Mortal Vengeance II follows the survivors of a deadly academy tragedy as they navigate fame, fractured relationships, and a reality television circus, only to discover that their terrifying past is far from finished when a sinister killer returns. What new ideas did you want to introduce in part two?

The first two books relied heavily on Excelsior Academy conditioning the students to keep quiet—a silence that is already deeply ingrained in Dominican society. In Mortal Vengeance II, it’s quite the opposite. Shane wants them to speak, to expose their ugly truths and scars, and, ideally, to break down on camera. Ultimately, though, the core struggle remains the same: someone else is trying to control their identity and their voice.

I also wanted to explore as realistically as possible what would happen in the aftermath of the first book’s events. How would society react to this tragedy? There’s a popular saying in Spanish, “pueblo chico, infierno grande” (small town, big hell), which refers to how fast news travels and how everyone knows everybody else’s business. What would that actually look like on a national scale? What makes people tune into a tragedy?

Last but not least—and I hope this really comes through on the page—I wanted to ask: in this scenario, who is the true villain? Is it the Grim Cojuelo? Is it Shane Harper, the producer? Or is it the audience, including the readers themselves, consuming that trauma as entertainment?

How did you approach Alex Herrera’s moral complexity and his relationship with Melissa Rocha while balancing romantic vulnerability, lingering suspicion, and the threat of violence?​

Alex was a massive challenge. In the first book, his morality is intentionally ambiguous—you’re not always sure if he’s the hero or the villain. When I wrote the prequel, A Grim Tale, I really upped the ante on his “villainy,” exploring who he was eighteen months prior. For the sequel, the struggle was continuing his arc realistically without sanitizing him. I had to preserve what makes Alex who he is, without undoing the growth he experienced by the end of Book 1. And how would that look? Would his actions inadvertently trigger another round of murders? That was going to be the original route, but instead of perhaps going to the obvious path, and in order to find that balance, I had to look inward.

Alex is partially based on me—at the very least, he inherited my borderline personality disorder. I had to really meditate on my own growth and struggles since my BPD diagnosis. How do I cope with it? What does it actually mean day-to-day? I wanted to bring that to the page as honestly and realistically as I could.

It’s funny, because when I was fifteen and wrote the original Mortal Vengeance draft back in 1999, I actually did write a trilogy. But with the reboot for the 2020s, a lot had to change. The 2025 ending is completely different and the “reboot” sets up this reality TV circus—which I initially wrote as a joke, knowing I’d eventually have to pay it off! Plus, back in 1999, A Grim Tale didn’t exist to inform his backstory.

When returning to Alex and Melissa’s relationship, there were elements from that original draft I wanted to keep. Amongst them, where they are at the end of that story. But because the new ending shifted everything so drastically, making their dynamic feel earned was a huge challenge. I absolutely refused to eliminate Melissa’s agency or make her naïve, just as I refused to make Alex’s growth a lie. The lingering suspicion and trust issues had to remain intact, especially when the threat of violence makes trusting the wrong person potentially fatal.

Without spoiling the reveal, the tension shows up early — in Melissa and Ana Sofía’s first conversation in Santo Domingo — and later, in the Real Scholars episodes, her fear actually comes to life. They hide from the show’s audience and from readers how their relationship evolved. Yet there are hints — in that same chapter and later ones — of how Melissa goes from “just a friend” at the end of Mortal Vengeance to where they are now.

Most importantly, Melissa is never a damsel in distress, or just “the female love interest,” she has her own agency and we see how she could potentially even rival Alex’s own methods.

What inspired you to transform the survivors of Excelsior Academy’s tragedy into reality television stars, and how does that premise deepen the story’s psychological tension?​

The idea grew out of observing influencer culture and the pressure to turn everyday life into content. People put on these performances and adopt haughty personas that really make you wonder: are they actually like this? Their lives revolve around capturing everything on camera, which creates this false sense of invincibility—as if recording makes them untouchable. The real-world cases of influencers being attacked mid-filming prove otherwise.

From a storytelling perspective, the reality show first appeared as a joke at the end of Book 1 that I knew I’d eventually have to pay off. It could’ve just been a footnote for the sequel—something that happened in the years between books—but where’s the fun in that? In Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Tale, there’s a scene where Julián’s mind is almost completely gone, and he hallucinates his friends and the faculty as part of a reality TV show. In such a dark story, it brought a needed moment of levity, which ultimately convinced me to fully commit to the premise.

I love a good reality TV show—The Real Housewives, Below Deck, RuPaul’s Drag Race. We watch these people and think we really know what they’ve been through, but do we? After every season of Drag Race, queens come out to reveal production secrets; after every Housewives episode, they’re online, on the aftershows, or on Watch What Happens Live! breaking down what was truly happening. We only ever get half the story. That’s why you always have to watch Untucked. But sometimes those cameras capture things the cast doesn’t want seen—secrets caught on hot mics, or displays of wealth that don’t match the story they’ve been telling.

All of this makes us believe we know them—that we have a right to know what’s going on. Viewers can become so invested in a relationship like Kyle Richards and Mauricio Umansky’s that the heartbreak doesn’t stay theirs. They go online trying to get them back together, scolding them, having meltdowns over it. We believe that since we watch them on TV, they owe us. It’s the same dynamic between the British royal family and the public. And what does that make the audience? What does that make the readers?

Well, in Mortal Vengeance II: To Reel or Not Too Real?, the real villain is the reader.

