Murder, U.S. military, organized crime: Utah author draws on her work with the Navy in debut thriller

When Elizabeth Heider was eight years old, she enrolled in a creative writing class, a part of an adult learning program at Taylorsville High School in Utah. Every Thursday night, along with her mother and sister, she read her short stories out loud and listened to compositions of other members of the group, all of whom were adults. She loved writing, but she was also curious about “how things worked,” Heider told me. She went on to study physics at the University of Utah, launching a career that led Heider to travel the world and eventually inspired the setting for her new murder mystery.
As a civilian analyst for the U.S. Navy, Heider spent three years in Naples, Italy, which is the backdrop in Heider’s debut novel “May the Wolf Die,” a captivating mystery and Heider’s debut book that was released in July through Penguin Publishing. The book follows investigator Nikki Serafino, who sets out to solve a murder involving organized crime and the United States military. There are dead bodies, drug smuggling, nefarious family past, with the narrative unfolding amid the scenic background of Naples.
The New York Times included the book on the Best Crime Fiction of the Year list.
As part of the book tour, Heider has returned to her home state. “If you go and you do things in the world and come back, you reconnect with those parts of you that were deeply rooted,” Heider told me. “Coming back to Utah, there is a sweetness to it.”
Heider will be hosting her next book signing this Sunday, Sept. 29, at Dolly’s Bookstore in Park City.
Heider, the second of six children, grew up in South Jordan in the family that loved books. After finishing high-school at 16, she went on to study acting at the University of Utah, where she performed Shakespeare, Chekhov and Marlowe. A year into her theater studies, she switched her major to physics.
“It was fascinating and it engaged my mind,” said Heider. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in physics from Tufts University in the Boston area, where she focused on nuclear magnetic resonance (she got to collaborate with the University of Utah’s chemistry department during her research.)
After graduating, she became a civilian researcher for the U.S. Navy, where she ran war games, assessed at-sea exercises and spent weeks and months at a time aboard Naval warships. She did research in 15 African countries, and trained troops in Senegal, Gabon and Cameroon. For several years, she worked in the human space flight program at the European Space Agency, where she got to co-write a paper with an astronaut about their mission.
For her longest mission, she worked on a 39-year-old amphibious transport dock ship which travelled down the West Coast of Africa for 12 weeks. “I was just a civilian plunked in the middle of this military environment doing this mission to Africa,” said Heider.
As part of her job as an analyst, she was stations in Naples, Italy where she lived and worked from 2010 and 2013. But it wasn’t until 2021, that an idea for a book setting popped into her mind.
While visiting Naples, where she used to work, she went sailing with two friends — a security officer who trained Heider in Krav Maga self defense and an undercover Naples police officer. Right there, on a boat on the Bay of Naples, she had a thought: “I was like: how are you two not characters in a murder mystery?”
These two friends went on to inspire the main characters in “May the Wolf Die,” who go out on a boat just like Heider once did with her friends. They consulted her on the details of the local Neapolitan culture (panini is the plural form of panino) and gave her a tour of the police headquarters and the forensics unit.
Heider has just finished the manuscript for her second book, which will come out next year. Heider plans for the books to become a seven book series that will revolve around an overarching mystery. She even got some early interest from producers for a television series.
Heider now lives in the Netherlands, and in addition to writing, she works as a program manager for Microsoft’s AI4Science program.
During her Utah book tour, Heider revisited her roots: The trip coincided with her 30-year high school reunion; she visited a former professor at the University of Utah and gave him a copy of her book. Growing up in Utah has informed some larger themes in Heider’s book: the emphasis on the family and her characters’ strong moral compass.
“As I’ve done work all over the world, I’ve tried to understand what does this mean on a deeply human, ethical and moral level?” Heider told me. There is no easy moral solution in her characters’ stories, she said, but they are driven by the desire to live and act ethically. “I don’t like to shy away from ambiguity or moral conflict, and I think it shows up in my books.”
Elizabeth Heider’s signing of “May the Wolf Die” will take place at Dolly’s Bookstore in Park City, Utah on Sunday, Sept. 29 at 12:00 p.m.