i would you know i made him read it and i think that he knows what to expect from me at this point we've been married for like 20 years so i i think that he he knows what of, you know, he's dealing with. Yeah. Cancel the life insurance, bud. That's all I can tell you.

No, no, no, no, no. Got to keep our policy current. I'm always wary of any, any girlfriend I get who loves watching those murder things. And they're like taking notes the whole time. And you're like, why are you taking notes of the CSI murder thing? Um, you know, it's like,

it's like, they're just trying to figure out the best way not to get caught. Like there was a, there was a gal that was in the news recently who was putting bleach or some sort of chemical under to her and you guys coffee. And I'm just like, and you know, he finally caught her and I think she coffee and i'm just like and you know he finally caught her and i think she's getting just suspended because that's what he wanted which is really

weird she tried to kill you dude it's interesting yeah because most of the time if women are going to kill a guy you know historically it was always poison yeah you could get rid of it take him to divorce court and take half his shit that's's a slow, painful death. I mean, I know most divorce guys that are like, I really would rather have my coffee poisoned. That's a joke, people. We're doing very dark divorce comedy now on the Chris Voss Show. Tune in next time. I use that as a callback for dark stuff that we do. Tune in next time for more divorce dark comedy.

As if you weren't, anyway, as if you weren't depressed enough as it is. Don't hit the bottle. Anyway, any final thoughts as we go out on how to pick up the book? And give us a little bit of pitch out if you want for people to get out and buy it now. Yeah, you know, The Hunter's Daughter is available now at your favorite bookstore, online, in person. I think it's everywhere by now. Jennifer McMahon calls it genuinely creepy, and I hope that you'll find it to be genuinely creepy, too. Creepy, this is a good thing.

People love great stories, as long as there's no real murder. The fake murder is good, real murder is bad. There you go. So thank you very much for coming to the show. We really appreciate it. It's been fun to have you on, Nicola. Thank you so much for having me. It was great to meet you, and it's great to meet your listeners.

There you go. And give us.coms one more time so we can find you on the interwebs. Sure. My website is nicolasolvinik.com, and there at the top right, you'll see my Facebook, X, and Instagram. There you go. thank you very much for coming by we really appreciate it and thanks for joining us for tuning in go to goodreads.com fortunes chris voss linkedin.com fortunes chris voss chris voss won the tiktok kitty damn it

and be good to each other stay safe we'll see you next time and