How many podcasts and TV shows are out there just feeding our obsession with people who have suffered? Look at the Jeffrey Dahmer show on Netflix, or the massive obsession with true crime podcasts. We, as an audience, enjoy it, consume it, and believe it’s our right to have it. The worst part is that we are not passive participants—we don’t just sit and watch. We love to report on it, engage in online discussions, attack celebrities online while disregarding whatever situation they might be going through, and worst of all, just like the audience in the book, if we have the chance, we pull our phones out and record them. We actively create the content. In the story, Shane Harper might bring the product to the people, but the people demanded that product—she’s just capitalizing on it. We keep forgetting that the people featured there—whether they’re the heroes, the victims, the survivors, or the ones who didn’t make it, along with their families—are real people. They aren’t just content.

That inherent disconnect is exactly how the premise deepens the psychological tension. By removing the narrator during the reality TV moments and broadcasts in Mortal Vengeance II, I was able to hide the characters’ interiority, reflections, and true intentions. It allows the reader to see exactly what is being presented on screen—surface level only—and leaves them wondering, only to blindside them later with what was really happening or what was edited out.

Plus, it perfectly sets up the mystery for the third book. Let me put it like this: the cast desperately wanted the raw footage from that Casa de Campo trip, and some characters had no idea there were cameras installed in their homes. Trust me, you are going to want to see what’s on that USB.

How do Santo Domingo’s cultural traditions, class dynamics, and Dominican humor shape the characters’ identities and influence their responses to fame and trauma?​

When I started writing the Mortal Vengeance series, I never set out to make Santo Domingo the selling point. To borrow from Mean Girls, I wasn’t trying to “make fetch happen.” I wanted to explore themes of guilt, complicity, and silence. Yet slowly but surely, the cultural, historical, and social elements of the city naturally shaped the characters and the narrative.

Santo Domingo is a city of extremes; there’s extreme poverty right next to extreme wealth. The reality of everyone’s household is different, and I wanted to show that through Shane’s assistant and characters like Camila and Mario. But I didn’t want to make poverty a comedy beat or something for the reader to view with pity, just as I didn’t want to rely on the cliché that wealth automatically equals bad or spoiled. There’s a lot of nuance there. It was important to understand exactly why characters like Rafa, Camila, and Valeria would join the TV show and willingly accept being labeled as villains, and conversely, why characters who had money—like Alex, Melissa, Mónika, and Lucía—would stay on the show when they didn’t have to. But hey, did Lisa Vanderpump join The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or Vanderpump Rules because she needed the money?

After college, I left Santo Domingo and moved to New York to get my master’s degree at NYU, living there for four years before moving to Spain. In both the US and Spain, whenever I discuss growing up in Santo Domingo, one of the things that consistently shocks people is the fact that I grew up with maids. Having domestic help was normal in the environment I grew up in. But upon hearing this, people immediately formed an opinion about who I was, how much money my family had, or assumed we were exploitative. I knew introducing Mary, Alex’s maid, was going to invite that exact same judgment upon him. I wanted to show the deep love Mary and Alex have for each other without pretending that affection erases the inequality within that relationship. In a society where people like Mary have limited employment options, domestic work can help support their families and give their children a real chance to escape poverty, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t question the conditions that limit those options in the first place. Shane’s assistant is the same story told from a different angle: the job looks like proximity to power, but it comes with the same precarity—the same limited options, the same dependence on someone else’s goodwill.

I also wanted to bring balance to the depiction of religion in the Mortal Vengeance universe. I’m a man of faith—the full católico, apostólico, romano—and there’s a clear distinction in the book between faith itself and religious authority. In the Dominican Republic, religion is a massive aspect of our lives, and I wanted to be honest about that, showing that not all priests are evil and depicting how families genuinely rely on their beliefs. That distinction shows up most personally in Doña Silvia, who is entirely based on my mom. If Alex is based on me, Doña Silvia is my mother on the page. In the story, she retells taking Alex to a basilica to ask la Virgen de la Altagracia to save him because of health issues he had as a baby. I pulled that straight from my own life; I had those health issues, and my mom really did take me there. And if you asked her today if it worked, she would most likely give you the exact same answer Doña Silvia gives: “Have you met Alex? I’m not sure that little head of his is screwed on tightly.”

Beyond their reasons for joining the show, class shapes how much each character can afford to lose. It also influences how they are viewed and treated, something the scene at Restaurante Julieta shows perfectly. The b-roll sections deepen the question further: would people really care as much if the victims had been children from poor families? Class is also what ultimately drives the wedge between Alex and Mario. What does it do to someone’s self-esteem to be surrounded by so much wealth—money spent carelessly—while they can barely afford to be in the room? To be constantly watched, knowing you are one mistake away from poverty? There’s a huge disparity in the Dominican Republic, and we see that displayed in Mario’s story: his job, the opportunities he has, and how living in the exact same city and facing the exact same storm can affect families so differently.

When it comes to humor, Dominican humor can be quite inappropriate. We often joke and laugh even through our tears; it’s one of the ways we cope and keep going. That comes through heavily in how the characters process grief and trauma in the story. Fair warning, though: my mother finds my dark humor “not amusing,” and perhaps a bit cruel. Some would say it’s just British humor. I don’t know about that. I just know that growing up surrounded by a lot of hypocrisy, humor was the tool that helped me process it and call it out.

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