Minotaur Debut Week: Kat Ailes (9/15/23)

We hope that you enjoyed all the mystery and adventure from this very special Minotaur Debut Week!

We are closing out the week with THE EXPECTANT DETECTIVES by Kat Ailes, the start to a delightful and hilarious mystery series. Join along as a group of pregnant women team up to solve the murder of someone in their village.

THE EXPECTANT DETECTIVES is available for download on Edelweiss and NetGalley. LibraryReads votes due by December 1st.

Where is your local library? How have libraries played a role in your reading life? 

I live in Stroud, a small town in the Cotswolds, and we have a local library in the town centre. This particular library has been a lifesaver for me after having my son, as the bounteous kids section means I don’t have to read the same five-sentence story over and over again. (I mean this still happens but at least I have a get-out, “oh dear, it has to go back to library now!”) 

As a child I was given free-rein in our local library, where I read pretty much anything, especially if it had an animal or a spaceship on the front cover (Animorphs was therefore the ultimate series in my 8-year-old opinion). You could take twenty books out at a time – twenty! The most important lesson my library upbringing gifted me was the opportunity to take risks with my reading. You’re not outlaying any of your money (unless, like me, you’re terrible at letting books get overdue and accrue fines). If you don’t like it, you just return it. There’s nothing to lose. So why not try the sci-fi-rom-com-thriller mash-up? There are so many books, genres, eras, that I would never have explored if it wasn’t for libraries.

What’s on your TBR right now?

I’ve just been sent an advance copy of THE BEST WAY TO BURY YOUR HUSBAND by Alexia Casale, which has somewhat alarmed my own husband, especially as the last book I read was HOW TO KILL YOUR FAMILY by Bella Mackie. 

I hasten to add, I have no plans in this direction. In fact, I’m actually reading quite frothy books at the moment, as I’m due to give birth in two days. So I’ve lined up REALLY GOOD, ACTUALLY by Monica Heisey and VERA WONG’S UNSOLICITED ADVICE FOR MURDERERS by Jesse Sutanto. Although admittedly both have a black edge to their comedy now I come to think about it, and possibly won’t offer my husband much comfort…

Tell us about your writing process.

Ha. Well. I have a toddler and a dog (and a baby in a couple of days) and a job so it’s not so much a process as a fiasco. It tends to take the form of voicenotes on dog walks (always fun bumping into another dog walker as you whisper “how do you make cyanide at home” into your phone) or scribbled notes on the back of my son’s “artwork” whilst he berates me for not giving my full attention to playing space-pirate-dinosaurs.

Who’s your favorite character in literature?

As a kid, I was obsessed with Lyra from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy – in the main because she comes with a built-in animal soul-companion, something I’ve wanted since the age of about three. What I’ve ended up with is a semi-feral dog with zero social graces, but she’ll have to do.

In fact, I think in part it was Lyra’s lack of social niceties, her ability to say the wrong thing but ultimately do the right thing (or try, and often get it tragically wrong), and her slightly feral ways that appealed. She’s not necessarily “likeable” but that made her so very real. She is always dirty, often rude, and frequently out of her depths. I’m now thinking I should have called my dog Lyra…

Can you describe your debut novel in five sentences? 

Alice has just moved down to the English countryside from London, along with her boyfriend, as they are expecting their first (unexpected) baby. Their peaceful rural idyll is upended by a birth and a murder at their first prenatal class, and Alice and her expectant-mum friends find themselves embroiled in a murder investigation as they nose around trying to clear their names. As they waddle around the countryside they stumble across rural politics, inner-goddess temples, and a hippy commune hiding a dark secret – as well as a few skeletons in the closet a little closer to home. As the bodies and secrets pile up, and the police are doggedly determined to arrest one of the women, it’s down to Alice and her pals to catch the killer before another body pops up – or their waters break.

In essence, it’s a murder mystery but on the cosier, comedy end, and it heavily features a dog (largely based on my own), who has turned out to be most people’s favorite character – and is also probably mine.

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Kat joins us with a letter to librarians all about the impact that libraries and librarians have had on her life and on writing

Dear Librarians,

Thank you, wonderful people! You do an incredible job that I once dreamed of doing, before it became clear that my organizational and interpersonal skills were simply not up to the job. You create and curate libraries, these beautiful spaces that are so mystical they not only house thousands of stories but also feature in so many of them. Authors simply cannot resist putting libraries in their books because the magical potential of these spaces is so astronomical; libraries are places that occupy the real world and the fictional world in equal measure. Anything can happen in a library.

Even a murder.

THE BODY IN THE LIBRARY by Agatha Christie has to be one of the ultimate classics of the golden crime era. Just hearing the title conjures up the image of a British stately home, its library of leather-clad tomes, the fire in the grate – and the body on the rug. My own book, THE EXPECTANT DETECTIVES, hopes to follow in this genre, albeit in a more modern vein, featuring fewer bodies in libraries and more misbehaving dogs, processed snacks and heavy use of Google by the amateur detectives. It is, however, set in a village in the British countryside that is definitely fictional and not at all based on where I live, and is home to a women’s inner goddess temple (for all your gong bath and astral surfing needs) and a shady hippy commune in the woods hiding a dark and secretive past. And a murder or two, of course. Anyone who watches BritBox knows this is standard practice for quaint British villages.

I have spent a lot of time in libraries – I know, controversial for an author. As a child the library was a formative experience. I first learnt how very ill-suited I was to any form of responsibility when I incurred my first ever library fine aged just five, for an overdue copy of MEG, MOG AND OWL. But it also opened up endless possibilities for me – I didn’t need to save my pocket money for a month to buy the latest Point Horror or the new Philip Pullman, I could get twenty (twenty!) books out of my library for free. This allowed me to read anything and everything I could lay my sticky little hands on.

In my rebellious teen years I was even kicked out of a library (for eating a KitKat). And at my university, library occupation stepped up a level with a phenomenon known as ‘nesting’, when people staked out prime spots in the college library over the exam period and literally moved in there, lining their book nooks with duvets, pillows, and hipflasks of increasingly strong liquor as the exam stress peaked.

Today, my local library is a safe haven as both a writer and a mum. I try to write out of the house when I can, where the dog/toddler/husband can’t find me and demand snacks/walks/attention. This generally takes the form of writing in cafes or libraries. (Libraries with cafes are of course the ultimate destination but a rare find – libraries and snacks being apparently sworn enemies.)

Equally, on a rainy day, when my toddler is climbing the walls (literally – they do this) and I can’t bear to read our tattered copy of EACH PEACH PEAR PLUM for the six thousandth time, it is a sanctuary of sanity for me and my kids. It offers a bounty of new reading choices for the under-fives that I can thankfully return after a mere two hundred reads, crayons that my toddler can eat, and a photocopying machine where we can photocopy my son’s hands at 3p a sheet (the ultimate entertainment).

Plus there is the bonus that my own book will soon sit on a shelf in my local library. I will be able to go in and hold it, and creepily stroke its protective plastic sheath (all library books must apparently be wipe-clean), in the hope that a passerby will ask me ‘any good?’ and I can proudly show them the author photo on the back that looks nothing like me. Or even better, I won’t be able to find it because it will be out on loan.

So, long may the beautiful, mysterious, magical phenomenon that is libraries continue! Given they’ve been around for literally thousands of years (*googles ‘oldest library ever’*), I have no doubt they will.

Thank you!

Kat x

THE EXPECTANT DETECTIVES by Kat Ailes; 9781250322708; 1/9/24