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With her debut novel, the thriller “Tread Lightly,” Los Altos author Elizabeth Kemp offers a peek into the fictional enclave of Park View, featuring a protagonist who must confront her own inner demons as she navigates the everyday struggles of parenthood and the not-so-everyday mysteries cropping up in her new hometown.
The year is 2007 and former hotshot hostage negotiator Tierney Gillespie is attempting to settle into her life as a stay-at-home mom in Silicon Valley while still haunted by the trauma and loss that ended her law-enforcement career in Dublin, Ireland. Having left police work years before, Tierney expects the biggest source of drama in her life to be trying to make headway into the cliquey parent volunteer world of her kindergartener’s new private school, but when a lifeguard is found dead at the community pool where Tierney often swims, she’s unexpectedly drawn back into a world of intrigue and danger.
Kemp grew up in Los Altos (where she also resides currently), is a graduate of Mountain View High School and has lived in other local towns including Palo Alto, Cupertino and Sunnyvale.
Affluent Park View is a fictional amalgamation of the various local places in which she’s spent time. Tierney’s son’s private school, Apricot Grove, is a product of Kemp’s imagination, but other elements of the book are less fictional, such as a stock backdating scandal that really did rock Silicon Valley, just as it does in the book.
While it was fun for Kemp to include nods to the setting and time period, the heart of the story is Tierney herself. The reader is brought along on the protagonist’s journey toward confronting some of her festering pain, fear and guilt as she also grapples with recovering her own sense of self as a mother, and the ingrained stigma she feels about mental health issues and asking for help.
“I love my character, and I think a lot of readers are really resonating with her,” Kemp said. “The struggle between finding a balance between work and family life, it’s kind of a universal struggle.”
Kemp drew on her own experiences as a young mother when writing (and her cats helped inspire the feline character Louie). And like Tierney, Kemp is an avid lap swimmer who relies on swimming as a physical and mental outlet.
“A lap lane is really where I would swim my way through ideas or plot points or things I struggle with,” she said. Also like Tierney, Kemp is a member of an active book club. Recently, the club chose “Tread Lightly” as its featured read, which gave Kemp’s club friends the chance to ask questions about the writing and publication process in addition to discussing the story.
“The most fun for me was hearing who they thought the murderer might have been,” she said.
When it came to crafting the plot, Kemp wanted to keep readers on their toes.
“I think, having enjoyed mysteries for so long, something I really wanted to hit home is to have a story where it’s not easy to guess (the plot),” she said. “I just wanted to make sure I wrote a story that would be more challenging for the reader. Deciding where to put the red herrings, I think, is the trickiest part.”
She relied on beta readers’ feedback, and advised fellow would-be mystery writers to do the same. “Writers need other writers and readers who read the genre,” she said.
Growing up, Kemp favored English classes and was yearbook editor her senior year of high school. “I just like working with words,” she said. After college, she used her writing skills during her career in high-tech marketing and communications but it wasn’t until she became a stay-at-home parent that she rekindled her love of reading – in particular reading suspense and mystery novels – and began to think about writing her own. What eventually became her first published book was many years in the making.
“I got the idea for the murder-mystery piece of ‘Tread Lightly’ literally 20 years ago, when we were on a cruise to Alaska celebrating my parents’ anniversary,” she recalled. She found herself jotting down more ideas on scraps of paper while attending her children’s soccer practices and dance rehearsals, compiling her notes into what she called, with a laugh, “a giant pile of ridiculousness.”
She continued dabbling, writing chapters here and there, until the pandemic hit, when her now-grown children came back from college and the family was homebound, carving out areas of the house in which to do their respective work. “I got the dining room table, which was great,” Kemp said. She decided to use the time to buckle down and get to work on her novel in earnest. In 2021, she took a course on jumpstarting a novel from Stanford Continuing Studies and began building community with fellow writers and attending conferences, seeking a developmental editor and later taking another Stanford course, this time on preparing a manuscript for submission to agents and small presses. The work paid off, and “Tread Lightly” was published by Sibylline Press in October.
The book launched with an event at Books Inc in Campbell in the fall, and, in addition to speaking at book clubs, Kemp will also attend the Left Coast Crime conference in San Francisco in February and speak at Leigh’s Favorite Books in Sunnyvale on March 5.
While she’s deep into the promoting and sharing of “Tread Lightly” for now, Kemp said she does have some ideas for a sequel, as well as a potential spin-off starring another character from the world of “Tread Lightly,” brewing. “There’s definitely going to be more from me,” she said.
More information is available at elizabethkempwrites.com.
Find more local reads in our roundup of recently published and upcoming books by area authors.
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