Photo courtesy of William Morrow/HarperCollins.
Nice Girls cover
It’s a moody fall day in Minnesota. Mary has just moved back to her hometown (the fictitious Liberty Lake), after abruptly—and mysteriously—leaving Cornell during her senior year. Lost, sad, and frustrated, she floats through life in Liberty Lake—and becomes intensely invested in the disappearances of two young women, both of whom have mysteriously vanished within a few months of each other. But the deeper into the case Mary gets, and the closer she comes to figuring out what happened in these local tragedies, the deeper she finds herself in danger. Will Mary become the next victim? And what’s happening in safe little Liberty Lake after all?
Catherine Dang’s debut psychological thriller, Nice Girls, is a gripping tale of small-town drama, clandestine trysts, and secrets gone too far. But behind the scenes, Dang is a 26-year-old Minnesota native with a lifelong penchant for crime shows and mysteries, who put her all into writing what just may be the suspense novel of the season. The novel is out September 14 from William Morrow, but we got a sneak peek—and asked Dang how she got her book deal, the intersection of race and class in police investigations, and just what town Liberty Lake is based on.
Congrats on the book deal! Can you catch us up on your timeline the last few years? How did the book come about?
Photo by Joseph Dammel
I graduated from the University of Minnesota in May 2017. I have always wanted to write a book, but was always too scared to try it. But in August 2017 I decided to just try to chase that big dream. It was always something I was never encouraged to pursue, but I felt like, Well, I'm fresh out of college, I haven't really done much in the terms of taking risks.
It was kind of a grueling process—it took two years before I finally finished the full manuscript. In between that time, I worked as a legal assistant at a Minneapolis law firm. It was just a day job—a lot of authors have 9 to 5s, and they write on the side. But I absolutely hated it. I was always tired, exhausted. The environment was horrible. I was actually fired from the job! And then after that, it was like the big kickstart to just completely put my all into the book. And then I kind of tested the waters, sent it out to some agents, I got a bite, and the rest is history.
How did you get the idea for the book? What pushed you toward a thriller?
Growing up, I, I watched a lot of the true crime shows. A lot of Law and Order SVU, America’s Most Wanted, I also watched Cops for some reason, Dateline NBC, 2020. All these really gritty, harrowing crime-themed shows as like a seven- or eight-year-old kid. The one thing that always stuck out to me was just how common it was for these stories to revolve around disappearing women. And it was always this kind of boogeyman in the back of my mind growing up, like, Oh, you got to be careful, you could disappear, who knows what will happen to you. So I just wanted to write a story in that vein, but I also wanted it to be from kind of like the women’s perspective. I wanted the victims to have a bit of a fighting chance, because I never really seemed to see that in the shows I watched.
In the book, the women aren’t portrayed as completely sweet, innocent—well, nice girls—either. They have a bit of an edge, a bit of backstory you don’t always see on those shows.
Yeah, when the girl goes missing, reporters always ask someone about them and they're like, Oh yeah, she was such a sweet girl. She was very nice, she lit up the room when she stepped into. It’s so bland, the adjectives to describe these women that aren’t here anymore. It should be something more serious.
Without giving too much away, of the two girls who go missing in the book, one is white and one is Black. One comes from a rich, well-known family in the area; the other comes from a poorer family and neighborhood. Of course, their cases are treated completely differently by both the police and the public. Why was that important for you to show?
I was concerned about the way that some victims are just completely overlooked or neglected. And I think there's a way in which people tend to judge the victim before they hear the full crime. I just wanted to show how a situation like this might play out, because I think we all kind of can sense how things would happen. I grew up in like some very diverse communities in the suburbs, and it's just something that I felt like I kind of just needed to put on the paper. Being around all these different people, and always kind of feeling a bit like an outsider, it teaches you to kind of observe people more and to take in what they have to say.
Did the towns you grew up in and around influence your descriptions of Liberty Lake?
Yes! Liberty Lake was supposed to be like this generic Minnesota town. I would have called it Lakeville, or Lake City, if those names weren’t taken in Minnesota already. I think Liberty Lake is like an amalgamation of my suburb and another very white, very wealthy suburb next door. We’re close to each other, but people's lives are just so different in both places. So I just kind of wanted to mix it together, and just see how things would turn out in that kind of place, being so close physically but mentally, economically, and socially so far away from each other.
OK, we have to ask—you’re 26 years old and got a book deal from William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. How’d you do it?
It was the old-fashioned way! I don't really have any connections in the publishing industry, so I was starting from scratch. With fiction you have to finish the manuscript, and then you have to write this query letter, just a few paragraphs where you summarize the book into this interesting synopsis. And then you email the letters off to certain literary agents, and then they might or might not ask you to see the actual manuscript. I sent it to, like, 19 agents. I think five of them wanted to read it and the rest just ghosted me. And then, my actual agent, I was recommended to her from someone else. I hit a really bad time with querying where I wasn’t getting any bites back for a while, and I was just so ready to throw in the towel, so I said, I'm just gonna send this off to this other agency, why not? That person was not interested but she sent it to the woman who would become my agent. So it's very—I feel like I'm Cinderella, just a little bit.
Now that Nice Girls is done, what’s next for you?
I have been working on a second manuscript. It’s about a Vietnamese family, which is my background, in the Midwest. I don’t know how much else I can give away yet!
Nice Girls comes out September 14 from William Morrow. Find it at local bookstores and at harpercollins.com. And catch Dang in a virtual author event with Magers and Quinn on September 16—tickets available here.
