Midnight Train to Paris
About the book (City of Light, Book 3)
When hard-hitting DC reporter Jillian Chambord learns that her twin sister, Isla, has been abducted from a luxury train traveling through the Alps, not even the threat of losing her coveted position at The Washington Daily can stop her from hopping on the next flight to France. Never mind the fact that Samuel Kelly—the sexy former CIA agent who Jillian has sworn off forever—has been assigned as the lead investigator in the case.
When Jillian and Samuel arrive in the Alps, they soon learn that their midnight train isn’t leading them to Isla, but has taken them back in time to 1937, to a night when another young woman was abducted from the same Orient Express train. Given a chance to save both women, Jillian and Samuel are unprepared for what they discover on the train that night, for the sparks that fly between them . . . and for what they’ll have to do to keep each other alive.
inspiration for midnight train to paris
When I was living in San Diego taking daily beach walks, I would always marvel at the sight of the Coaster train barreling up and down the coast. It was during one of those beach walks that the initial idea for Midnight Train to Paris came to me. I saw a young woman in the 1920s or 1930s holding a suitcase in her hand and running to catch a late-night train. She was running from someone or something, although at the time I didn’t know who or what that was!
I kept this seed of an idea in my head while I was writing Dancing with Paris, and not long after, my publisher asked me to write a Kindle Serial. The idea was that I would write a few chapters at a time and group them into episodes which would be released onto my readers’ Kindles each week. I knew immediately that my train idea would be my Kindle Serial book, and thus was born Midnight Train to Paris.
This book is a time travel mystery (with a splash of hot romance), and I loved the idea of having both the main mystery and the time travel occur on the train. Inspired by Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, I decided that my characters would be traveling on the Orient Express in both the past and present. This luxury train (that I dream of traveling on one day!) would be the vehicle to take my main characters, Jillian and Samuel, back and forth in time, which would ultimately help them solve a parallel mystery from 1930s France and present day.
Since I was handing early chapters over to my publisher to be edited and published before I had even written the ending, I had to plot out this book meticulously. I actually loved writing the book this way—and for this particular story, it worked! It’s a magical, suspenseful, and steamy adventure through the French Alps—a story that is so close to my heart that I recently had a dream in which I had traveled to one of the fictional places I’d created in the book. I was in the snowy winter wonderland I’d imagined, knowing I could create anything I wanted there. This dream came to me eight years after I wrote the book! I think the dream is telling me that it’s finally time to write the sequel…
