Elle Cosimano did not move to the Williamsburg area because of her love of history, but rather “because the area contains all the things we love best about Virginia.”
And while she really “isn’t a history buff,” her family — husband and two teenage sons — are very happy here, not far from the beach and not far from mountains; they felt this was “a lovely place to be.”
The New York Times bestselling author moved here three years ago after leaving a home in Nelson County. These days, she spends time finishing the fifth book in her highly successful Finlay Donovan mystery series that has more than a half-million copies in print around the world.
A captivating personality with wit, charm and spunk, Cosimano took time from her schedule to sit down in a local coffeehouse and talk about herself, her writing and her books. She now has published 10 books in the last 10 years, the latest — “Finlay Donovan Rolls the Dice” — in March. She’s recently been promoting the novel and has a book signing scheduled in Newport News in May.
Growing up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., Cosimano attended a notable small liberal arts school — St. Mary’s College in Maryland — where she majored in psychology, a subject far away from her first professional work in real estate and today’s ventures in writing.
For a number of years, Cosimano worked in northern Virginia and became a successful real estate agent “at the top of my game, living in a six bedroom, two-story colonial on two acres. I had a home theater in my basem*nt, a fireplace in my bedroom, two ovens in the granite kitchen and enough square footage that I didn’t have to hear my children killing each other in X-Box games on the other side of the house. I had it all,” she wrote in a Time magazine essay.
But she was not very happy.
“I had told my mom many years earlier that when I hit my mid-life crisis, I was going to run away and write a novel,” Cosimano said. “Mom and I were talking one day about how life was and that I had maybe hit that mid-life time. She reminded me what I had said about writing. It’s amazing how moms always know and remember.
“She suggested that maybe I should do it — write the novel.”
Cosimano recalled she thought about how “selfish and irresponsible” it would be just to walk away. “I was the bread-winner of the family. How could I run away and do something for me?” But after some soul searching, she decided to try it.
She took her sons with her to Mexico, where her parents were living, and for two months, she wrote and wrote. When she returned to join her husband she faced a decision — back to real estate or on to writing.
Her husband asked pointedly about her writing: “Are you good at it?”
The answer proved to be “yes” with her first young adult/high school mystery, “Nearly Gone,” published in 2014. It became an International Thriller Award winner and an Edgar Award nominee in the Mystery Writers of America 2014 competition.
In her Finlay Donovan series, book two, “Finlay Donovan Knocks ‘Em Dead,” became a USA Today bestseller, while book three, “Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun,” was on the New York Times bestseller list.
And she continues to be acclaimed.
Most recently in March, Forbes magazine named Cosimano in a list of 30 top mystery books that began in 1902 with “The Hounds of the Baskervilles” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Her book, “Finlay Donovan is Killing It” was listed as No. 24 and was said to be “zany, zippy and easy-to-read … a must-read for those who love cozy mysteries and women’s fiction.”
Her fans will have another adventure to peruse as soon as she finishes her fifth book, “Finlay Donovan Digs Her Own Grave,” scheduled to be published in March 2025.
These days, writing primarily at night often between 8 p.m. and 3 a.m., Cosimano is working to meet her own deadline to send the manuscript to her publisher, Minotaur Books of New York City.
She and her husband, an IT specialist, will be empty nesters this fall and maybe she’ll have more time. Their older son will be a senior at Virginia Tech and the younger will be a freshman at Appalachian State University.
Through her books, reviewers and fans have commented on the complexity of her characters. She recalled in a Huffington Post essay: “The greatest lesson my father taught me is that we are not one-dimensional. That we can’t be singularly defined by our last victory or mistake. We’re human and complicated, and we all have a backstory.”
Carrying it one step further, Cosimano in the essay stressed that the “complexity of characters makes a crime drama more compelling and a mystery more difficult to solve. If readers are spoon-fed watered down versions of heroes and villains, the answers become obvious and they’re left with nothing to chew.”
Her goal in developing her books, she wrote in the essay “is to make readers think. I want them to question their pre-suppositions. I want them to doubt themselves until the very last page. Sometimes, that means turning our universal belief systems — right and wrong, good and bad, wicked and just — on their heads.
“These are the lessons, the images I carry with me as I develop characters for my stories,” she added.
As she is writing, often she doesn’t know where she is going. “It’s a kind of process of discovery. Sometimes I’m half way through a book and still don’t know why a person did it.” It’s not uncommon for her “to scrap entire chunks of a novel,” realizing suddenly that what she was writing wouldn’t work.
The whole Finlay Donovan series began, Cosimano said, in a very different way. She did not plan to write an adult mystery. She was in a brainstorming session at a Panera Bread with other writers, talking about a plot that included a murderer.
“Someone adjacent to us overhead our conversation, got up and walked out,” Cosimano recalled, giving heran idea for a book — an author is mistaken for someone she was writing about.
In that instance, the character of Finlay Donovan was born.
Cosimano admits that she sometimes struggles with an acknowledged pressure to write a better book with stronger characters as her series continues. She already has contracts for books six and seven.
About that pressure, her youngest son once told her: “They can’t all be bangers.”
Cosimano is scheduled to appear at two author signings in Virginia in the next month. On May 11, she’ll be at Barnes & Noble on Jefferson Avenue in Newport News from 1-2 p.m. On May 23, she’ll appear from 6-8 p.m. at The Bookshelf on Church in Kilmarnock.
For more about Cosimano, visit her website at ellecosimano.com.
Wilford Kale, kalehouse@aol.com
