Former News 12 reporter Elise Hart Kipness discusses 'Close Call'

New on bookshelves this week is "Close Call" (Thomas & Mercer, $16.99), a thriller by Great Neck native Elise Hart Kipness that revolves around a kidnapping at the U.S. Open. It’s the third in a series of novels featuring Kate Green, an athlete-turned-sports journalist thrust into criminal investigations. As the current book begins, Kate is on Long Island to cover the tennis tournament for her sports network but ends up going undercover with the FBI when one of the star players disappears.

Kipness recently chatted with Newsday by Zoom in Southold, where she was spending part of the summer, to talk about her career and her new book.

Like Kate, you were a broadcast journalist, right?

I always wanted to be a reporter. In college at Brown, I worked at the radio station, WBRU. After graduation, I worked at several media organizations before returning to Long Island to start my on-air career at Channel 55, then went to News 12 Long Island. I covered the Pine Barren fires in the mid-'90s, the Long Island Rail Road massacre trial, the Joel Rifkin serial murder trial. Then, when I went to work for WNBC-TV, I covered the Flight 800 crash. In 1998, I had the opportunity to cover the NBA lockout for Fox Sports Network. It was a good change for me, because day to day I had been covering stories that were so difficult and sad. You know what they say: “When it bleeds, it leads.” It was a real relief to go to sports.

Kate is a former Olympic soccer player. Are you also an athlete?

I was no Olympian, but I dipped my toes into sports at Great Neck North High School, where I was on the tennis team, and took lessons over the summer in Syosset, at the John McEnroe Tennis Academy. I was never very good, though — I didn't have that competitive brain you need for it. Instead I became a great fan, which was perfect for covering sports.

How did you transition to writing books?

I stayed at Fox Sports Network for several years, then took a break when my first son was born. I was traveling so much — I would go to spring training in Florida for a month, then March Madness for a month — as a mom, I wanted to be closer to home. A few years later, after the kids started school, I realized that the thing I missed most wasn’t the adrenaline of covering a game or reporting live, but the writing itself. So I started to take classes in fiction writing. It took me about five years to finish my first draft because I had so much to learn.

How did you develop the character of Kate?

I like to think of Kate as a way cooler version of me, with a lot more athletic talent. I put her in soccer because my younger son has played soccer since he was little and is now a D1 soccer player. I know soccer intimately through him, as well as from covering it.

Tell us about the Long Island settings in "Close Call."

One of the main characters in the book is Lucy, an aging star of the tennis world. During the Open, she is renting a house in Oyster Bay, which is where I got married. But she grew up a few towns over in a fictional town I call Glenport, which is based on some of the scrappier towns on the Island, and much of the action in the book happens there. The characters also spend a lot of time in traffic on the Long Island Expressway. Something I had a lot of experience with!

A realistic touch! Did you do any special research for the book?

I went with my son to the U.S. Open right before writing the book, and I found I saw it very differently than I had as a sports reporter. At one point, we were watching a match, and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a giant refrigerated container being wheeled off on a dolly. I jumped up and ran down to take pictures of it, and my son was like, "What are you doing?" I said, wouldn’t this be a great place to hide a body?

What’s up next?

I’m working on a new series, featuring not a sports reporter but a TV news reporter.

So is this the last Kate book?

For now, but Kate is heading for television. The series has been optioned by NBC Universal Television and Mary J. Blige's production studio, Blue Butterfly, with Deborah Martin Chase from "The Equalizer" as executive producer and Liz Friedlander from "The Rookie" executive producing and directing.