Check out our interview with Laurell K. Hamilton, the author of "A Glimmer of Death."
What was your inspiration behind your most recent book?
Love. Love for my characters, the world, Celtic myth, folklore and legends.
What does Reading Rainbow mean to you?
Being able to read about LBGTQIA+ characters with the hope that someday it will just be normal to read about people of every orientation on and off the rainbow without anyone worrying about it. It will just be normal to let everyone be who they are and love or not love in whatever way makes them happy. So long as you harm none, including yourself, then love is love.
Why do you feel representation of a variety of people is so important when it comes to writing books?
I grew up in a time when there weren’t a lot of strong female main characters in stories and books. I treasured them all when I found them. I enjoyed stories with male main characters, but getting to read about a character that was more like me helped me widen my idea of what adventures I could have as a little girl. I could count on one hand and have fingers left over the books I read growing up that had main characters that weren’t white. That seemed unfair to me as a child, and I never grew out of that. When I was old enough that sexual orientation mattered, I found out that unless you were traditionally heterosexual, there weren’t a lot of books that showed you people like yourself. That seemed unfair to me, too, so when I sat down to write my series I allowed the characters to be who they wanted to be, no judgement, no plans to force them to be anyone other than who their best, happiest version of themselves would be.
Tell us a little more about the book and why you decided to write it.
A Glimmer of Death is a modern fairy tale, and like all such stories, the middle parts can be frightening, heartbreaking, but eventually you must have your happily ever after. Bad things happen, but good things happen, too. Evil wins sometimes, but not forever, not for always. Good must triumph in the end.
What can fans expect from your book?
A world that is just a few steps away from our own in the beginning, with a supernatural mystery to solve. There are fair damsels to save, enemies to defeat, monsters to slay, but in the end it’s harder to tell the monsters from the good guys than most of us want to believe.
What's up next for you in the bookish world?
A Glimmer of Death comes out November 3, 2026, then the next Merry Gentry novel, A Ghost of Daylight comes out in April of 2027. It will be the last book in the series with a truly epic ending.
Laurell K. Hamilton is a full-time writer and the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series; Zaniel Havelock series; and the Merry Gentry series. She lives in a suburb of St. Louis with her family.
