Today I’m delighted to feature author Vera Mercer who writes psychological suspense about women, records, and the systems that remember what powerful people try to erase. Her stories blend domestic tension, institutional pressure, and documentary clues, with a recurring fascination for the paper trail that survives when memory is forced to doubt itself.
Over to Vera :
Which five pieces of music/songs would you include in the soundtrack to your life and why?
Aerosmith – “Dream On” It reminds me that ambition does not expire just because time passes. I like dreams that survive a more realistic understanding of the work required.
Augustana – “Boston” It captures the urge to go somewhere no one knows the version of you they expect. Reinvention can begin with distance.
John Lennon – “Watching the Wheels” I love its refusal to live at the speed other people prescribe. Stepping outside expectation can look like failure from the outside and freedom from within.
The Cranberries – “Dreams” It brings lightness to the list. It reminds me that even cautious people can still be surprised by hope and change.
Sting – “Shape of My Heart” It makes me think about how easily motive is misread. The visible game is rarely the whole reason a person is playing.
What five things (apart from family and friends) would you find it hard to live without.
Books They are not only entertainment. They let me enter other lives and understand choices I might never face myself.
Music It can preserve an emotion after ordinary language has stopped working.
Uninterrupted time alone Solitude is how I hear my own thoughts again.
The loneliness of travelling alone in a foreign country I value the strange freedom of being somewhere no one knows my history or expects a familiar version of me.
A valid passport I need the knowledge that leaving, observing and beginning again are still possible.
Give five pieces of advice to your younger self?
Be brave enough to leave. Do not remain somewhere simply because your staying makes other people comfortable.
Do not be afraid to make mistakes. Some mistakes are the price of finally choosing your own life.
If the opportunity appears, buy a little NVIDIA, Apple and Tesla, and be patient enough to keep it.
Do not confuse being needed with being loved.
Do not wait until you feel completely ready. Readiness often arrives after the first step.
Tell us five things that most people don’t know about you
I am almost entirely a night writer. I can go several daylight days without producing a line, then write fluently late at night or in the very early morning.
I check a real calendar before assigning dates to a fictional year. If a scene happens on a Thursday, I want it to have been a real Thursday.
I keep a private knowledge ledger for complicated stories. When several characters are hiding information from one another, I track who knows what, when they learned it and what they still misunderstand.
I often begin a story by asking what is missing rather than what happened.
I study low-star reviews as carefully as praise. They often reveal the exact moment a reader stopped believing a story.
Tell us five things you’d still like to do or achieve.
Complete ten book-length manuscripts in a single year.
See one of my books translated into another language.
See one of my stories adapted into a film or limited series.
Complete an entire novel while living alone for a time in an unfamiliar foreign city.
Build a lasting community of readers who want to discuss characters’ choices, moral responsibility and what an ending changes about everything that came before.
Many thanks for joining me today Vera, I enjoyed learning more about you.
Vera’s Books
(NB This post features Amazon affiliate links from which I earn a very small commission on qualifying purchases)
The Wife He Rehearsed
Her divorce settlement was missing one page.
Her ex-husband’s new fiancee knew exactly what was on it.
Neither of them knew he’d already written their ending.
Claire Whitlock thought she had escaped Grant six years ago. She signed the papers, kept the townhouse, protected her daughter, and learned to make fear look like routine.
Then Grant’s beautiful new fiancee appears at a school fundraiser with Claire’s private words written on a sign.
Words Claire never said aloud.
Words from a journal no one was supposed to have read.
Jenna Cole is younger, calmer, and easier for everyone to like. She wears Claire’s old colors. She knows things she should not know. And she keeps asking questions about a woman Claire was warned not to mention.
Everyone thinks Claire is jealous.
Everyone thinks Jenna is naive.
One missing page says otherwise.
To protect her daughter, Claire has to find out what she signed before Grant’s perfect new life becomes impossible to question.
The Version That Survived
She built an empire from a dead man’s grief. Now her last words have gone missing.
When Lydia Vale steps away from the microphone and falls from the gallery at Corbett Hall, the world calls it a tragedy. Nora Bell knows better. Lydia had invited her there for a reason.
For more than a decade, Lydia turned the death of Owen Mercer into a movement: bestselling books, sold-out retreats, a foundation built on radical honesty. Nora kept the private version of Lydia safe until the public one became unbearable. Then the recordings appeared. Lydia was ruined. Hours later, she was dead.
But one page vanished from the lectern before the police secured the scene. One page Lydia had touched moments before she died. One page that may name Owen, Nora, or the truth both women spent eleven years surviving.
As a journalist, a detective, and Lydia’s own people begin pulling apart the old story, Nora must decide how much truth the dead are owed, and how much of herself can remain if the right version finally comes to light.
The Compliance Kill Switch
They put her name on the slide before anyone asked her a question.
Compliance analyst Mara Voss knows exactly what she approved: temporary view-only access. No exports. No transfer authority.
But when a confidential investor packet appears outside Luminex Health’s controlled environment, the company names Mara as the internal source in an all-hands meeting. By the time anyone asks for her version, her badge is dead, her accounts are locked, and a severance agreement is waiting with a deadline one hour before the board packet closes.
Then Mara remembers an exception ID.
With a facilities ticket, an altered audit trail, and a company lawyer willing to look where management would rather not, Mara has less than forty-eight hours to reconstruct a record designed to disappear before the official story hardens around her.
