James LePore | The Suspense Novel

I’ve heard it said that what drives a genre novel is plot, a comedic novel, voice and a literary novel, character. My novel, A World I Never Made, is a genre novel, a thriller, or, as it says on the cover, “a novel of suspense.” It seems to me, however, that a suspense novel can--and should--be character driven as well as story-driven. This is what I aimed for in A World I Never Made, the story of an estranged father and daughter who struggle to reconnect under an extraordinary set of circumstances. Those circumstances include a faked suicide, a betrayal inside the French government and the workings of a little known but extremely deadly terrorist organization. I hope that readers find both the story and the characters compelling and that they have as much fun reading the novel as I did writing it.