T.R. Ragan's "Furious"

T.R. Ragan (Theresa Ragan) is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. Her exciting Lizzy Gardner series (Abducted, Dead Weight, A Dark Mind, Obsessed, Almost Dead, and Evil Never Dies) has received tremendous praise. In August 2015 Evil Never Dies hit #7 on the Wall Street Journal bestselling list. Since publishing in 2011, she has sold two million books and has been mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, the L.A. Times, PC Magazine, Huffington Post, and Publishers Weekly.

Ragan grew up in a family of five girls in Lafayette, California. An avid traveler, her wanderings have carried her to Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, China, Thailand, and Nepal, where she narrowly survived being chased by a killer elephant. Before devoting herself to writing fiction, she worked as a legal secretary for a large corporation. Ragan and her husband Joe have four children and live in Sacramento, California.

Here Ragan dreamcasts an adaptation of her new novel, Furious:

I enjoy spending time searching for actors and actresses who I think could play parts in books I’m working on. I find pictures on the Internet or cut them from magazines and then pin them on my office corkboard for inspiration.

Long before I began writing Furious, book 1 in the Faith McMann Trilogy, I chose Sandra Bullock to play Faith McMann, a schoolteacher, wife and mother of two small children. Faith must find a way to deal with the death of her husband as she sets out into the dark world of human trafficking to find her kids. I think Sandra would do a great job portraying the variety of emotions displayed by Faith’s character.

For the other roles, I chose Drew Barrymore to play Faith’s sister, Jana. Mostly due to sheer size, I would love Vincent Peter Jones, an English actor, to play Beast. I also selected Lenny McLean to play his father. Sadly, Lenny McLean passed away after the making of the movie, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. As far as directors go, there are so many great directors out there, but I think Lenny Abrahamson (The Room), David Fincher (Gone Girl), or Kathryn Bigelow (Hurt Locker) would do a great job of bringing realism to the Faith McMann Trilogy.

Visit T.R. Ragan's website.

The Page 69 Test: Furious.

Writers Read: T.R. Ragan.

--Marshal Zeringue