Featured Interview With S. C. Abbey
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born in Glasgow, Scotland, but I spent most of my childhood wandering the streets of Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore where my parents had a career in the finance industry. So I’m much globally raised. I don’t really identify with any one location as my hometown. I currently still spend most of my time travelling in Asia and Europe, I’m kind of a nomad. Before my life as an author, I have worked as a chef, door-to-door salesman, a fishmonger (true story) and many other not so glamorous jobs. Not that being an author is a glamorous thing, it’s really just a lot of sitting and bending over a desk.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I can’t remember the exact age I started reading fiction, but I do vaguely remember the first book to be ‘Charlie And The Chocolate Factory’ by Ronald Dahl, which till this day, is still one of my favorite books. Growing up travelling from place to place meant that I didn’t had many friends, and my parents were busy most of the time, so I grew up living in the many different worlds in fiction, with all these characters as my friends. I only started writing fiction when I was in high school, I still have tons of this material I wrote more than a decade ago, I actually started exploring fiction with romance and fantasy, perhaps someday I will publish them, they need severe polishing though. I only started reading thrillers, mysteries, crime, when I got acquainted with Sherlock Holmes in my early twenties. God knows how did he evaded me for so long.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Tom Clancy, J.K. Rowling, Ruth Rendell, Tolkien (senior I’m afraid), Ian Rankin, Vince Flynn, George R.R. Martin, Lee Child. I dig fantasies and thrillers (crime/psychological/political/spy, not horror) profoundly. Suzanne Collins (author of hunger games) inspires style of my writing, because her work proves that a strong plot is perhaps the most important aspect of storytelling (I guess this applies to Rowling as well). Sure, her prose may not be as beautiful as Marcel Proust or Sylvia Plath, but the story captivates its readers nonetheless. I like that kind of clean prose, where the story moves along at a neck-breaking pace, instead of over-descriptive or over-sob prose.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
The name of my latest book is: Maximus: A Harvey Nolan Thriller. It is the first full novel in the series I have planned out. What inspired me to write this series was a combination of action movies (Taken, James Bond, etc), captivating television series with great plots (CSI, Bones, House of Cards, etc) and thrillers with strong plots (Daniel Silva, Ian Rankin, James Patterson, Lee Child, etc).
The first book introduces the two main characters: Harvey Nolan and Katie Moulin, and their background stories. Although this book is the first book of a series, I plan all the books in a way where every single novel has a proper story line within itself, with an underlying huge plot that builds up of course. As the series progresses, the huge plot unfolds. There is also a prequel available for readers to get a sneak peek.
In the first book, Dr. Harvey Nolan, a Nobel prize-winning Columbia Professor, wasn’t expecting the FBI at his office after his first blood-soaking brush with them many years ago. In a dark and damp dungeon, a frightened woman wakes up to find herself chained to her bed, her screams echoes but unanswered. Agent Katie Moulin, a jaded ex-FBI, grudgingly returns to the ground when things get chaotic with a single divergent event.
Caught in a crossfire between a merciless assassin and the FBI for a crime he did not commit, can Nolan clear his name before it is too late? As New York City becomes a hotbed of crime, Harvey’s and Katie’s lives must intertwine once again. Forced to battle enemies and allies closing in alike, they find themselves surprised by the extent of cruelty people can go to.
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