Today’s author interview guest is Katie Tallo, author of Dark August.

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“Dark August is a tightly-paced cauldron of a thriller about small town corruption, murder and mayhem, in the vein of Sharp Objects and All The Missing Girls. A macabre and confidently twisty debut.” — Lisa Gabriele, internationally bestselling author of The Winters

An electrifying, page-turning debut about a young woman haunted by her tragic past, who returns to her hometown and discovers that there might be more to her police detective mother’s death—and last case—than she ever could have imagined.

Augusta (Gus) Monet is living an aimless existence with her grifter boyfriend when she learns that her great grandmother—her last living relative—has just died. Ditching her boyfriend, Gus returns to the home she left as a young girl. Her inheritance turns out to be a dilapidated house and an old dog named Levi. While combing through her great grandmother’s possessions, Gus stumbles across an old trunk filled with long-lost childhood belongings. But that’s not all the trunk contains. She also discovers cold case files that belonged to her mother, a disgraced police detective who died in a car accident when Gus was eight. Gus remembers her mother obsessing over these very same documents and photographs, especially a Polaroid of a young ballerina.

When Gus spots a front-page news story about the unearthing of a body linked to one of the cold case files from her childhood trunk, she can’t resist following her mother’s clues. As she digs deeper, determined to finish her mother’s investigation, her search leads her to a deserted ghost town, which was left abandoned when the residents fled after a horrific fire. As Gus’ obsession with the case grows, she inadvertently stirs up the evils of the past, putting her life in danger. But Gus is undeterred and is committed to uncovering long-buried secrets, including the secrets surrounding a missing geology student, the young ballerina in the Polaroid, a prominent family’s devastating legacy, and a toxic blast that blew an entire town off the map.

But is Gus ready to learn the truths that culminated on one terrible August night, more than a decade earlier, when lives were taken, and secrets were presumed buried forever…?

Dark August introduces a bold new voice and will leave readers guessing until the final startling conclusion.

Katie Tallo was born in Toronto, Ontario and grew up in the suburbs of Ottawa. An avid swimmer and movie-goer, she loved dreaming up plays for her friends to act out. She went to movie camp and took theatre workshops which eventually led to her landing the role of a spinster librarian in a grade eight school play…the pinnacle of her acting career.

After high school and a year traveling with the Katimavik youth program, Katie went on to earn a degree in Film and English. This was followed by a deep dive into waitressing where she met and fell in love with a bartender. They married and had a daughter, Alex, who is now an elementary school teacher in Ottawa.

Katie studied TV Broadcasting at Algonquin College and filmmaking at the prestigious Summer Institute of Film and Television and Women in the Director’s Chair.

In the two decades that followed, Katie had an award-winning career as a screenwriter and director, collaborating on projects in animation, television and motion pictures. She received support from the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts, and her films screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival, Sudbury Cinefest, Local Heroes International Film Festival and the NSI Film Exchange.

As a freelance writer, Katie has contributed articles to Problogger, Zen Habits, Live Bold & Bloom, Write To Done, Be More With Less, Tiny Buddha and Rowdy Kittens. In 2013, Katie’s manuscript, 22 Mondays (aka Gone Monday), won top prize in the international Mslexia Women’s Novel Writing Competition.

Over the next four years, with her golden retriever (Levi) by her side, Katie began writing the thriller Dark August (Harper Perennial, June 30 2020). The novel is set in the Wellington West neighbourhood where Katie lives with her husband, Andy. She is currently working on a sequel. Her beloved Levi lives on in the novel.