Press Room

New York Times bestselling author Carla Neggers is always planning her next adventure – whether in life or for one of her novels. An accomplished wordsmith, she enjoys nothing more than taking her readers on an exciting – and often spine-tingling – journey into new and unexpected experiences. Today, she can claim more than 60 novels published around the world, with translations in 24 languages.

Carla starts most days just before the sun is up, stepping outside her home in the Vermont mountains for a brisk hike. She draws the fresh air into her lungs and lets her mind wander as she thinks about her latest work-in-progress. Once settled into her office overlooking the woods behind her house, she turns her attention to the richly textured, deeply atmospheric stories her readers have come to love.

She takes the craft of creating the world that surrounds the characters in each of her books seriously. Her novels have taken her on a number of adventures of her own, including to the top of the northeast’s highest peaks, onto a shooting range with a police academy instructor and into an ancient Irish stone circle at midnight as she scouts out locations and seeks the authenticity that imbues her writing.

Carla didn’t have to look far for the inspiration for her latest novel, SECRETS OF THE LOST SUMMER. While the town and characters in the book are fictional, the Swift River Valley, where Carla grew up, is not. It’s a beautiful place in western Massachusetts, home to the pristine Quabbin Reservoir, created in the 1930s when four entire towns were wiped off the map through eminent domain. Everything—people, houses, cemeteries, even the trees—had to go. The valley was then dammed and flooded to provide pure drinking water for metropolitan Boston.

It’s against this rich backdrop that SECRETS OF THE LOST SUMMER takes place. Graphic designer Olivia Frost has returned to her hometown for a complete change from her busy life in Boston. As she is renovating a historic house, transforming it into the B&B she’s always dreamed of owning, she meets Dylan McCaffrey. Dylan has come to her small town to investigate an inheritance, discovered after the death of his father – one he never expected. Together, Olivia and Dylan uncover long-buried secrets that changed the lives of people near and dear to them.

Carla’s family moved to small-town Massachusetts to start a new life shortly before she was born. The daughter of a Dutch merchant marine who fought on Allied ships during World War II and a Florida homemaker-turned-teacher, Carla learned industry from her parents. They settled in an eighteenth-century carriage house on 90 acres, where Carla and her six brothers and sisters helped with the renovations. She established her enduring work ethic – as well as her ability to daydream and conjure a good story that will intrigue her readers.

“As it turns out, our old house barely escaped demolition for Quabbin,” Carla said. “One of my favorite breaks as a kid was to climb a tree with a pad and pen and spin stories. I’d look out toward the Quabbin wilderness and wonder what life was like there before the reservoir. I think that fueled the sense of adventure and the strong sense of place in my writing.”

Carla sold her first novels and became a founding member of the New England Chapter of Romance Writers of America in her twenties. A distinguished member of the writing community, she has served as president of Novelists, Inc., and vice president of International Thriller Writers, and she serves on the Advisory Board of the University of Washington Professional and Continuing Education Writing certificate programs. Carla was awarded an RT Book Reviews Reviewers’ Choice Award and three times has been a finalist for a RITA, romance publishing’s “Oscar.”

“Maybe it’s because I started writing in a tree, but I’ve never been one to chain myself to a desk,” Carla said. “I love to travel, and I’ve written parts of recent books in an Irish cottage, a London hotel room and by a Coronado Island pool.”

Closer to home, she has a particular soft spot for Boston, where she attended Boston University and lived as a newlywed. A member of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Carla is also a Boston Red Sox and Bruins fan and follows the “Bean Pot” hockey tournament every year.

These days, Carla and her husband, Joe, live in Vermont, where they renovated their mountain house not far from picturesque Quechee Gorge. They are the parents of two grown children, a daughter who is a college history professor, and a son who has just entered a graduate program in emergent media. Their greatest joy: Leo, the world’s smartest grandchild.