Susan Cory lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her architect husband and bossy rescue dog. Like her sleuth, she is a residential architect practicing out of a turreted office. Also, like Iris Reid, she has a brown belt in karate.
Susan grew up in New Jersey devouring mysteries. She loved seeing order restored by ingenious sleuths. But the visual arts were her medium of expression. As an Art major at Dartmouth, she imagined that designing buildings was just a larger-scaled version of creating sculpture. Susan soon discovered the many differences. At graduate school at Harvard’s G.S.D., she found a setting—insecurities and egos riding a runaway train of Design Obsession—just ripe for murder.
Conundrum and Facade are odes to Susan’s profession and all the deviously clever practitioners within it. She’s hard at work on Book 3 in the series in which Iris Reid will continue to uncover pools of evil in her world.
The mystery world is filled with sleuths who are cops, P.I.s, lawyers, bookstore owners, caterers, ministers—practitioners of every profession but Susan’s own, architecture. Aren’t we problem solvers? Don’t we find ourselves deeply enmeshed in other people’s lives? Don’t we passionately defend our beliefs? Clearly the architecture world has been ignored as a mystery setting, and architects have been neglected as sleuths and, yes, murderers. In my graduate program alone at Harvard’s G.S.D., I found a setting ripe for murder. Egos were flying, and critics would reduce sleep-deprived students to tears and screaming matches at final juries. Later, out in the real world, a tiny handful of architects would claim all the plum commissions, as a single architect each year would be awarded the Pritzker Prize, ratcheting them to Starchitect status.
Several years ago, I decided to remedy this oversight by writing the Iris Reid series. Iris designs houses in Cambridge, Ma., while her loyal Basset hound, Sheba, sleeps nearby inside the fireplace hearth. Iris spends her days hunched over a drafting table in her turreted home office, or butting heads with sexist contractors at construction sites. She spends her nights with the sexy neighborhood chef. Her loyal friend, Ellie, has her back.
I started writing the first book, Conundrum, in my head while attending my own 20th GSD reunion, reconnecting with back-stabbing, competitive classmates. (In fairness, there were plenty of nice, normal fellow students, but they aren’t as much fun to write about as the prima donnas.) In this book, Iris also returns to her 20th Architecture School reunion, only to discover the body of her former GSD boyfriend at a neo-Modernist house she’s designed. That part did not happen to me.
In the second book, Facade, Iris agrees to teach a design studio at GSD. A charismatic Dutch starchitect, also teaching that semester, lures Iris into his world. When a local schoolgirl goes missing after visiting the man’s office, Iris is his only alibi. But can she actually vouch for his innocence?
You can order the ebooks and paperbacks at:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01F6K8O2E and at http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/susan+cory?_requestid=1130254
Please visit Susan at her website: http://www.susancory.com/ and tell her what you think of the books at: https://www.facebook.co/authorsusancory
Buried Under Books 