Lindsay Hunter Is Redrawing the Boundaries of Crime Fiction

At its core, Lindsay Hunter’s Hot Springs Drive is a novel about a tragic and violent crime that rocks a community, wrecks two families, and rends to shreds the close friendship between two women, Jackie and Theresa, in a small community. In Hunter’s capable hands, however, this story grows and pushes against the boundaries of crime fiction. I spoke with Hunter about true crime, impossible choices, and how reading begets writing.

Stephen Patrick Bell: This is a book about two women and their friendship, but there are many other observers, many other voices, many other lenses the reader gets to observe them through. How did you decide which characters you wanted to have speak before and after the murder?

As I was drafting this novel, I was thinking of it as almost a shattered windshield, or a crazy quilt. Something made of shards but that, together, was a whole thing.Initially, I had Jackie in both first- and third-person narration. I wanted readers to have access to her story, the way she’d tell it, but also glimpse a more objective truth about her. I thought that was pretty clever. , when we think we’re clever. As I revisited the novel in the editing process, this