Atlanta mom friends turned co-authors strike gold with murder mystery
Murder fuels the drama in “Perfect Life,” the latest beach read by Atlanta co-authors Meredith Lavender and Kendall Shores. But it’s the juicy rivalries and friendships between the female characters that make the book hard to put down. Perhaps that’s because the book is a direct result of the authors’ own friendship.
It was shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic at a back-to-school event for The Galloway School that Lavender, 48, of North Buckhead, and Shores, 43, of Brookhaven, first met.
Lavender, a scriptwriter, producer and showrunner for such shows as HBO Max’s “The Flight Attendant,” had recently moved to Atlanta with her husband and two sons from Los Angeles. Shores was from Winter Park, Florida, where she married her high school sweetheart, and worked in corporate communications, first for Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, then MailChimp.
A partnership is born
In 2023, both found themselves in a professional slump. Lavender was out of work because of the Writers Guild of America strike and Shores was feeling displaced by changes at MailChimp following a corporate shake-up.
As it turns out, like the characters in their books, Shores was harboring a secret. Her dream was to write novels, and she’d been pecking away at one late at night after everyone in her household had gone to bed. But wracked with imposter syndrome, she was too insecure to share her work with others.
“I had written my whole life,” said Shores last week in a video call with Lavender. “On nights and weekends, I had spent all of my time trying to crack a piece of fiction but had never successfully finished the thing. I’d get about 20,000 words in then go, ‘Well, I don’t really know how to get from here to the end of this thing, so perhaps it’s not for me.’ And I would put it down and then inevitably start the cycle all over again.”
Then she got an idea about a mystery set in her hometown and suddenly, she said, “I felt like I couldn’t picture not finishing it.”
On their walks in Chastain Park, Shores began talking about her idea with Lavender, who expressed interest in seeing her friend’s work in progress. Still, Shores hesitated.
“I was really feeling embarrassed, insecure,” she said. “Meredith will tell you, the reception part of the book is almost the hardest part for me. Being creative in a public space is really vulnerable.”
Finally, in June 2023, Shores sent Lavender an outline with some character sketches and a few chapters.
Lavender immediately liked what she saw.
“There was a fun and bouncy voice on the page. … I could understand what she was trying to do and immediately I had pitches. My brain just lit on fire. I was like, ‘What about this and what about that?’”
Lavender’s enthusiastic response prompted Shores to ask her friend to co-author the book. Four months later, they completed their 2025 debut book “Happy Wife.”
Set among the wealthy social strata in Shores’ hometown of Winter Park, “Happy Wife” revolves around Nora Somerset, the younger, second wife to prominent attorney Will Somerset, who goes missing during his 46th birthday party. Shunned by the town’s upper crust for her working-class roots, Nora is determined to find out what happened to Will and prove she had nothing to do with his disappearance.
Already represented by CAA talent agency, Lavender used her connections to help secure literary representation and a two-book publishing deal with Bantam at Penguin Random House. Selection as a Jenna Book Club pick and an appearance on the “Today” show catapulted the book into bestseller status.
Their families have been supportive of their success, but perhaps no one has been a bigger champion than Shores’ husband Drew.
“My husband and I met in a bookstore. He’s known I’ve always wanted to do this, so he’s always beaming. He has a propensity for showing up at our book events and telling anyone and everyone who wants to do this that they can,” said Shores. “Whenever I get stressed out or I’ve had a hard day, he’s like, ‘This is your dream. You’ve always wanted to do this. This is amazing.’ He really is so supportive.”
The couple brought their daughter with them to New York for the ‘Today’ show filming so she could share in her mother’s accomplishment.
“We’re both very hard-working people,” said Shores. “She is living with parents who work kind of around the clock, nights and weekends, so for her to see what that hard work looks like practically and then also what the reward of that is, is really important to us.”
By the time the first book came out, the co-authors were already knee-deep into the sequel, “Perfect Life,” which published last week. Also set in Winter Park, it features many of the same characters, including Nora’s neighbor and close friend Este, a transplant from California enjoying newfound wealth from the sale of her husband Beau’s tech company. But Este’s happiness is threatened when someone from her secret past resurfaces and a dead body turns up, implicating Beau as the killer. The authors celebrated the book launch with a signing at Eagle Eye Book Shop in Decatur.
Strength in numbers
When it comes to co-writing, there’s no clear divide in how Lavender and Shores split up the work. One of them writes one section while the other writes another, then they share their work to hone the voice and continuity. And they each bring a different approach to the table.
“Meredith has a lot of confidence,” said Shores. “She’s ready to come into the room and be like, ‘Here’s the idea. We like it or we don’t like it. We move or we don’t move.’ And that’s really helpful to me because I tend to be introspective to the point of paralysis.”
That was particularly helpful with the first book, said Shores.
“It was stunning to me for her to say, ‘Yeah, now we’re going to write it.’ I was like, ‘Wait a minute. What do you mean? No, we just suffer over this idea for six or seven months and then we go do something else. That’s what writing is, right?’ She is capable of just walking into the room and being like, ‘What now?’”
Meanwhile, Lavender, who is accustomed to the structure of 55-page screenplays and collaborating with as many as 10 writers at a time, found inspiration in Shores’ freewheeling writing style.
“Kendall has an incredible strength in being able to just write and see what comes out and then mold it from there,” said Lavender. “That has been helpful for me to watch just to see that sometimes you just have to do the thing and see if it works as opposed to having a structure.”
While the plots of both books revolve around murder and mystery, it’s the relationships between the dynamic female characters that captivate readers. And while there’s plenty of conniving and backstabbing going on, there is a genuine bond between the core characters that pays homage to the power of female friendships. It’s a topic Lavender and Shores know well.
“Female friendship is so different than a marriage or a sibling or a parent or being a parent because there’s just a universal truthiness to it,” said Lavender. “There’s something unique about being able to be unabashedly who you are around your female friends with no pretense. It’s lifeblood. Especially when you have children. Having those friends who bootstrapped me through my first kid … There’s something very magical about it, and I’m grateful for it.”
Lavender and Shores are already at work on their third book set in Winter Park. Shores said the city is a gift that keeps giving.
“Winter Park as a community has so many fascinating women in it,” she said. “You look at these wealthy enclaves and there’s all kinds of rules and roles and trade-offs and tropes that people are taking on. We want to look at women who are finding their way in these communities. What inspires them to be there and what are they keeping to themselves? How are they participating in these roles and where are they challenging them? And what does that look like under difficult circumstances — such as a mystery.”