Caroline Kepnes

Caroline Kepnes certainly has range, said Matt Donnelly in Variety. Before she wrote You, a novel that introduced heartthrob serial killer Joe Goldberg and spawned two sequels and a hit Netflix series, the onetime entertainment reporter wrote a couple episodes of 7th Heaven, the family drama series built around a Christian minister.

“I do love extremes,” she says. “When you’re in 7th Heaven, you know that no one is going to swear. When you’re with Joe Goldberg, you know that eventually something is going to send him off the deep end.” Joe, who is played by Penn Badgley in the Netflix series, falls obsessively in love in each book and in each corresponding season. The premise pushes Joe to keep moving and pushes Kepnes to keep up with him. “I love the obsessive mind,” she says.

In You Love Me, Kepnes’ new novel, Joe has to win readers’ sympathy again—despite all the stalking and murdering he’s done, said Lexy Perez in The Hollywood Reporter.

“It wouldn’t work for me,” Kepnes says, “if he didn’t have some good intentions.” So

Joe is starting a new life on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle, and he believes that smalltown living is the antidote to the phoniness he’s found in himself and other people. His crush this time is a sexy married librarian. “I wanted him to go up against someone with a functioning life,” says Kepnes. Some things don’t change, though, such as Joe’s penchant for upending a particular rom-com convention. “We’ve all been taught that spirit of ‘I can’t live without you’ is part of romance, and I like toying with that,” Kepnes says. “That focus is very dangerous. But that focus can also come across as very beautiful.”