Inside Tracy Clark’s childhood bedroom was a notebook - hidden between the mattress so no one could find it - with stories inspired by some of her favorite authors. When she wasn’t visiting the library every Saturday to pick out as many books as possible with her brother, she was writing her own.

It would be many years before she voiced her interest in becoming an author. She was constantly working on her craft, but never admitted out loud to anyone that she was writing with the intention of getting published. Her debut novel, Broken Places, started a four-book series of Chicago mysteries before pivoting to Hide, another four-book series featuring Chicago homicide detective Harriet Foster. The third book in the series, Echo was recently released.

Echo brings Detective Harriet Foster to Hardwicke House, home to Belverton College’s exclusive Minotaur Society. When a body turns up in the field next to the mansion, the scene looks chillingly familiar. With no suspects or leads, Foster and her partner, Detective Vera Li, will have to dig deep to find answers.

Prior to publishing Broken Places, there were two things that motivated Clark: the first being a stack of rejection letters. She recalls a rejection letter in particular that was just one too many for her, resulting in Broken Places sitting in a drawer for nearly two years. She convinced herself that her life was going a certain path and that she should stick to it, but in her mind she knew that she was not done writing.

“You can quit,” she said. “It’s easy to quit, in fact. That’s the easiest thing you can possibly do, just to stop. But you have to keep going if you believe in what you’re doing. If you think that you’ve got a talent for it, if that’s what motivates your life, if it fills you up when you do it, then you have to keep at it until your shot comes.”

Her second piece of motivation came from authors Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky. She credits them as writers who inspired her to learn everything she could about detective fiction. She was lucky enough to meet Grafton at a book signing and looked at that autographed copy as much as the rejection letters for inspiration. It would become a full circle moment when she became the recipient of the Sue Grafton Memorial Award twice.

“She was one of the beacons out there who was doing what I wanted to do,” she said of Grafton. “I held onto these two writers, read everything that they wrote, and tried to emulate the pacing and how they developed the characters. I did that for years, studying what they were writing, how they were writing it, how it felt when I read it… you want readers to be impacted about what you’re writing about so I had to sit down and figure out what that thing was.”

While she may not be the first author to do so, she does take a groundbreaking approach to creating a main character that is a Black, female police detective. She credits the authors who came before her, such as Valerie Wilson Wesley and Eleanor Taylor Bland, for giving legitimate voices to underrepresented people.

When creating her characters Cassandra Raines and Harriet Foster, they both began with a voice. One day she heard them, and she knew it was her job to figure out how to put that voice into words on a page. She was insistent that the characters not only seem real to her in that moment, but to any future reader. She made sure the characters had some sort of complexity that translated easily.

After years of hearing the voice of Cassandra Raines, the thought of making room for a new voice was daunting. It felt like there were more days staring at a blank page than actually writing, and she admits that Harriet Foster is still a difficult character to break. She likens the character to using a pick axe in order to figure out where she should go next, but she enjoys the dig.

The novel was meant to be a stand-alone, but Foster was far too interesting to be a one-and-done type of story. However, Clark does write her novels with the intention of them being stand-alone stories. Readers can start from the beginning in either of her series, or they can just read one and still have a solid grasp on the characters and storyline.

Something all her novels have in common is what some might consider a silent character: the city of Chicago. Clark is a born and raised Chicagoan, and knows that it is easiest to write a familiar setting. However, she believes that if the characters had been placed in another city, they might not have the same voice that they do now. The city is part of the character’s personalities, and she believes that Chicago compliments them.

From a hidden notebook under the mattress to several published works, Tracy Clark always knew that her interest in writing could be something more. She has taken what she knows and what she’s learned, combining them to create characters with heart.