What is the title of your latest release?
THE REVENGE PARTY
What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
Big Little Lies meets Desperate Housewives with a true-crime twist. When Katherine Valentine connects with her husband's mistress, she expects a pawn. Instead, she gets a co-conspirator with her own score to settle. Twisty, ruthless, and absolutely to die for.
How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
Seattle felt inevitable because I lived there for a dozen years and witnessed many of those themes firsthand. It also has this very specific tension between progressive politics and old money. I wanted the city to be its own character, from the weather to the way wealth concentrates in certain neighborhoods, even the traffic and parking.
Would you hang out with your heroine in real life?
Heck yeah, either of the two POV characters, Katherine or Isabella, but specifically Katherine, because her character is loosely based on my real-life best friend.
What’s something you learned while writing this book?
I learned a great deal about politics and how money can influence elections and policies on the micro and macro level.
Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
Unfortunately, as I edit as I go, it takes me forever to get a first draft!
What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
I love Dim Sum
Describe your writing space/office!
My office is at the front of my house with big windows facing the mountains. It is centrally located in the house, so I can see people coming and going (kids, delivery drivers, my dog, whoever!) so I can keep a pulse on things even when I’m deep in writing. It’s filled with hundreds of books!
Who is an author you admire?
So many! If I had to narrow it down to one: Margaret Atwood.
Is there a book that changed your life?
Not coincidentally to the previous question: THE HANDMAID’S TALE
Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published). Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
With THE REVENGE PARTY, I hybrid published, so I made the call myself. It felt like the perfect fit.
What’s your favorite genre to read?
Female-driven fiction and thrillers.
What’s your favorite movie?
Arrival
What is your favorite season?
Summer
How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
Sleeping in, reading, relaxing, and spending time with family and friends.
What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
Dying for Sex
What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
Probably Asian
What do you do when you have free time?
read!
What can readers expect from you next?
Another feminine rage thriller
A Novel
"Do you have what it takes to bring down the bad guy?" When a husband’s lies are no longer a secret and manipulation passes for love, a wife must decide how far she’s willing to go to expose the man she married—and what justice truly means—in this dark, modern marriage thriller.
He used women to climb to the top. Now watch him fall.
Devoted mother and party planner Katherine Valentine thought she’d finally found safety when she married Seattle’s golden boy, Shane Sutton. Charming, generous, and politically untouchable, he’s the kind of man people protect. But behind the polished façade lurks a predator who collects women like trophies, and Katherine has become his latest prize.
Desperate to protect her children, Katherine devises the perfect plan: use Shane's mistress against him. But Isabella Meyer is no pawn. She didn’t come to be saved. She came to settle a score.
And revenge is only the beginning.
In The Revenge Party, marriage is a stage, politics is a weapon, and every woman has a reason to lie. A razor-sharp, female-driven psychological thriller of social warfare and buried secrets, when women are pushed past polite.
Twisty, ruthless, and absolutely to die for.
Women's Fiction | Thriller Domestic [ Rise Books, On Sale: May 12, 2026, Hardcover / e-Book, ISBN: 9781959524175 / eISBN: 9781959524182 ]
Emily Lynn Paulson is an author and TEDx speaker who examines the messy truths beneath polished lives and the power structures that sustain them. She explores these themes in Highlight Real: Finding Honesty and Recovery Beyond the Filtered Life, Hey, Hun: Sales, Sisterhood, Supremacy, and the Other Lies Behind Multilevel Marketing, and the psychological domestic thriller The Revenge Party.
Her work has been featured on the Today Show and in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, and the Chicago Tribune, as well as on Next Question with Katie Couric and The Tamron Hall Show. She lives in Central Oregon with her husband and their five children.
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