Happy Hour: 3:30 to 4:30 PM
On-stage Reading, Conversation, and Book Signing: 4:30 to 6:00 PM
Ever wanted to peer into the twisted mind of your favorite thriller writer? To know what motivates someone to write something so dark, so well? Join Christa Faust and Benjamin Whitmer as they read short excerpts from their recent works followed by an on-stage conversation between the two old friends. Preceded by a casual happy hour, and followed by an audience Q&A and book signing we promise a event that will no doubt keep us all on the edges of our seats.
This course is a part of Thrills and Chills Fest, a weekend celebration of thriller, mystery, crime, and suspense taking place on March 15 and 16, with the opportunity to engage in craft seminars, panels, happy hours, and fun evening events. Learn more here.
Christa Faust grew up in New York City, in the Bronx and Hell’s Kitchen. She’s been making stuff up her whole life, and spent most of her teen years on endless subway rides, cutting school and scribbling stories. After High School finally had enough of her, she worked in the Times Square peep booths and later as a fetish model and professional Dominatrix. She sold her first short story when she moved to Los Angeles in the early 90s. After nearly 30 years in her beloved adopted city, she is currently living out her third act in the Pacific Northwest. She’s an avid reader and collector of vintage paperbacks, a Film Noir enthusiast and a Tattooed Lady. She writes primarily Hardboiled crime fiction, but also does work-for-hire media tie-in novels. She doesn’t plan to stop any time soon.
Benjamin Whitmer was born and raised on back-to-the-land communes and counterculture enclaves ranging from Southern Ohio to Upstate New York. One of his earliest and happiest memories is of standing by the side of a country road with his mother, hitchhiking to parts unknown. Since then, he’s been a factory grunt, a vacuum salesman, a convalescent, a high-school dropout, a graduate student, a semi-truck loader, an activist, a kitchen-table gunsmith, a squatter, a college professor, a dishwasher, a technical writer, and a petty thief. He lives with his two children in Colorado, where he spends most of his free time trolling local histories and haunting the bookshops, tobacconists and firing ranges of ungentrified Denver. His first novel, Pike, was published in the US in 2010 by PM Press, and in France in 2012 by Éditions Gallmeister. Satan is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers, a memoir co-written with Charlie Louvin, was released by Igniter Books in 2012. His latest novel, Cry Father, was published to great critical acclaim.
