First-time author channels worry over son’s illness into a three-book deal

Ellison Cooper needed to find a creative outlet to prevent her mind from tumbling into dark places.

Her son was sick, and she was worried. Many of her days were spent in agonizing stretches at doctors offices and waiting rooms. Eventually, the anthropology professor quit her job at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, to care for her boy.

Then she began to write. And write. And write.

“It saved me,” said Cooper, who now lives with her husband and son (doing much better) in Los Altos. “It gave me something to focus on and keep my mind off of awful things.”

Cooper launched into writing a novel featuring a female Indiana Joneslike protagonist that never got published and began honing her writing style through short stories.

Now she has struck gold with a lightning bolt of a read, the serial killer novel “Caged” (Minotaur Books, $26.99, 358 pages). The unputdownable thriller finds doggedly determined and tough FBI special agent and neuroscientist Sayer Altair in a clock-ticking race to nab a killer who’s trapping young women in cages at undisclosed locations while taunting and toying with the law. It’s a pulsepounding read that weaves in many of Cooper’s interests and accomplishments: “archaeology, science and dogs.”

While the plot is grim, the novel’s neither relentlessly bleak nor graphic; Cooper wanted to focus on the survivors and victims. She purposefully steers clear of entering into the mind of the murderer.

“I don’t want to glorify that process,” the self-described feminist said. “For me, one of the things that I wanted to do was stay in the mind of the victims, and I want to tell survivor stories.”

Writing “Caged” took about a year and eight months, she said. By the time she began writing, her son’s health had improved.

“But there were still some struggles, so there was this weird mix of darkness and hope, and I really wanted to channel all that, and I really wanted it to be fun to read and that it gave you hope.”

She admits a hopeful serial killer novel isn’t exactly the norm.

“My poor mom was like, ‘Did we do something wrong? Because you decided to write something hopeful, so you wrote a serial killer book full of hope.’ ”

But that approach, along with a twisty narrative, strong female characters, eyebrow-raising medical science and countless cliffhangers, resonated with publishers when her agent shopped the book around. The novel also opens the door for further stories to be told.

Unlike her first novel, — “the one that was terrible” but the one she thought she was supposed to write — “Caged” sped through the publication process, attracting two publishers within five days and going to auction, where it sold a few days after that. (Her first received zero interest.)

Cooper insisted on one proviso — it needed to be a series. Minotaur Books bit, and she landed a threebook deal.

She’s already finished with book two and is pouncing on book three.

Cooper, who remembers writing her first short story and annotating it just like she did with her published research articles, is taken aback at how smoothly this has gone.

“I still can’t believe it,” she said. “Like none of this feels real for me. It’s just like a dream world.”

But it is Cooper’s diverse interests and background that contributed to making “Caged” different and riveting.

Born in Washington, D.C., Cooper originally decided to become a criminal defense attorney. She briefly went to Georgetown Law School. While there, she was trained to become a murder investigator through the D.C. public defender service.

That eight-month experience was “life-changing.”

“I would say mind-blowing. I did not understand the criminal justice system before then, and I got a really in-depth view of all the moving pieces and all of the tensions.”

She took a couple of months off and decided to volunteer on an archaeological project in Utah. It unearthed one of her greatest passions.

“I loved every second of that and (then) came back to law school. I was there for one semester. Every second I was sitting in the law library thinking I would much rather be back out at the gulch documenting petroglyphs.”

So she left law school and got a Ph.D. in anthropology at UCLA.

Cooper, who describes herself as a definitely restless person, has been a Wilderness K9 Search and Rescue volunteer and has published academic articles based on her anthropological research and studies.

She was a lobbyist for PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) in the 1990s, when she worked for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between a woman and a man.

Cooper admires the work her PFLAG lobbyist friends have done but said the political world wasn’t for her.

“I would go to a congressional aide and say, ‘Hey, here’s why your congressperson should vote against DOMA.’ And they’d say, ‘Yeah, you know what — he agrees with you totally, but he would lose the election if he voted against this.’ And I was just like, ‘OK, so they’re not voting their conscience, they’re just voting for votes.’ I think that soured me. I was like, I don’t want to be in this system; it’s a machine.”

Although Cooper has signed on for three books, there are many other ideas swirling around for Altair and the rest of her welldrawn cast of characters, including Altair’s feisty grandmother, to appear in more volumes.

“I totally wanted to write about strong women,” she said. “I wanted to write about a bunch of different women that were all strong in their own way.”