She’s an old-fashioned girl when it comes to mystery and murder. Local author and musician Vanessa Leigh Hoffman is a film noir buff, enjoys a good Sidney Sheldon thriller and grew up reading Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie.
Hoffman’s newest book, Domestic Ransom, debuts this spring. For many years, she wrote many of her books while living in Pass-A-Grille near the Don CeSar. A wordsmith at heart and language teacher by trade, she’s inspired by the Gulf’s lapping waves: “I love the quietness and lived here for a number of years before moving to St. Petersburg,” says Hoffman, who moved to St. Pete Beach in 2003 with a job offer from Admiral Farragut.
She and her adopted 9 year old daughter still love beachcombing as well as cooking, listening to music, walking the dogs and shopping. Hoffman speaks Spanish, German, Bulgarian (where her daughter comes from) and worked as a language teacher and travel agent before focusing on writing.
Her books are self-published (The Treasure, her first trilogy which includes her first book Rear View Mirror) and available on Amazon. When it comes to promotions, she’s a bit of a whirlwind, blowing up devoted fans after appearances at the Chicago and New York City Book Expos as well as the SCC College Tour from Vanderbilt to USF.
In 2015, she collected a handful of accolades including awards at the NY Book Festival, Hollywood Book Festival, Southern California Book Festival and in 2016, the Florida Book Festival and London.
Her newest thriller is about a charming sociopath who holds his wife hostage after she invests her life’s investments into remodeling a house (based on a toney neighborhood in her Memphis hometown).
It’s The Money Pit meets Misery. “He keeps ruining things, bent on mass destruction of her life and the home he’s promised to renovate,” says Hoffman. “She’s based a little bit on me, a hard worker and good money manager, but she’s more naïve when it comes to relationships – and I’m not.” Is there a happy ending? “We’ll see,” she says mysteriously.
Hoffman dances to her own drummer and her life has been anything but easy. In Memphis, she had a hit disco tune, but her teenage musical career was cut short by a car accident. “I had to learn to sing all over again,” she recalls. She lived and worked in NYC as a musician where they told her “she was too American looking. They were looking for Cyndi Lauper types.”
Her life intersected with “many famous and infamous people along the way,” including Robin Zander of Cheap Trick, who she adored. “I really blew it,” she says about her first love, who in 1986 during their last meeting, said he had written a song about her. But rock and roll fame was not the final destination of her journey.
So Hoffman went back to school and studied romance languages, inspired by her Mom’s love of travel. Although she briefly attended L.A.’s Pepperdine University studying theater and music, teaching took her all over the globe, her imagination fueled by the people she met and the places she saw.
As a writer, no scenery goes unused. “In my first book, Rear View Window (part of her The Treasure trilogy), the little pink hotel next to the Undertow is where the couple end up and the little island with the birds is where they were growing marijuana.”
Story by Nanette Wiser