A newspaper reporting career in the small-town South provided Brandi Bradley not only with a rich vein of stories to tell but also a window to the writing life she really dreamed of having.

“I always wanted to be a novelist,” said Bradley, a 12-year resident of East Cobb, who this month will have her second work of fiction published.

But what kind of novelist she would become wasn’t clear at the outset.

She thought about writing Romance novels, but her stories “just kept getting darker and darker.”

Her biggest influences were Sue Grafton and Janet Evanovich—”I love the airport novels,” she says—but the style and real-life experiences of her journalistic work poured out as well.

“I wrote like a journalist because I was a journalist,” she said. “I still do.”

She covered courts and trials in places like Paducah, Ky., where she was the only female reporter on staff, and the stories practically wrote themselves.

“I love a good crime story,” Bradley said. “Crime stories are interesting because they are about human drama.”

In 2023, she self-published her first novel, “Mothers of the Missing Mermaid,” set in Destin, Fla.

It’s about a young woman who learns that she was kidnapped as a toddler and raised in the Gulf beach town.

Her new novel, also self-published on her own platform, Rumor Mill Press, is called “Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder,” and is set in a fictitious Kentucky town called Pleasant Springs.

If that sounds intentionally noirish, it is. Bradley describes her new novel as a noirish tale of a young entrepreneur’s death, investigated by a distracted detective who uncovers a motive that unfolds very gradually, and intensely.

As the dead man’s relationships are examined, the female investigator’s wife’s ex-boyfriend—who was the sperm donor for their baby—decides to return to Pleasant Springs.

“There’s a lot of small-town human drama,” Bradley said. “Being suspicious of new people, and asking the question: What is the fight really about?”

Bradley grew up on a farm in western Tennessee, and was hooked on reading and writing at an early age, devouring the novels of true-crime author Ann Rule in high school.

There wasn’t a high culture revolving around bookstores, so public libraries filled her reading cravings.

She and her husband both worked for newspapers in Kentucky. He left the business for law school, then the family relocated to East Cobb when he became an attorney for the U.S. Treasury Department in Atlanta.

They have two sons, one a Walton High School graduate, and another who attends Dickerson Middle School.

“We just fell in love with East Cobb,” she said, mentioning the writing workshops she’s been a part of with writing groups at the East Cobb Library.

“I love working with the libraries,” she said. “They have saved me many, many times.”

Until she recently got a study room of her own at home, Bradley did a good bit of her own writing at Panera Bread at Avenue East Cobb and local coffee shops.

“I learned how to write in the margins,” she said. “I write when I can.”

Since 2020, she has been a full-time non-tenured teacher of English composition and creative writing at Kennesaw State University, and she’s on campus four days a week.

She’s set up what she calls a “write in” space for students who want to meet, talk, or just hang out. A good bit of her job is to encourage students who haven’t been given much encouragement.

“The students who are told in high school that they’re bad writers,” she said, “they realize they’re good. And I tell them that. They’re trying to validate experiences with their writing.”

She notes that during her youth, before the online world, reading and writing books were made to seem like chores.

Now she sees something of the reverse taking place.

“The digital spaces feel like school” to students today, “and the physical spaces don’t feel like school.

“I like to tell them you get to touch the thing you own.”

Bradley, who said she prefers self-publishing to have control over her own work, updates readers on her author’s website, BrandiBradley.com.

She says she’s at work on the very early stages of another novel, also set in Pleasant Springs, “but it’s not a sequel.”

“Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder” will be published on March 14.

Preorders are available on Amazon and the book also will be sold at major retailers.

Related:

• Cobb library book groups announce March schedule
• Atlanta Ballet to debut George Balanchine’s ‘Coppélia’
• Atlanta Country Club to host Cobb Library Foundation gala
• Sewell Mill Library to host East Cobb Quilter’s Guild exhibit
• Georgia Symphony to present ‘Lux Perpetua: Light of Hope’
• Wheeler Theatre to stage ‘Cinderella The Enchanted Edition’

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