Michele Campbell worked at a prominent Manhattan law firm before spending eight years fighting crime as a federal prosecutor in New York City. She launched her fiction career in 2005, writing as Michele Martinez, with the Melanie Vargas legal thriller series. Then in 2017 she pivoted, boldly shifting into a new subgenre and, perhaps even more boldly, under a new pen name. Newsweek calls her writing “Taut, unpredictable, and sensual [ . . . . ] the perfect escape.” This fall, she debuts her latest thriller, The Intern (St. Martin’s Press), which features a twisty interplay between two powerful female characters. You can read an excerpt here.
RN: You are half-Puerto Rican. Growing up in Connecticut, did you feel a push-pull about your identity?
MC: I’m half-Puerto Rican and half-Eastern European Jewish. Growing up, I didn’t know of anybody with my ethnic mix, other than Juan Epstein from Welcome Back Kotter, whose very existence was treated as a joke. I didn’t feel like I fit in anywhere. It was a challenging childhood in a lot of ways. People think of Connecticut as leafy suburbs, but I’m from New Haven, not Greenwich. In the ’60s and ’70s, New Haven was a very rough town. Racial strife, poverty, crime. One of my earliest memories is smelling the smoke from riots of 1967. We lived in a small apartment in a marginalized neighborhood that was changing from white working class to Puerto Rican. There was a lot of tension — slurs on the school bus, fights in the schoolyard. The stabbing Kathryn witnesses in The Intern is based on something I saw in middle school. The sense of menace and deprivation from that time, the striving to get somewhere better, informs not only Madison Rivera in The Intern but every protagonist I write.
RN: Why did you choose the law as a path? Money? Prestige? Too much Perry Mason as child?
MC: I grew up around law and the criminal justice system, so it came naturally. My mother was a legal secretary. I loved going to her office after school and, once I turned sixteen, had a part-time job as a file clerk there. My father was director of the industrial education program at the maximum-security prison in Somers. He taught machining to the inmates and ran the shop. I wasn’t allowed to visit, but that world was part of my reality. I remember writing a paper on The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and my dad arranged for me to correspond with an inmate who belonged to the Nation of Islam. Unfortunately, that degenerated quickly with some inappropriate comments being directed my way (I was maybe 14 at the time). It then occurred to me to ask what the guy was in for. Turned out he’d broken into a house and murdered an entire family, including their dog.
RN: As a prosecutor, you must have seen some very bad things. What was the most outrageous thing you encountered?
MC: The worst thing I saw was how casually people used violence to get money — how willing they were to hurt or kill people they personally knew, members of their own family, innocent people in their communities. I had a case where the head of a violent drug organization left dismembered bodies in public places as a warning not just to his enemies, but to people in the neighborhood so they’d be too terrorized to talk to police. On another case, the drug dealers knew that people were OD’ing — actually dying from their heroin. So little did they care that when the ODs affected sales, they simply changed the brand name and kept selling. More people died! The two top guys in that organization both had legit jobs, one in a bank, the other for the sanitation department. They could have lived law-abiding lives but chose not to. I asked them why, and one of them said, because he wasn’t a chump. They wanted fast, easy money, sex, cars, guns. I got the sense that they enjoyed the violence. I had plenty of witnesses tell me stories about home invasions, bombings, you name it, with a smile on their face. It was fun to them.
RN: Your first four books were legal thrillers — Most Wanted, The Finishing School, Cover-Up, and Notorious — published between 2005 and 2008 under the name Michele Martinez and featuring Latina federal prosecutor Melanie Vargas. As far as I know, she is the first English-language Puerto Rican female sleuth ever. What inspired you to write that series?
MC: I needed to quit my prosecutor job to be home with my kids, yet I couldn’t bear to leave that insane, exciting world behind. One night, I had a dream about a fire that killed a silver-haired lawyer who’d been mixed up in a crime. I woke up and realized it was the perfect opening scene for a novel. So I wrote it. It came naturally, because I loved crime fiction, and I had the material from my years as a prosecutor. Melanie’s world was based on my own. She was half-Puerto Rican because I was, and because I cared about representation.
