Sara Adrian on the thrill of writing treasure hunts

In our last interview, following the success of her trilogy, Infiltrating the Ton, Sara introduced us to her second series, The Diamond Dynasty, which follows the loves and adventures of the Klonimus brothers. She has now published the second and third books in this series, In Eternal Love and In Tune With His Heart, which besides romance, offer the excitement and dangers of a treasure hunt. Let’s discuss how Sara uses the hunt to reveal more about her characters.

How important is the treasure hunt in this series?

In every book, the couples engage in a different aspect of the treasure hunt, and alongside the physical search, they find symbolic treasures – wisdom, rather than material things. The moral of each story is different, and the characters have to work quite hard to find it.

The Klonimus boys’ father is best friends with Izaac Pearler, who hid the treasure. Izaac is also the grandfather of the characters in the Infiltrating the Ton series. He will get his own book next year as a prequel to that series. Klonimus means special name and all of the six brothers are very special and dear to me.

The heroines, who each come from a different country in Europe, also become involved in the hunt.

Can you please share the blurb for Book 2, In Eternal Love?

He hates surprises. How can he consolidate duty and passion when the love of his life presents him with the surprise of a lifetime?

Meet Aaron, the third of the Klonimus brothers whose love story will sweep you off your feet. A student at Edinburgh University, Aaron and his classmate are working on an intricate clockwork mechanism. But when Aaron seeks out his brothers’ help to make it work, he returns to London and leaves his love behind.

At a time when girls cannot enrol, Liora secretly attends university with her brother. When Aaron’s sweet manners and good looks catch her off guard, can she withstand the sparks that fly between them?

What is Aaron’s connection to the treasure hunt?

Aaron is doing math research and wants to apply his learning to his job as crown jeweller for the grand services the Klonimus’s are making for the Prince Regent, Prinny, but it’s Liora who uses math to steer the family towards the treasure hunt. I can’t give spoilers to say what they find, but suffice to say, it leads into the next book.

What is the metaphorical treasure they need?

Besides the obvious that they fall in love, Liora is looking for a way to live out her passion for math even though she can’t go to university – girls couldn’t enrol for another 30 years. Her story is packed with the contradictions that a smart girl of the time would have endured, from emancipation and her ambitions as a mathematician to the virtues of the perfect bride for Aaron. Liora wants to be perfect.

Aaron needs to learn how to deal with the unexpected. He’s coming into the story spoiled by his older brothers, so he needs to learn to think on his feet and carve out his own way in life without the help of the rest of the Klonimus brothers. They work together, and we get to see a wonderful sibling dynamic alongside Aaron’s path to growing up.

Can you please share the blurb for Book 3, In Tune with His Heart?

When the oldest Klonimus brother does everything that’s expected of him, he falls short of his own expectations. Can he overcome a stroke of fate and find love?

Gideon was betrothed to a lovely girl since his childhood, and he had to do right by his family and marry her, a virtual stranger. But when he suffers an injury after a hate crime against Jews, his new wife nurses him to health. Can they become more than friends?

Rosie left her beloved French country home to marry into the renowned Klonimus family in London. Shy as she is, she prefers to speak through her music rather than confront people. When her husband takes her on an adventurous trip to Italy and her preferred means of communicating – her violin – is stolen, can she overcome her fears and forge a path for love?

What treasure are Gideon and Rosie looking for?

None of the Klonimus brothers have time to follow the clue found at the end of book one, Instead of Harmony, but eventually, Gideon picks up where Aaron and Liora left off in In Eternal Love.

Gideon is the oldest brother, so he was used to being the first in everything, but already, he’s not the first brother engaged with this hunt. On top of that, he couldn’t even choose his bride or his career as a jeweller. The hunt throws him completely out of his orbit.

Rosie thinks she already has a treasure, her violin, which enables her to express her emotions, but when she loses it, she finds something else entirely. The story is full of twists of fate that force the characters to grow into themselves.

