Buckhead novelist’s latest work keeps readers guessing!
These days, sifting the truth from the tall tales is getting harder to do. The problem struck a chord with Chastain Park’s Katherine Wood, who based her fourth book, Ladykiller, around that premise.
“Sometimes I do pull ideas from real life or get a hankering for a certain kind of story,” Wood says. “With Ladykiller, it’s told from two different points of view and plays with truth and perception. How do we decide what is true when two people see something two different ways?”
For this book, Wood presents two competing versions of a woman’s mysterious disappearance in the Greek isles that leaves readers questioning each narrator’s reliability. At the same time, it sticks to Wood’s favorite genre: escapist thriller tinged with romance in an exotic location.
“I’m always traveling and looking for my next place to set a book,” says Wood, a former actress, screenwriter and producer who spent 24 years in California before moving to Buckhead three years ago. “I always wanted to set something in the Greek islands that are such a wonderful place to go in summer. I honeymooned there in 2012, but even if you haven’t been there, you can conjure an image of what it’s like. And with oppressive heat and Aperol spritzers flowing, you know bad decisions are coming.”
Among Wood’s favorite destinations is Atlanta, the city she and husband Alex Petrovitch specifically picked to be their home base. During the pandemic, Petrovitch did his TV editing job from their LA home, and Wood was on leave from a production company to stay with the couple’s two young daughters. “It was always a dream of mine to write a book, so I used that time to do it,” she says. “Nap time was novel time for me.”
But the couple decided rearing kids in LA wasn’t ideal, and they began city shopping. Wood, a Mississippi native, and Petrovitch, from D.C., were drawn to the South, but both wanted a metropolitan area.
“We made a spreadsheet of cities we were interested in and ranked them on natural beauty, diversity and airport,” Wood says. “Atlanta came in first. We came to visit, and on the drive to our Airbnb, I kept saying, ‘Look at the trees! Look at the flowers!’ The natural beauty was stunning.”
When the couple learned their daughters, now 8 and 10, could attend The Galloway School, they immediately started house hunting and landed in Chastain Park. “We absolutely love living in Buckhead and the easy-living lifestyle,” Wood says. “It feels like you’re on vacation in your house.”
Now settled, Wood is working on the screenplay of Ladykiller and another of her other thrillers, The Lion’s Den, written under the pen name Katherine St. John. And she’s working on her fifth book, set in St. Barth’s, and scheduled for a summer 2025 release. Even when she’s out with the dog, she’s working. “I spend a lot of time walking around with my dog and thinking,” she says. “I’m always figuring out plot points.”
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