Times were very different then in terms of diversity in publishing. “Own voices” didn’t exist, and to be honest, I felt like back then, they didn’t know how to market my books. I remember being told that accounts only wanted a Latina if she was the next Isabel Allende, that my books were not literary enough, that there was no market for Latina-identified commercial fiction. And simultaneously hearing that Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez was doing well, so I should make Melanie more Puerto Rican — like, sprinkle in more Spanish. This was not ever presented in a discriminatory way, but more in the sense that marketing the Melanie books was a challenge.
Anyway, I do feel like those books had an impact. I spoke at schools in Latino neighborhoods. I remember getting an email from a girl with a Hispanic last name who said Melanie made her believe she could become a lawyer. I feel like the books mattered, and that’s important to me.
RN: In 2017, with It’s Always the Husband, you moved not only away from legal thrillers to darker, psychological, domestic thrillers, but also more significantly away from your established nom de plume. These are huge changes for any author who has already built a brand and reputation. Why the changes?
MC: The Melanie Vargas books were still finding their readership when the financial crisis hit. Ebooks were also just coming in, the publisher of the Melanie series went through major layoffs, and most of the people who’d championed those books left. The series was basically orphaned. Selling an ongoing series to a new publisher is very difficult, so I stepped back from writing and went to teach criminal law. It was almost a decade until I published again.
Pivoting to domestic suspense seemed like a natural. Writing a procedural series was a great place to start given my background as a prosecutor, but I was even more excited to write standalones. It was the age of domestic suspense. Not only did I love that subgenre, but it was where the opportunity was.
I was very fortunate to get a contract for the book that became It’s Always the Husband. My new publisher wanted to relaunch me. They didn’t own the Melanie books, and understandably didn’t want to contend with any brand confusion. So they asked me to choose a new name. My full legal name is Michele Rebecca Martinez Campbell. All my books are copyrighted that way. I could have chosen a Latina name that was not my own. Instead, I chose to publish as Michele Campbell, because that is my name, just as Michele Martinez is.
RN: You like playing with alternating points of view in a few of your books. In A Stranger on the Beach, we follow the stalker and his target. In The Intern, we follow law student Madison Rivera as well as the secretive judge she interns for. Is that style related to your law background, where a way to get to the truth is to interview all the witnesses?
MC: You’re right — being a prosecutor convinced me there are multiple sides to every story, all of which need to be sifted to get to the truth. But I also use multiple viewpoints as a matter of craft when writing thrillers to create suspense and build tension.
The Intern is a cat-and-mouse story with two strong female protagonists who don’t know if they can trust one another. The story begins from Madison’s viewpoint when she lands her dream internship with Judge Kathryn Conroy. But Madison’s younger brother Danny is in trouble with the law, and Conroy is the judge on his case. He claims he’s innocent, that he’s being framed, and the judge is corrupt. Madison has to figure out whether to believe her mentor, or her brother, pitting her ambition and her admiration for a remarkable woman against family loyalty. Is Judge Conroy a villain, a victim, or a hero? We face this quandary from Madison’s point of view, then switch to Kathryn’s. By writing from both points of view, I can tell their story with maximum impact and suspense.
RN: Crime fiction can sometimes over-simplify or romanticize the criminal justice system. Do you ever read some crime fiction and shake your head?
MC: Having been a prosecutor in real life, I agree there’s a difficult balance to strike between truth and fiction. To me, the issue isn’t so much romanticizing, or even over-simplifying, but satisfying the conventions of the crime and thriller genres as far as twists. In my experience, the solution to a crime may be terrifying, or frustrating, but it’s almost never surprising. Usually, the perpetrator is exactly who you’d expect, and the investigation is simply about gathering evidence. I wrote It’s Always the Husband because — well, I don’t want to spoil the ending. Authors face pressure to deliver big twists to keep readers entertained. For me, the challenge is crafting a twisty tale without writing something so implausible that it doesn’t pass the smell test. My mantra is, lean into the truth. It can be done!