What is the metaphorical treasure they need?

They come from different directions, but they each find a form of self-expression.

And while they don’t have to search for a spouse, they need to work to find love. In marriage, people can fall in love, or they can fall out of love. There’s a scene when Arnold, from The Pearl of All Brides and Loving Arnold, tells Gideon that he should woo his wife.

I recently heard a lovely example of this in real life. A local pianist, who’s been married for forty years, said he was serenading his wife of 43 years with the songs she loved. I asked if it worked, and he said she finally bought him the mechanical pencils he wanted. So, it can work at all stages of marriage.

Your earlier books were mainly set in London, but in the latest books, the characters are travelling further from home. What is the location of each of the books?

Back then, Jews didn’t have a country, they were only a culture and a religion, so when they travelled it was important that they find a safe haven with other Jews. In In Eternal Love, Aaron stays with a Jewish family in Edinburgh while he’s studying, and in In Tune with His Heart, Rosie comes from France to England to her groom’s family and is expected to be completely integrated right away just by virtue of being Jewish. The Jewish community stretched globally in this way.

In Tune with His Heart also has a bit of the forced proximity trope, as Gideon and Rosie take a very delayed honeymoon to Capri, Italy. In the course of the story, Capri shows its many faces: the beautiful lemon orchards, the nice marketplace at the port, the coves with turquoise and azure blue water … but danger looms in the caves. They have to escape the shadowy antagonist we met in previous books.

What can you tell me about the hate crime in this book?

I use the hate crime as an example to show how Gideon’s process of growing up was tainted by people who hated Jews, the element of disillusionment. In historical fiction, you have to stay true to the time, so I took that exact scene from something that happened to a friend’s grandfather, who didn’t survive the attack. In a way, Gideon, the fictional character, lives to tell the story of the real person.

They really did put rotten ham in his mouth, that’s not just cruelty in my mind but an assault on the person, the food, the animal that died for the food – it’s wrong on so many levels. I hope people have the empathy to understand that this was an attack on his person beyond just being called Jewish. After the real-life victim died, his family fled the country, the former Soviet Union.

You must have done a lot of research to portray the era accurately.

Yes, I’ve become so emersed in my research that sometimes I forget where I am. My husband recently took us to a living museum that’s set up as an American settlement in the 1800s, the era of my novels. I grew up around castles in Germany and have visited many castles in England, France, Austria, Hungary, and Spain. They’re all set up a certain way, so in this village, I recognized a lot – their weaving, the stables, and how they hung food in the kitchens so rodents couldn’t reach it. A woman, who was playing a character of the times, explained that they used the kitchen for more than preparing food, such as for washing, or to heat bricks to warm the beds. She explained there were two rooms for eating, a dining room and a parlour.

I asked where the servants ate, and she said, “What do you mean?”

My husband told to me, “This is a village. This isn’t Kensington Palace.”

When I explained, they all laughed and were very friendly. I realised how much I’d been caught up in the world of my characters.

What next?

The Diamond Dynasty will be a series of seven books overall.

In In Tune with His Heart, Gideon realises that his little brother Ben is quite grown up, and in book 4, In Just a Year, Ben gets to prove himself. His part of the treasure hunt is really dangerous.

I also have a story coming out in the Grand Mistletoe Assembly Anthology. The Pearlers from my first trilogy, Infiltrating the Ton, host the Ball in this holiday-themed collaboration of six indie authors. A part of each story happens at the ball, and they each connect to one of the other authors’ series. My story is also the prequel for my new series coming out next year called Check Mates.

You can find Sara here:
Email: author.sara.adrien@gmail.com
Website: www.SaraAdrien.com
Facebook: Sara Adrien
Instagram: authorsaraadrien
Twitter: @AuthorSAdrien
BookBub: Bookbub
Goodreads: Goodreads
Booksales link: Amazon

Next time: an interview with Maura Pierlot on the pros and cons of changing genres