Erin Young. (photo courtesy of Young)
A best-selling British novelist who writes crime-thrillers is releasing her tenth book this week, the second in a row that’s set in Iowa, more than 4,000 miles away from her home in Brighton, England.
Erin Young’s earlier novel, “The Fields,” followed a sheriff’s deputy who was based in rural northeast Iowa, and the new book, “Original Sins,” picks up the story in Iowa’s capitol city with the heroine Riley Fisher in a new role. “She’s moved on, as you say, from being in Black Hawk County in the sheriff’s office where she had risen to become head of investigations, so she was pretty much at the top of her game and could have probably stayed there and done pretty well,” Young says, “but she’s decided to throw caution to the wind and has headed down to Des Moines on her first assignment as a rookie in the FBI.”
In a phone interview with Radio Iowa from the UK, Young says that first book in the series started out as a small-town murder-mystery that spiraled into a global conspiracy involving high-level corporate and political corruption. “I’ve sort of done a similar thing in ‘Original Sin,'” Young says. “I’ve taken what looks to be a sort of standard serial killer format and I’ve tried to do something a little bit different with it, but it’s one of those things where it’s really hard to talk about without giving away the whole plot, so I better stop there before I do.”
Back in 2017, Young read an article about what she calls disturbing trends in big agriculture and corn production, which gave her a “lightning bolt idea” for the first novel. She Googled “world’s biggest corn producer” which led her to the Hawkeye State. “That kind of bounced me into somewhere that I’d never been,” Young says. “I didn’t know anything about it before I started the novel, and in 2018, when I got the go ahead from my publishers to write the book, I hopped on a plane and spent a good few weeks out in Iowa, doing as much research as I could, and ‘Original Sins’ follows on the story.”
In a Radio Iowa interview from 2022, Young said a production company had acquired the rights to “The Fields” with plans to launch a television series centered on Riley Fisher’s crime-solving adventures. She says it’s still in the works. “I had always been told that TV and Hollywood was kind of this very slow machine, but I had no idea quite how slow,” Young says. “Obviously, you know, with the pandemic, and with the writers’ strikes and actors’ strikes, it’s definitely slowed the whole thing down, but we have a fantastic screenwriter and showrunner and it’s all sort of poised at the moment.”
Young’s first eight books were all works historical fiction, written under her pseudonym, Robyn Young. All eight were international bestsellers that have sold two-million books worldwide. They’re available in 19 languages in 22 countries.