sara shepard the perfectionists book series

Side note, I think you’re incredible at naming characters. I structured the hack in Reputation to look how the Sony hack looked, which is just that everyone’s data was dumped on this server. I would say the kernel of the idea came from the Sony hack, which happened right around that time. Still I thought it would make a really fun book, and it kind of went from there. They were too similar, even though they’re not similar at all. We got really close to getting it ready to pitch, but I had another show called The Perfectionists that takes place in a college town get picked up right at the same time, and they realized you can’t have two properties set at a college. to create this idea about a hack, and all these people whose lives it touched. I started working with some people at Warner Bros. I didn’t have much to do with Pretty Little Liars as a show, but was always really interested in how it worked, and how to develop a story that can last over multiple episodes and multiple seasons. It’s funny, this book actually started quite a few years ago as an idea for a TV show. It’s really about how far people will go to protect their reputations. The book follows a couple of different perspectives of some of the people affected by the hack, all of them women, and what they go through. Obviously things come out that aren’t supposed to come out. The administrators, the teachers, the doctors, the students, everyone’s everything gets dumped into an email server. What ends up happening is there is a hack at the university, and everything is exposed. It’s about a community and different families who are all part of a fictitious university town in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. What is it about, and where did the first nugget of inspiration come from? I’d love to start with your sharing a little about Reputation. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Shepard spoke to Fortune about Reputation, her incredibly prolific career-and what it is about the books she writes that leaves readers begging for more. Like all of Shepard’s work, it is an inarguable page-turner filled with murder, intrigue, and female characters who are somehow simultaneously easy to adore and loathe.

Reputation follows the goings-on in a university community after a hack lands everyone’s private business squarely in the public eye. If the title isn’t a dead giveaway, Reputation also involves another Shepard trademark: the often massive gulf between who a person pretends to be and who they really are. “I heard it called a ‘domestic thriller,’’’ Shepard says, defining her new book. Shepard’s stories have a few hallmarks: They are mysteries about women or teen girls usually taking place in Pennsylvania towns they often involve the spooky or sinister side of technology and whether these stories are being read or watched, they are filled with cliff-hangers so juicy you can’t turn away.

Sara shepard the perfectionists book series