The first step to writing a great detective story is setting up a tantalizing mystery at the very beginning. The best authors use those first paragraphs to introduce such a compelling hook that readers will only look up from the page to cancel their plans so they can find out what happened.

Anita Coffee Thomas starts off her novel, Blood Will Tell, right amid something sinister:

Howard Taylor struggles to focus, his brain floundering through a dense fog. He has awakened, not from a restful sleep but from a drugged unconsciousness, finding himself inexplicably sitting in the driver’s seat of his own car.

“What?” A strangled croak emerges from his mouth, and he tries to sit up, to reach for the steering wheel. His arms and legs, even his tongue, feel thick, alien, as if they belong to someone else, and he tries to remember something, anything, to make sense of what is happening to him. What’s the last thing, Howard? The last thing. Think. You told Rochelle something. A lunch meeting? Wait. Who was I meeting?

The low purr of his car’s engine halts his frantic questions. Has it been running all this time? Where am I parked? Howard tries again to concentrate. He struggles to lean forward to peer out the windshield, and recognizes his garage, the shelves with their neat arrangement of tools. I’m home. Why is it so dark in here? How can it be nighttime? Is the door closed?

The air feels oddly thick, and breathing becomes difficult. Howard’s eyes drift shut and his head falls back.

If I can just sleep for a little bit, maybe my head will stop pounding, he thinks.

The second step to writing a great detective story is, as one would expect, to create a great detective. While the man in the car may not last past this first page, the heroine, Amanda Blackstone, is the driven young journalist who gets to the bottom of his demise in Thomas’ mystery novel, which Kirkus Reviews calls “an entertaining beach read with the potential for a sequel.”

Thomas, who lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, and is retired from a career as a publisher’s assistant at StarNews, wanted her protagonist to be deeply involved in the world of local journalism. She also wanted to set her story in a turbulent time from her own past: the early ’70s.

“I graduated college in 1970,” she says. “So the early ’70s were when I was out making my way in the world, and it was such an interesting time. The Vietnam War, living in the South during desegregation, the Clean Air Act—there were so many social issues that I thought would be a perfect setting for a reporter.” Blood Will Tell uses the time period as its backdrop, but its foreground is personal, focusing on a wealthy family with a “deep, dark, horrible secret.”

“There’s always a secret,” says Thomas, laughing, “but it’s the perfect scenario for blackmail.” Kirkus says that Thomas “provides enough action and plot twists…to keep readers guessing and turning the pages.”

Like any good writer, Thomas uses points of reference from her own experiences to inspire settings and some character traits, but the real point of inspiration for Blood Will Tell came to her from a simple assignment at a writing class.

After Thomas retired, a friend told her about the John C. Campbell Folk School, an institution dedicated to preserving and spreading folk arts by hosting classes for adults—everything from quilting to blacksmithing to writing. The class was a weeklong program where Thomas stayed on-site at the school along with her fellow classmates.

Thomas credits her teacher for giving her the assignment that sparked Blood Will Tell: She was told to write a scene where two characters were in conflict. The conflict in question is the scene in the book where Amanda hears two characters fighting and she hides so she can listen to their conversation. “That starts the murder mystery, because she hears a threat,” says Thomas. “That was the beginning of writing it, but then it took eight years for me to write the rest of the book. They say that your second book goes a little faster, and I hope that’s true!”

When Amanda overhears this confrontation, she’s on the job as a society column reporter, which was certainly not the investigative journalist job she wanted. But Amanda is determined to prove herself, and she follows the trail of evidence with the drive of a true reporter.

Journalists are a popular choice for mysteries because, like police officers and private investigators, it’s literally their job to find the truth. At least, it used to be. Nowadays, local journalism as it’s depicted in Blood Will Tell is dying out.

“I’ve called my book a love letter to newspapers because they’re going by the wayside,” says Thomas. “And it breaks my heart. So I took a couple of opportunities where you hear somebody’s inner thoughts, and they get on their soapbox and talk about why they love what they’re doing and about how local newspapers are such a valuable resource for communities. So I’d like to continue that.”

There were many things that happened during the writing process that surprised Thomas, including the identity of the murderer. “I go back to my class notes, where we were told to make an outline of the book, and someone else was the bad guy. But the characters started to come up off the page, and they speak to you whether you want to hear them or not.”

As far as continuing her writing work, Thomas has boundless enthusiasm. She herself recorded the audiobook for Blood Will Tell, which she says was a dream come true. She shares that she knows she really loves a book if she feels compelled to read it aloud, and so she did a lot of work honing her vocal skills in order to make the audiobook the best she could. Having reached that goal, she has lots of ideas for where she could take Amanda Blackstone next. Maybe she and her love interest, Patrick, are investigative partners at the paper. Or maybe Thomas could do a time-jump, and they’ve started a private investigation business together. Maybe she’ll do both, with a sequel and a third installment! After taking a simple class for fun and eventually ending up having written an entire book, Thomas has an open mind about where she might go next.

When asked about her seemingly endless enthusiasm for trying new things, Thomas says that she tries to surround herself with curious people. “Curiosity keeps you interested and interesting. I’m more amazed than anyone that I was able to write this book and finish it, then narrate it. I’m still pinching myself! I joke when I talk to book clubs that there were times when my laptop was sitting there open and I’d rather be doing anything else, even cleaning a toilet. And sometimes months would go by, and I wouldn’t write a word. But toward the end, things started coming together better, and I was having so much fun with the characters.”

To see where Thomas takes Amanda next, readers can stay up to date via Thomas’ website.

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn.