Although Falls to Pieces is the shortest book I’ve ever written, the story took longer than any other to write. New to the psychological thriller genre, I intended for this pivot to stick and thus, studied the genre for years before daring to try my hand at it.
My influences in this genre are many. For Falls, I was inspired by a wide range of novels, from William Landay’s Defending Jacob to Kimberly McCreight’s Reconstructing Amelia to Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me. Specifically, I wanted to explore a mother-daughter relationship in a way that hadn’t been done before.
Early on, I decided to use isolation and an unreliable narrator to sustain tension and build suspense. Kati Dawes and her teenage daughter Zoe are in hiding, living off-grid in the remote town of Hana on Maui, when Kati’s fiancé, local attorney Eddie Akana, goes missing from a popular hiking trail at Haleakala National Park. Almost immediately, Kati goes from victim to prime suspect, a status which jeopardizes the secrets and lies put in place to protect her and Zoe for the past two years.
Choosing Hana wasn’t a whim. In October 2021, I flew from my home in Honolulu to Maui, where I was determined to find the perfect setting for my book. After landing, I drove the length of the treacherous Road to Hana, in search of a waterfall that would make my jaw drop. I found it while hiking the park’s Pipiwai Trail. It came in the form of a two-hundred-foot horsetail waterfall roughly halfway along the path.
Maui’s wilderness provided an exotic and dangerous setting for the first part of the book. To break the relentless tension of being in the wild, I sent Kati to the bustling shore town of Lahaina in West Maui. Lahaina is one of my favorite areas in the islands but, little did I know during that 2021 visit, that it would be the final time I saw Lahaina as it’s stood since my arrival in Hawaii twenty years ago.
The Lahaina wildfires were the worst natural disaster my state has faced, and West Maui is still on the long road to recovery. In hindsight, I’m grateful to have Lahaina play such a vital role in my novel. For me, it’s very much the last snapshot I have to turn to, as I eagerly anticipate its rebuilding.
The epigraph in Falls to Pieces reads: “Paradise is only safe in designated places.” Several pages in, I’m reminded that there is a line that follows that sentence in my book:
Paradise is only safe in designated places.
Sometimes, not even in those.
Lahaina was one of those designated places where I and millions of other people always felt safe. But that feeling of security is too often an illusion, easily wiped away by the natural disasters increasingly created by manmade climate change.
Douglas Corleone is the international bestselling author of Gone Cold, Payoff, and Robert Ludlum’s The Janson Equation, as well as the acclaimed Kevin Corvelli novels, the Simon Fisk international thrillers, and the stand-alone courtroom drama The Rough Cut. Corleone’s debut novel, One Man’s Paradise, won the 2009 Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award and was a finalist for the 2011 Shamus Award for Best First Novel. A former New York City criminal defense attorney, Corleone now resides in Honolulu, where he is currently at work on his next novel. For more information, visit www.douglascorleone.com.
