When readers meet Samantha Hayes, she already knows how to watch a room.

She notices the hesitation before someone answers. The tiny shift in posture. The expression that disappears almost as quickly as it appears. She pays attention to what people say, but she’s just as interested in what they don’t say.

It’s one of the things that makes Sam good at what she does.

But Samantha Hayes wasn’t always an FBI agent.

Long before the investigations and the killers, there was simply Sam.

And many of the things that define her now began years before she ever carried a badge.

Before There Was a Profiler

One of the things I love about writing Sam is that her ability to read people isn’t something she switches on when she starts working a case.

It’s part of her.

Even when she was younger, Sam watched people. She noticed things. She asked questions. She was curious about why people behaved the way they did, especially when their actions didn’t quite match their words.

She didn’t know then where that curiosity would eventually lead her.

But the foundation was already there.

Her Father Helped Shape Her

Sam’s relationship with her father is an important part of understanding who she became.

He helped teach her to pay attention to the world around her. To listen. To notice the details other people overlooked. And perhaps most importantly, not to accept something simply because it was the easiest explanation.

Those lessons stayed with her.

As Sam grew older, observation became more than curiosity. She began understanding that behavior could tell a story of its own.

Years later, that instinct would become one of the most important tools she carried into an investigation.

But before any of that happened, Sam went to college.

And that’s where another important person entered her life.

Then She Met Claire

Readers who know both of my series already know Samantha Hayes and Claire Anderson are longtime friends.

That friendship began in college.

I love thinking about Sam and Claire at that age because neither of them knew what was coming.

Claire didn’t know that Willow Creek, her bakery, and more mysteries than any reasonable bakery owner should encounter were waiting for her.

Sam didn’t know that her future would eventually take her into the FBI and some very dark investigations.

They were simply two young women finding their way.

Yet so much of what defines them now was already there.

Both were observant.

Both were curious.

Both cared deeply about the people around them.

And both had a tendency to keep asking questions when something didn’t make sense.

Their lives would eventually take them in very different directions, but their friendship remained.

Two Very Different Paths

That’s one of my favorite things about connecting the Samantha Hayes and Willow Creek worlds.

Sam and Claire didn’t become friends because their careers brought them together.

They were friends first.

Claire eventually returned to a life centered around Willow Creek, family, friends, and Claire’s Curious Confections. Her mysteries tend to begin much closer to home.

Sam followed a very different road.

Her fascination with behavior and her ability to see what others missed eventually led her toward the FBI, where those same qualities became essential to the work she does now.

One investigates because trouble has a habit of landing in her small town.

The other goes looking for it.

Yet underneath all those differences, I can still see the two college friends they once were.

Meeting the Younger Sam

That history is one of the reasons I wrote Raven Song.

I wanted readers to have the chance to meet Samantha before the FBI.

Before the cases.

Before the killers.

Before she became the woman we meet in the Samantha Hayes series.

It’s also a chance to see Sam and Claire together when their friendship was still new and neither had any idea what their futures held.

For me, those earlier pieces of a character matter.

Sam didn’t suddenly become Samantha Hayes, FBI agent, on the day she received a badge.

She was becoming her long before that.

Every person who influenced her, every friendship she formed, every question she asked, and every detail she learned to notice helped shape the woman who would eventually walk into an investigation and see what everyone else had missed.

And somewhere along the way, the young woman who couldn’t stop watching people discovered that sometimes…

people tell you the most when they aren’t saying anything at all.