Katrina asked Edwin Hill:

I am curious about the name of your lead character. It is different and I like it. How did you choose the name?

Edwin Hill Thanks for this question! When I am drafting a novel, it is really easy for me to get distracted by, well, anything, so I name characters very, very quickly - otherwise I can lose hours "researching" on baby-naming web sites. I'll name characters after friends pets or people I know or just random names that come to me in a flash. Some of these names stick, and others I change later on in the drafting process. (For example, Sam Blaine, one of the characters in LITTLE COMFORT, is named after my friend's beagle.)

When I came up with Hester as a character, I didn't know much about her besides that she was a single woman with a child so the first names that flashed through my mine - and this is so pretentious it makes me want to throw up in my mouth - were Hester, for the woman, and Pearl, for the child. I quickly (and I mean the next day) changed the girl's name to Chloe, and then changed it again to Kate. I liked the name Hester, though, and it stuck.

When I first started drafting the series, I thought it would be lighter, more on the cozy side of the mystery spectrum, and I played around with titles based on movies. One of the titles I considered was HIS GIRL THURSBY, and Hester's last name was born. Of course, LITTLE COMFORT wound up being much darker than I planned, a psychological thriller rather than a cozy, and the title no longer fit. But, again, I liked the full name of Hester Thursby and decided to keep it!

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