One of the things that makes running Crime Fiction Lover so rewarding is being able to introduce you to new authors whose ideas and ambition challenge the norms of the genre. So it’s a real pleasure to welcome the American author Jessica Housand to the site. Her debut novel will excite anyone who enjoyed books like The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow, The Godfather by Mario Puzo, classic gangster films like Scarface as well as the crime show Narcos.
But in writing her novel Blood Gilt, Jessica has aimed to create something more than another example of narco noir. It has all the elements – organised crime, drugs, violence and deception – but she has also thrown in wider themes such as family loyalty, the psychology of what the narco life entails, the power of our memories and the consequences of violence.
She has approached these topics with a literary mindset, and the narrative is conveyed via her main character, Alejandro Santiago. Born to an El Salvadoran mother and an American father, his early years were surrounded by civil war. Since his father took him to Florida, this protagonist has grown up in a family involved in importing narcotics.
Now, his father has sent him back to the country of his birth to prove himself by securing a shipping route for the contraband. And that’s when things get really complicated for a young man who has already seen too much. In writing her debut, Jessica has not held back and Alejandro’s wiles, loyalty and compassion will be tested to the nth degree.
Originally from LA, Jessica has spent most of her life in New Mexico, before relocating to the Washington, DC, Maryland and Virginia region. Her background is in psychology – a field essential to this first novel. She’s also a researcher and a screenwriter, so watch this space.
But without further ado, let’s find out more about Blood Gilt and what inspired Jessica to write it…
What are crime fiction lovers going to love about Blood Gilt?
Crime fiction lovers will find plenty of action, brutality, betrayal and twists, but reviewers have especially praised the character dynamics, cinematic writing, and how the narration “traps the reader” in Alejandro’s psyche, while comparing its themes of blood, legacy, and criminal empire to The Godfather.
As bestselling author Catherine Lanigan put it, Blood Gilt “…moves with the force of a crime epic but cuts like a family tragedy.”
What makes Blood Gilt a little different is that although the writing is in third person, the prose follows Alejandro’s mental state, allowing the reader experiences his deterioration from inside rather than simply watching it happen.
Who is Alejandro Santiago, what inspired the character and how have you developed him in the story?
Alejandro Whitmore Santiago is a Salvadoran-born dual citizen shaped by civil war, child labour, the loss of his family and a father who uses him as an asset in his criminal organisation. But he is also a passionate young creative who, under different circumstances, might have been someone you know – your friend, your brother.
He began as an antagonist in a shorter story, but I felt he deserved more space and complexity. As I developed him, his contradictions became progressively more important. Alejandro is highly perceptive about everyone around him while remaining largely blind to the ways he reproduces the very patterns he wants to break.
What is he up against in Blood Gilt?
On the surface, Alejandro is entangled in his father’s transnational drug-running empire and a bitter rivalry with his older brother. Jared sends him back to El Salvador with promises of power and a reunion with the family Alejandro thought dead – if he can persuade his estranged sister’s anti-narcotics-officer husband to look the other way while cartel shipments move through the port. Internally, Alejandro is haunted by the civil war and struggles with identity, morality, emotional volatility, complicated ideas about love and possession, and his desire to be independent of the forces around him. He is constantly looking over his shoulder, unsure whom to trust, where his loyalties belong, or who is using love as leverage. Into that chaos he brings a woman he suspects may be connected to the FBI, partly because another dangerous relationship gives him another card to play.
The deeper machinery of the novel is Alejandro’s belief that he can free himself from the people and systems that made him who he is even as he increasingly uses their own methods of manipulation and control. At its core, Blood Gilt examines how violence reproduces itself across generations. The question is not simply whether Alejandro can survive the criminal and political legacy he inherits, but whether he can escape what produced him – or whether, in fighting it, he becomes just another version of it.
I don’t think we’ve featured a novel set in El Salvador before. What made you choose to set your book there and in what ways is this setting integral to the story?
