Tori Eldridge Books In Order

Publication Order of Lily Wong Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Tori Eldridge
Tori Eldridge is a thriller writer born in Honolulu. She is of Norwegian, Hawaiian, and Chinese descent and graduated from Punahou School with classmate Barack Obama. She has published short stories and one non-fiction book on empowerment.

When she was a kid in Hawaii, she would watch kung fu films at her calabash auntie’s theater in Chinatown. Once she quit professional dance and enrolled her son in karate, she regained her interest. During her first class, her teacher noted the aptitude and accelerated her training. This moment birthed her obsession with martial arts.

When she was a kid, she was usually too serious for her own good, so her favorite authors included Leon Uris, James Clavell, Pearl S. Buck, later on Ann Rice, Stephen King, and Michael Crichton. After becoming serious about writing, she started paying attention to authors like F. Paul Wilson, Ken Follett, David Morrell, Barbara Kingsolver, Lisa See, and Lisa Gardner.

Tang Soo Do rapidly led kickboxing and then To-Shin Do Ninjutsu, the modern evolution of the ninja martial arts that altered the course of her life. Her ninja experience has given her peace of mind, a gentler heart, and the sort of grit that comes from testing athleticism, challenging fears, facing disillusionment, and combat training with some trusted partners.

She holds a fifth-degree black belt To-Shin Do Ninjutsu and has traveled around America teaching seminars on ninja arts, women’s self-protection, and weapons.

Tori’s first short story, titled “Call Me Dumpling”, is still one of her favorites. It also inspired a novel and a possible mystery thriller series.

Tori has a tough time with plot. She gets easily immersed in character, but plot usually challenges her, which is probably why she obsessively outlines. She doesn’t just trust that a story is going to come if she starts at the beginning and write it. So she starts with character, a premise, or sometimes and a character and a premise, which was the case with “The Ninja Daughter”.

From here, she expands outwardly, adding in more plot, details, and characters, until she has a chapter-by-chapter outline with summaries. She doesn’t stick strictly to the outline, but she has a direction, some pacing, and a whole lot of comfort. Outlining is an essential and deeply creative process for her.

When it comes to character driven or plot driven, she thinks of herself as being right in the middle. She likes keeping the story moving with turning points, action, climax, and reversals. At the same time, she is fascinated by the human condition, with the commonality of our internal struggles with integrity, love, loss, and fear. These are all the things that speak to the core of the things that make us all human and the unique points of view that make everybody so different.

She also loves the gray areas where the line between saint and villain grow muddied and you learn only too late you have it completely wrong.

Before becoming a writer, she performed as a singer, actress, and dancer on television, film, and Broadway.

“The Ninja Daughter” received Thriller Book of the Year by AOTA Global Radio Network in 2019 and was a Lefty Award nominee for Best Debut Mystery Novel. Tori’s debut short story was featured in Suspense Magazine’s Best of 2014. Her screenplay for “The Gift” was a semi-finalist for the Academy Nicholl Fellowship.

Her debut novel, called “The Ninja Daughter”, was released in the year 2019 and is the first of her Lily Wong.

“The Ninja Daughter” is the first novel in the “Lily Wong” series and was released in the year 2019. Lily Wong, after her sister is murdered, dedicates her life and her ninja skills to protect women. Her mission gets complicated by the secrets that she keeps. Her dad, a North Dakota farmer turned Chinese restaurateur, and her Hong Kong-born mom, who is already disappointed in her less than feminine ways, would be terrified at what their daughter has become. Only the couple that runs a local women’s shelter and her Japanese Sensei know the truth.

A young mother that Lily rescued goes back to her abusive marriage, Lily turns her protection abilities on a new client. It is a nightclub waitress who is in the crosshairs of a mysterious assassin that has no apparent reason to want her dead. This mystery sends Lily on a dangerous path of lethal conspiracies, tangled truths, and some gritty suspense.

Readers found this to be snarky, tough, and grudgingly vulnerable, with an irresistible heroine, in Lily Wong, that is set perfectly against a quirky millennial LA backdrop. Tori delivers an intense and remarkably fresh, and Lily is one hell of a heroine. The book is filled with action and still develops character well and speaks the truth about the human condition.

“The Ninja’s Blade” is the second novel in the “Lily Wong” series and was released in the year 2020. Lily Wong, who is a Chinese-Norwegian modern day ninja, has got more trouble than she bargained for when controlling grandparents show up in Los Angeles from Hong Kong. It is right when she goes undercover in the extremely dangerous world of sex trafficking.

While she hunts for some missing high school girl, a kidnapped hooker, and a sociopathic pimp, and she has the surviving members from a murderous street gang after her. Life would be much simpler if Lily knew who she could trust. However, when victims are villains, villains are victims, and even her family plots against her, easy is no option at all.

All Lily is able to do is follow the trail where it leads her: through the high school campus that is polarized by racial tension or the secret back rooms of a barber/tattoo/brothel. Or through the soul-crushing stretch of Long Beach Boulevard called The Blade. She relies on her ninja skills in order to infiltrate and deceive, kill and rescue, whatever necessary to free all the girls from their figurative and literal slavery. If only those same skills would keep Lily’s conniving grandparents from taking over control of her future.