Our Featured Book is The Informationist by Taylor Stevens!

Looking for a book featuring an exciting plot, an exotic locale and a tough, smart and beautiful protagonist? Then Taylor Stevens' debut novel, The Informationist, is the book for you!

In her debut novel, Taylor Stevens introduces us to Vanessa Munroe-a resourceful loner who grew up overseas and has combat training, a wry sense of humor, and plenty of sex appeal. Vanessa Munroe deals in information--expensive information--working for corporations, heads of state, private clients, and anyone else who can pay for her unique brand of expertise. A Texas oil billionaire hires her to find his daughter who vanished in Africa four years ago. Pulled into the mystery of the missing girl, Munroe finds herself back in the land of her childhood, betrayed, cut off from civilization, and left for dead. If she has any hope of escaping the jungle and the demons that drive her, she must come face-to-face with the past that she's tried for so long to forget.

Born into an apocalyptic cult, Taylor reveals how her difficult childhood lead to her writing this book! 

CommitmentNow.com:  THE INFORMATIONIST, your debut novel, is a complex thriller which takes place in the United States, Europe and Africa, and which features a strong, brilliant and sexy protagonist, Vanessa “Michael” Munroe.  The setting, plot and characters are all so unique!  Were there individual people or events that inspired this book?

Taylor Stevens:  I wish I could say yes because then having to explain it all would make for such a fascinating answer. But truthfully, the original idea behind writing THE INFORMATIONIST, even before I had characters or a plot, or any idea really of what I would write, was to bring a location—Equatorial Guinea—to life for readers who might never have the chance to visit. The plot itself, the characters, and especially Michael Munroe, chameleon and predator, a woman with her own brand of morality and a take-no-prisoners form of justice, gradually came alive as a result of putting this rather unusual and demanding location into a novel format.

CommitmentNow.com:  When did you first start working on THE INFORMATIONIST?

Taylor:  So much has happened in my life over these last years, that at times it feels as if I’ve lived five years in the space of each one. Exact dates can get a little fuzzy, so I just recently hunted down my earliest handwritten notes and electronic drafts, and they both point to having started in early 2005. Going back and looking over the dates brought a bit of a surprise to me, because when I’d finished THE INFORMATIONIST in February of 2008, I’d thought it had only taken a little over two years to complete. Ooops.

CommitmentNow.com:  THE INFORMATIONIST is filled with details about the culture, geography and politics of Equatorial Guinea.  Why did you set your story in this country and how much research did you have to conduct prior to writing The Informationist?

Taylor:  Before moving to Bioko Island (the part of Equatorial Guinea where I lived for about two-and-a-half years) I’d already spent a year-and-a-half in East Africa, and had backpacked the 1700 miles from Nairobi, Kenya to Livingstone, Zambia, and up again, so it’s fair to say that I was already somewhat familiar with living in and traveling around Africa. But, nothing that I had experienced by that point prepared me for what Equatorial Guinea would be like: a world of its own, the land that time forgot, nestled at the edge of civilization. I was quite affected by my time in Equatorial Guinea, and there was so much to write about, that it was the natural location to set the story. Considering that I’d lived in Equatorial Guinea for over two years, I had to do more research than one might suppose.

CommitmentNow.com:  You, like Vanessa “Michael” Munroe, spent part of your childhood in Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon.  Born into the Children of God cult, you lived all around the world.  How do these experiences influence your writing?

Taylor:  Although I was born into and raised within the Children of God, and I did live all over the world starting at a very young age, the roughly four years that I spent in Africa were actually as an adult, not a child, so it’s fair to say that these experiences heavily influenced my writing, if for no other reason than that the memories of living there were very vivid and definitely the driving force behind THE INFORMATIONIST.

In writing THE INFORMATIONIST, I also created a story and characters that made sense to me given my own perspective on life and locations, and I expect that having grown up outside of society and with very little influence by books, movies and TV, this may have contributed to the characters and structure being a little different than what we find in many of today’s thrillers.

CommitmentNow.com:  Your life has taken many interesting turns!  How did you go from being a child in the Children of God cult, begging for money and often separated from your family, to living in the United States and writing novels?  Was this a difficult transition?