I’ve long been fascinated by the Cold War, particularly the covert and sometimes controversial policies and actions conducted overseas in an effort to protect American strategic interests. That led me to El Salvador and how a geopolitical struggle involving much larger powers could become deeply personal for families living through it.
El Salvador also felt underrepresented in fiction, and I wanted readers to encounter a world beyond the narcotrafficking stereotype – individuals rooted in the land and its history, competing political beliefs, cultural life and the long aftermath of civil conflict from the 1980s and 90s. The land and people are inseparable from the characters and tensions in Blood Gilt.
It feels like you’ve given your main character a lot to deal with, and the setup also sounds epic, even for an organised crime / narco novel. And all of this in your debut novel! What have been the biggest challenges writing the story and making it relatable?
Nearly all the main characters in Blood Gilt are compromised in some way, but I didn’t want any of them to become a caricature of evil – even Jared, arguably the most brutal character, believes he is protecting his legacy and preparing the future heir. Writing so closely from within Alejandro’s perspective meant following his internal logic even when it led him to do shocking things that were sometimes challenging to write. I wanted readers to sympathise with him without absolving his worst choices, romanticising abuse or suggesting that all traumatised people are inherently violent.
Balancing those qualities with genuine courage, loyalty, tenderness, and compassion was essential to making him feel like a whole human being readers could care about even when they were disturbed by what he did.
There are strong themes of family, loyalty, exploitation, expectation… and more. What made you want to explore these themes in this novel, and what aspects of them have you brought to the surface?
I think most writers draw from lived experience, and Blood Gilt contains elements of truth – not only from my own life, but from people I’ve known and observed. We are shaped first by the families that raise us, then by the relationships and communities around us, and by pressures such as poverty, conflict, loyalty, fear and the social contracts that tell us what we owe one another. What feels extreme to one person may simply be another person’s baseline, their everyday reality. Likewise, Alejandro lives in extremes, thinks in extremes, and has been trained to react in extremes. What interested me most is what happens when love itself becomes the extreme that complicates all the others.
The action, the violence, they’re a big part of it too. How did you approach this and what is the tone or atmosphere you wanted to create for readers?
The violence in Blood Gilt is intimately tied to the characters experiencing it and matters most for what it reveals about them, their relationships and the consequences they carry forward. I approached those scenes visually, paying close attention to sensory detail, visceral reaction, pacing and what Alejandro is capable of perceiving in the moment. Violence forces immediate thought and reaction, which is often reflected in the tighter prose, but much of its lasting impact comes as the mind tries to process what happened.
For readers, I wanted that atmosphere to feel immersive and increasingly unstable, moving between beauty, intimacy, tension and sudden brutality without always signalling when one might give way to another. Those shifts reflect both who Alejandro is and the extent to which violence has constructed his identity.
What are some of the crime books and authors that have inspired you and what are you reading at the moment?
Don Winslow is an all-time favorite, of course, and I really loved Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings was a fascinating study in psychologically distinct voices within the same novel, and James Ellroy’s dark, psychologically intense crime fiction – particularly The Black Dahlia – and his use of compressed, impactful language have also been influential.
Outside crime fiction, I adore Virginia Woolf’s masterful stream-of-consciousness writing as well as Hemingway’s succinct but potent prose, and I’m also a huge historical fiction reader. As for what I’m reading or planning to read next in crime fiction, I’m exploring work by SA Cosby, Gabino Iglesias and Juan Gabriel Vásquez.
What’s next for Alejandro, and what’s next for Jessica Housand?
Bound to Burn, a completed screenplay set in the same character world as Blood Gilt, is currently being circulated to gauge industry interest. I’m working on a sequel to Blood Gilt with a different but familiar protagonist from the first novel, and I’d eventually like to develop Blood Gilt as a television series. I don’t know exactly where all of those paths will lead, but I hope the novel becomes a catalyst for future work and gives readers a reason to stay with these characters and this world.
Blood Gilt is out now in print and for Kindle, and you can grab a copy with our purchase buttons below. You can find out more about Jessica and her projects on her author website.
