Tracy Clark Initiates New Detective Series with 'Hide'

In her fifth published novel, author and newspaper editor Tracy Clark brings us into the world of Detective Harriet Foster in her latest crime thriller, Hide. Set in Chicago, the novel follows 43 year-old detective, Harriet Foster, as she hunts down a serial killer with a proclivity for red-haired females. Initially, Hide was intended to be Clark’s first standalone, which was a departure from her previous series and included all new characters, but the publishers loved the characters so much that they asked her to write additional books for the series. In this first novel, the title, Hide, is significant to the story in several ways. “…It not only pings on the murder cases that she’s investigating, but also her personal life. When we meet Harriet, she’s a character who is in conflict with herself, and so she’s hiding from the world. She’s hiding even from herself, so, sort of, a dual title, pinging, but it definitely has to do with the murders because this craven killer is killing young women with red hair and blue eyes and he’s hiding their bodies under the city streets… He’s hiding them in weird, precarious places and so that’s what the title is about. So, those two little things going, one little word, that can mean so much.” Additionally, some of the suspects are hiding secrets as well. Clark remarked, “I love that readers have to think about it. I mean, it’s entertainment, yes. But I also want you to have an interesting puzzle, an interesting journey, to go on with the characters too… I like the little multi-layered, complicated little things.”

As a native of Chicago, Clark plans to continue writing stories set in the Windy City. Every location she uses in her novels are all places she’s walked through and is familiar with. “I’ve walked the streets… I know what it smells like down there because I’ve smelled it for twenty-some years. So it’s good to know the streets that you’re writing about. It’s not necessary, but it lends a level of authenticity and reality that you can’t get from just sitting at your writing desk and figuring out or imagining what it might look like and smell like… It’s all real, it’s all Chicago, and it’s all gritty.” She also doesn’t anticipate setting her books in another location until farther down the road. For her, Chicago is suitable for all the mysteries that happen in her stories because of the long history of crime and corruption that has occurred there. “We’ve had gangsters, we’ve had Al Capone. We’ve had gangsters in politics. I mean, the last four governors of ours have gone to prison for corruption. Everything happens in Chicago. There’s nothing, crime-wise, that we do not know about, so to find a crime story in my city, which is, sort of, inundated with crime, built into the brick of the foundations of our city here, I don’t have to look far. But on the opposite side of that, we have the most wonderful people here too. We have seventy-something neighborhoods, each one is different, each one is vibrant. It smells different, it sounds different, it has a different movement… All of that stuff, juxtaposition… Chicago is where I live. This is the city I know. I can find a million stories to tell here. When I run out of that million, then I’ll consider someplace else.”