Taylor:  It certainly wasn’t an easy one. I’d worked like a dog for over twenty years, putting in full work weeks from the age of twelve onward, and it’s difficult to describe the sheer exhaustion that sets in when, after finally being able to chart your own path, you’re struggling just to pay basic bills and faced day in and day out with the realization that not only do you have nothing to show for anything up to this point in your life, it will also take several years of adjustment and remedial effort just to reach the stage most people in the U.S. start off at after high school.

That said, one of the wonderful things about this country is that it is still very much the land of opportunity, and with enough drive and focus and determination, just about any obstacle can be surmounted. I have childhood friends who’ve come from the same harsh circumstances as myself, with as little or even less education than I received, and with truly horrific life experiences that make my own pale in comparison, who went on to graduate from Columbia and Harvard, to become doctors and lawyers, or professionals at the top of their game in non-academic fields. The effort and sacrifice and endurance that it takes to attain these achievements—to even manage everyday life—when having started from a position of minus zero, comes at an enormous personal cost. Each individual story is a testament to what the human spirit is capable of when that drive to succeed is strong.

CommitmentNow.com:  Munroe is intelligent, analytical, strong and multilingual!  Did her character develop as you wrote The Informationist or did you develop her before (or after) you crafted the plot?

Taylor:  Both the plot and the characters developed as I wrote the story. Had I known then what I know now, I would have most likely gone about the whole process differently, but when I first started writing THE INFORMATIONIST, I’d probably only read about thirty or so novels, many of them, like Robert Ludlum’s Bourne series, a bit outdated. The decision to write a novel was made quite spontaneously—a flash of inspiration, if you will. I’d never taken a creative writing course or completed smaller works of fiction—I was really just winging it—which meant a lot of re-writes as I eventually found my voice and my craft improved.

CommitmentNow.com:  As a child of a cult, you were forced to end your formal education at age twelve!  When and how did you start writing?

Taylor:  My first attempts were at fourteen and fifteen, and these ended rather badly. For many years, imagination had been a survival mechanism, but I made the mistake of turning daydreams into storylines which I put down on paper. When the leadership found out, the notebooks with the handwritten stories were confiscated and burned, the “devils” in me were exorcised, I was punished, and then ordered to never write fiction again.

When I was finally free of the cult and able to read whatever I wanted, I discovered Robert Ludlum. Reading his stories ignited the long dormant desire to create. I might not have had an education, or a background in books, or much of a clue, but the nomadic nature of the cult had taken me through locales as exotic as anything Ludlum had brought to life and I determined to write about them, and that’s how THE INFORMATIONIST began. A couple of used writing guides became my Bible, an old laptop that was now seeing its third continent became my everyday companion, and a journey that started out as nothing more than a way to take back stolen childhood dreams, eventually grew into a three-book deal with Crown Publishing.

CommitmentNow.com:  The Informationist is the first in a series of books featuring Vanessa Munroe.  Can you tell us anything about the next book in the series?

Taylor:  THE INNOCENT, the second installment in the Michael Munroe series, which will be released on December 27th, draws heavily on my childhood of having been raised within The Children of God. Although the story is fiction, it’s based on truth and probably the closest I’ll ever get to writing an autobiography—and I’m currently working on the third Munroe installment.

Born in New York State, and into the Children of God, an apocalyptic religious cult spun from the Jesus Movement of the '60s, Taylor Stevens was raised in communes across the globe. Separated from her family at age twelve and denied an education beyond sixth grade, she lived on three continents and in a dozen countries before reaching fourteen. In place of schooling, the majority of her adolescence was spent begging on city streets at the behest of cult leaders, or as a worker bee child, caring for the many younger commune children, washing laundry and cooking meals for hundreds at a time. In her twenties, Stevens broke free in order to follow hope and a vague idea of what possibilities lay beyond. She now lives in Texas, and juggles full time writing with full time motherhood.

Visit Taylor at www.taylorstevensbooks.com

To purchase THE INFORMATIONIST, click here.