It started with After Party. Not an after party, but “The After Party,” as in the Apple TV show that turned heads in 2022.
Bestselling thriller novelists Joe Finder and Gregg Hurwitz had watched it and liked the premise of a story about a murder at a high school reunion after party as told through the eyes of each attendee. Each episode of the show was told from a different character’s point of view as a detective worked to figure out what really happened. As vice president of publishing for the International Thriller Writers, Finder saw the format’s potential for the organization’s fourth audio book. Hurwitz, now ITW co-president, came up with the idea of a women’s book club during which a variety of crimes are committed. He discussed his idea with Finder and Kim Howe, ITW’s executive director.
Finder came up with a title, The Twisted Women’s Book Club, and started the process of pulling it together.
Writers know how difficult it is to start a new novel from scratch with a single idea. Now multiply that by fourteen––the number of authors it took to complete this, this thing. What exactly did ITW create? An anthology? Eh, sort of. Narrative fiction? Yeah, maybe that’s more like it.
Finder says their collaborator in the venture, Audible, which had worked on the three previous original audio books, was “looking to create a cohesive narrative.”
The Twisted Women’s Book Club debuted on Audible April 10, the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby, and—believe it or not—sold much better than F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s novel initially did. The Twisted Women’s Book Club was number one on Audible for four weeks and stayed in the list of top ten Audible Original or exclusive title books for months after. The Great Gatsby, considered today to be the great American novel, struggled to sell its first printing of 5,000 copies.
Finder faced the huge task of corralling all of the big-name thriller writers, each to write a short story, which would become a chapter about one of the book club members.
“He has such a warm personality, no one can say no to him,” Howe says.
Well, he admits, a few big names did. All of the authors who participated donated their time to the project.
Finder cajoled famous authors to take part, he says, because they had to sell the book. “I wanted writers that readers knew.” Proceeds from sales go to The International Thriller Writers organization, which enables ITW to offer its memberships for free.
Finder’s instructions to his writers were simple. “The writer prompts were very open-ended.” Each author’s chapter was to engage their book club member in a crime (although one author decided to take on the persona of the fancy caterer for the club meetings). They also had to include the book club’s leader, Dr. Margaret Richter, a “psycho psychiatrist,” as Finder describes her. She lives in a mansion on a hill in the small town of Wellfleet on Cape Cod. These prompts would tie the characters and chapters together. Finder and Howe quickly realized it would take more than that.
“None of us had any idea what the others were writing,” says Canadian bestselling author Linwood Barclay, one of the chapter authors.
Finder wanted a strong female presence for this project. “A majority of the writers are female,” he says. “I wanted mostly female writers because I knew this would be a female-driven story.” Only three men made the cut to join the club.
He got what he wanted. Besides Howe and Barclay, the participating authors are Karin Slaughter, Lee Child, B.A. Paris, Caroline Kepnes, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Sarah Pekkanen, Naomi Hirahara, Robert Dugoni, Alison Gaylin, Heather Gudenkauf, Shari Lapena, Clare Mackintosh, and Stacy Willingham.
All of them, he said, took the time to create something special. “There isn’t a klunker in the entire book,” Finder says. “They’re really good stories.”
In all, it took eighteen months to collect the completed manuscripts, each author working around their individual publishing deadlines while creating an audio story anywhere from forty-minutes to an hour long.
In the past, ITW has created anthologies in print, which always sold well. But the price of paper kept going up. So, years ago ITW came up with the idea of an audio series of anthologies and began working with Steve Feldberg, Sr. Director of Creative Development for Audible Originals. While Audible boasts the largest collection of audiobooks available from a wide range of publishers, Audible Original titles do not take a previously published book and turn it into an audio book. Instead, they are original manuscripts, which are released first (and in some cases only) on audio.
Feldberg was interested in shifting ITW’s focus from pure anthology with a group of famous writers, to a more narrative story line with a group of famous writers.
“We started talking about upping the ante,” Feldberg says. “How do we elevate the anthology to make it even more compelling?”
“Like a nesting doll, we had a story within a story within a story,” Howe says. “And all of this started with Karin Slaughter’s fabulous faux chapter from a book called Twisted.” Stacy Willingham penned the final short story.
“You can read the stories on their own,” Feldberg says. “They’re really good stories.” But at the same time, Finder says, “We wanted more connective tissue to the stories than just a theme.”
“The idea popped into my head to have a central location, a book club for women––twisted women, of course, the best kind,” Hurwitz says. “Everyone present is hiding a terrible illicit secret.”
“Once the stories came in, we realized we needed an intensive continuity edit,” says Howe. “We gave quite a bit of latitude to the authors, and their creativity was impressive. But the main character, psychiatrist Margaret Richter, was single, divorced, and widowed. She was also childless in some stories, had a child in another story. The first step was to make sure there were no obvious inconsistencies.”
“We had to tweak a lot of the stories, so everything comported,” Feldberg says.
After the edits were complete, they still needed stronger ties between the chapters, so Howe wrote short chapters for the beginning, middle, and end.
“I read and reread all the entries,” Howe says, “analyzing which stories had an intense focus on Margaret––some just briefly mentioned her––and seeing if we could bring these elements to the forefront in the sections I wrote. I introduced highlights from these stories in the beginning and middle sections and then built them into the climax for the grand finale. It was important for this book to be more than an anthology.”
Even when it was finished, Feldberg was still worried. “My biggest fear before we released the project: would people get that? Would they get there was a plot going all the way through this?” Becoming number one in the Audible listening chart suggests they did.
Creating the cohesive narrative, Feldberg says, “is the genius behind the whole thing.”
After Howe established the main character in the introduction, Karin Slaughter took over with her opening chapter short story and Howe, Finder and Feldberg then arranged the stories in an order that made sense to the narrative.
Finder raves about the real cast of characters in The Twisted Women’s Book Club––the creators. “They are the nicest people in the world. They are smart and funny. Gregg Hurwitz is really funny. They threw themselves into the process. We’re talking about people who are really good story tellers.”
The full cast of characters also includes the narrators, Lauren Ezzo, Stephanie Epstein, Jenn Lee, Brittany Pressley, Cindy Kay, Nancy Wu, Nicola F. Delgado, Emily Lawrence, Karen Murray, Adepero Oduye, Daniela Acitelli, January LaVoy, Andi Arndt, Saski Maarleveld and Kathlene Early.
The Audible production team scrambled scheduling studio time all across the country to put the audio together. Slaughter and others had worked with some of the narrators before, so they were assigned to those with whom they were familiar.
“We do that because listeners associate certain voices with certain authors. They really respond to that,” says Feldberg. “We did that where it made sense.”
Finder is so pleased with the success of The Twisted Women’s Book Club, that he’s already thinking of ITW’s next audio book. He’ll use what he learned from his latest experience to give a more detailed writer’s prompt next time. He’d love to get started soon in hopes of publishing in 2027.
Can he turn a new book around that soon?
Yes, he says, “until Steve tells me that’s not possible.”
