Alexa Donne is the Edgar nominated author of Pretty Dead Queens, The Ivies, and The Bitter End, young adult thrillers featuring terrible teens and big twists. She loves exploring themes of class and wealth, toxic friendships (especially between young women), and the double-edged sword of trying to keep up with the Joneses in the era of social media and toxic capitalism. By day, she lives in Los Angeles and works in television marketing. The rest of the time, she contemplates creative motives for murder and takes too many pictures of her cats.
Alexa’s latest young adult thriller, The Bitter End, follows eight students of LA’s elite Warner Prep, who can’t wait for their Senior Excursion—five days of Instagrammable adventure in one of the world’s most exclusive locations. But they can’t believe their bad luck when they end up on a digital detox in an isolated Colorado ski chalet. Their epic trip is panning out to be an epic bore . . . until their classmates start dropping in a series of disturbing deaths. The message is clear: this trip is no accident. And when a blizzard strikes, secrets are revealed, betrayals are exposed, and survival is at stake in a race to the bitter end.
Alexa stops by In Reference to Murder to talk some Author R&R about writing and researching the book:
I LOVE isolation trope mysteries. LOVE. In movies, on TV, but especially in books. A ticking clock, no escape, and a limited pool of suspects—the tension in these stories is so high, and the dynamics at play so fun.
Writing The Bitter End, I challenged myself to set a cast of teens loose on this beloved genre trope. I wanted to see how I could fit the constraints of YA world (there has to be some kind of adult supervision… at least to start) into an adult genre, while also bringing something fresh and exciting to the conceit so that it might surprise and delight seasoned adult readers.
The closed circle mystery is essentially a balancing act: a large cast size, a number of inevitable deaths, and of course the big reveal. It’s a game of teetering precariously to build and sustain suspense as I work to hide the true killer’s identity while not giving short shrift to characters who are not part of the narrative for long. Ultimately, I landed on eight teens rather than the Christie classic ten, and a minimum body count (though I won’t spoil the exact number!). It felt important to have enough personalities to stir up trouble while also not leaving the suspect pool too large at the end.
I chose multi-POV and multi-timeline, in part to stretch myself with a different thriller format, as well as to play with themes of friendship, appearances, and perspective, all of which change over time. I work backwards to construct my thrillers, so I started with a motive. Then built out a cast of spoiled Los Angeles prep school teens to kick the plot mechanics into motion.
But for an isolation trope to work, I needed to figure out how to get my new cast away from their parents and in a remote location. I knew the group should be somewhat disparate to create a lot of conflict and intrigue. They are not all friends, which ruled out a besties Spring Break trip or a post-Prom retreat. Authenticity is important to me in any thriller, but especially YA—it should feel feasible at its heart.
The solution to my problem came at a lunch with some fellow writer friends, including one who’d attended a Los Angeles prep school. She blew my mind when she talked about a program for seniors where for one week they’d get to go on a grand excursion—and real examples from her school included Alaskan dog-sledding and a Hollywood directing workshop! It was so fantastic and sparked my imagination—which is why those real examples are in the book!—and provided the perfect jumping off point for my isolation mystery.
And since I’m an East Coaster who sincerely misses weather (after fifteen years in Southern California), I knew I wanted a mountainous/forest setting with heavy rain or snow. I settled on Colorado for two reasons: first, the state and its glorious 14,000 feet peaks came up in several of the 20+ high-altitude mountaineering tomes I’d read, and second, I had several friends who were either native Coloradans or who had moved there.
And with my setting locked in, I now got to contend with several high-altitude, mountain, and snow-related elements that required some honestly pretty fun, if morbid and mildly terrifying, research. Some highlights:
High altitude sickness
The prep school teens in the book end up stranded in a ski chalet on top of a Colorado mountain of significantly high elevation. The copious amounts of non-fiction and memoir written by and about mountaineers who climb 8,000 meter peaks inevitably all touch upon high altitude sickness and its varying complications, including high-altitude cerebral edema (HACE), and high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), hypoxia, and their symptoms. My made-up mountain isn’t quite that high, but altitude sickness is likely to strike an Angelino at high elevation for the first time.
Dark Summit by Nick Heil, in particular, went into great detail about a man who survived a near-death experience on Everest. Being able to get inside the mind, with vivid description, of someone experiencing hypoxia and nearly dying from it was invaluable. (Did you know it’s a common phenomenon to hallucinate a person following you/being with you, up high on the mountain? This is stuff made for the thriller genre!)
Cell phone emergency access
It’s the lynchpin of the modern-day thriller, isn’t it: How to deal with technology? Especially in a closed circle mystery with an isolation trope, the key is to get characters AWAY from technology and any hope of help from the outside world. I’m fascinated by wild, out of the way places and all the terrible things that can happen to you there. The Cold Vanish by Jon Billman reinforced that there are many places in the United States where it’s easy to fall to the elements with ZERO recourse. Often, those searching for you may simply never know what happened.
My editor wanted to be double triple sure these students couldn’t seek help. “Surely they’d just call 9-1-1?” she said. Cellphones have an emergency call function. This led both me and her down a rabbit hole of cell phones and emergency communications in 2024, as technology is constantly evolving and mystery authors must tear their hair out to make their plots work.
Multiple Colorado friends confirmed that there are many spots in the mountains where cell coverage is so spotty to the point that it is nonexistent. I did a deep dive to double confirm: emergency calls require a cell tower within a certain distance to work. But then a wrench in the works, at pass pages, no less: newer models of iPhones and now Androids have emergency satellite texting systems.
Here’s where all those books on mountaineering came in handy—they all have passages on satellite phones. How they work, when they work, and, helpful for me, when they don’t. Satellite phone may not work under heavy cloud cover or during storms. Luckily, I already had a blizzard at play, and used my creative license as the author to make things that much trickier for my poor cast of characters trying to survive a killer.
Sadly, I can’t share some of the juicier bits of research without spoilers! But I can relay one anecdote whose lesson is: sometimes you’ll blank on the silliest thing despite meticulous planning, and it’s important to be scrappy with your edits! With all my planning and research into cell signals and plot mechanics to deprive my cast of their phones, Internet access, and eventually power… I still managed to write an entire plot thread in the first draft that hinged on the characters looking through people’s Instagram DMs.
Then, my editor pointed out to me “but they have no Internet, so how could they check Instagram?” Reader, I died. You have to laugh about it though! I had to get creative in terms of keeping the information gleaned while tossing out most of what I’d written for that subplot. On the plus side—it made the back half of act 2 much tighter! Do the best you can, but you can’t do it alone—and some of your best work will happen in editing (and with your editor!).
You can learn more about Alexa Donne via her website and also follow her on Instagram, Goodreads, and YouTube. The Bitter End is now available via Random House Books and all major booksellers.
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