Alessandra Ranelli

It's fine.

Don't worry.

Father's having a heart attack.

Yeah, yeah.

And then I'm telling him like, and I realized I could have been murdered.

And the place feels like walking into an Agatha Christie home.

Because your cell phones are banned and the entire place is like a time machine.

They actually have rotary phones in all the rooms and a switchboard system.

And I was in love.

So I explained just the initial seed of the idea, which was a murder in the hotel because it solves the cell phone problem and would feel like an Agatha Christie mystery, but could be set today.

That was it.

And then my dad got very quiet and he said, eventually start saving your receipts because they're going to be a tax deduction, which was his way of saying he believed in me.

So with his blessing, I took my, my mother died when I was 19 and she had a life insurance policy that left me something that I had been very careful not to use up.

And this was what I used it on.

So.

I, with my dad's blessing, took some time before jumping into a new job and tried to write the book.

And because I'd never written a novel, the first thing I did was for about a month, I spent time just reading how to write a novel.

And

It was the following week.

I was sitting at a cafe called Kleine's Cafe, which is in the book.