M. P. Cooley

A native of upstate New York, M.P. Cooley currently lives in Campbell, California.

Her first novel is Ice Shear.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Cooley's reply:

My reading right now is split between pleasure and research for book two. First, the pleasure reading. I just finished Chris Holm’s Dead Harvest, which was a joy ride. It’s main character, Sam Thornton, is a collector of souls, and when I picked it up I think I had expected meditations on death and redemption with some suspense thrown in. Instead I got meditation and death and redemption in the middle of an all out demon war. With tight prose and world building that was organic and interesting, this novel had a life-and-death pace that made it unputdownable.

I’m in the last stages of refining my second book, which involves characters who were born 70 years ago in the Ukraine. I just finished Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder, which I was using for background research for several characters. Usually scholarly works are bloodless, filled with statistics and theories that are removed from real people and real conflict. As first Stalin and then Hitler destroy the Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, etc., the statistics in this book add to a sense of mounting horror: “In February 1933, 746,932 people died from starvation in the Ukraine,” or “57,345 people were killed in Warsaw in September 1944”. The book has a broad scope, but the stories from those that died and those that survived manage to turn the Nazi and Soviets “numbers” back into real people.

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My Book, The Movie: Ice Shear.

--Marshal Zeringue