Hooked From Page One: Interview: RECKLESS IN RED by Rachael Miles

RECKLESS IN RED
Rachael Miles
Regency Romance

Lena Frost is a force to be reckoned with. A woman who has made her way in society without family or fortune, she’s about to realize her first big success as an artist. . . . Until her business partner makes off with her money, leaving her with little more than her hopes—and a dead body in her studio. Now Lena is at the mercy of a strikingly handsome stranger demanding answers she dare not reveal . . .

Is it her seductive eyes, or his suspicion that she’s up to no good that have Clive Somerville shadowing Lena’s every move? Either way, his secret investigation for the Home Office has him determined to uncover Lena’s hidden agenda. But the closer he gets to her, the more he longs to be her protector. Is she a victim of circumstance? Or a dark force in a conspiracy that could destroy everything Clive holds dear? Discovering the truth could have dire consequences, not only for Lena, but for his heart . . .

Reckless in Red was a 2019 finalist for the Holt Medallion in Historical Fiction and a first-place winner in the 2020 National Federation of Press Women’s communications contests in the category Fiction for Adult Readers: Novels.

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Welcome to the blog! The first page is perhaps one of the most important pages in the whole book. It’s what draws the reader into the story. Why did you choose to begin your book this way?

In Reckless in Red, I wanted Lena to be in danger from the very first page. And I wanted her to meet the hero — Lord Clive Somerville—in a situation that will make her distrust him for a very long time. The note itself also needed to be a sort of character in the book, a stand-in for Lena’s missing partner Horatio. And though the note’s message seems straight-forward in this minute, Lena will eventually realize that Horatio left her more than one message, so I needed to spend a little of the first page drawing the reader’s attention to the paper itself.

In the course of writing your book, how many times would you say that first page changed and for what reasons?

It always takes me a little time to discover where a book starts. But with Reckless in Red, I knew from the beginning that it started with that message: Run. The other bits weren’t so solid, but the note remained through all the revisions.

Was there ever a time after the book was published that you wished you had changed something on the first page?

I revise the first page so many times before publication that it’s not usually the place that I wish I’d done something differently. That usually happens somewhere in the middle.

What advice can you give to aspiring authors to stress how important the first page is?

What you can do with a first page depends on your genre. With most genre fiction, the first page must introduce the character and some part of the conflict. It doesn’t have to be all of the conflict, but some part of the conflict has to be present from the very first page.

Rachael Miles writes ‘cozily scrumptious’ historical romances set in the British Regency. Her books have been positively reviewed by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Booklist, which praised her ‘impeccably researched and beautifully crafted’ novels, comparing her works to those of Jo Beverly and Mary Jo Putney. Her novel, Reckless in Red, won first place in adult fiction: novels in the National Federation of Press Women’s writing contest. A native Texan, Miles is a former professor of book history and nineteenth-century literature. She lives in upstate New York with her indulgent husband, three rescued dogs, and all the squirrels, chipmunks, and deer who eat at her bird feeders.