The event will take place at the Northwood School Innovation Hub at 2495 Main St. from 6 to 8 p.m. on Oct. 9. It is hosted in collaboration with Northwood School and The Bookstore Plus.

O’Leary’s family moved to Lake Placid when she was in first grade. From an early age, she was writing stories and bringing them to life. They started as skits in her parent’s basement, then to the stages at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts and Lake Placid Middle/High School.

“I was immersed in this little creative community from as soon as I can remember, and just kind of embraced,” she said. “I think being in a small local community, I was able to grow in confidence as a storyteller.”

The small community came with big opportunities. She did an independent study with then-English teacher Amy Spicer, where she was able to do a deep dive into literature and theater. For her senior project, she put on a musical at the LPCA.

Some of the most formative creative experiences was when she wrote murder mystery plays that were performed at the high school as fundraisers. In between acts, the audience had the opportunity to go to different rooms and interview the characters, like detectives, before returning for the second act and the great reveal of “whodunnit.”

“I just remember how much fun that was, and just loving getting to see everyone’s reactions and the conversations that I would start between people,” she said. “When I set out to write my first novel, I was kind of chasing that high.”

Her creative career had some twists and turns before she would write her first novel, though. She went to the University of San Diego to study English and creative writing.

“I did 18 Lake Placid winters, and I needed some sunshine,” she said.

She also had aspirations to work in TV, which made California a good place to be. She interned with Sony Pictures and then was accepted into the NBC Page Program, a prestigious internship that sent her to New York City and a career in television.

O’Leary got a job as an assistant and then a writer’s assistant at “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” The work was great … unatil the pandemic. The city and the shows shut down, and she found herself back at home. For the first time, she had uninterrupted time where she couldn’t do much else, so she started to write the first draft of her novel.

“I always joke that it was like my COVID sourdough bread project, I didn’t think anything would come of it. “It snowballed as the pandemic snowballed.”

The novel went back on the shelf as she returned to her TV work, but then the writer’s strike happened. She took that time to finish her book and signed with an agent a few days before the strike ended. Now she’s working as an author full time, O’Leary just sold her second book, which will be a mystery in a similar style and tone to “A Killer Wedding” and is expected to come out sometime next year.

“A Killer Wedding” is a mystery novel that revolves around opulent wealth and, as the title implies, a wedding. The spark for the idea came from O’Leary’s experience planning her own wedding. She had been planning a destination wedding, which ended up getting postponed due to the pandemic. The Pinterest boards ended up being put to work in a different way.

“It became really fun to write about a fake wedding, because there’s no budget, there’s no family drama other than what you’re making up yourself,” she said. “And so it became a really fun way to honestly process that tough piece of reality that I was swallowing at the time.”

The book is heavily influenced by her love for Agatha Christie — the main character, Christine, is named as an homage to Christie. The tone is “snarky,” O’Leary said, a product of her own personality and also being immersed in the late night comedy world. She described the feel of the book as similar to the dark humor of the 2019 film, “Knives Out.”

“I like that kind of dark humor, because I think humor helps people process hard truths,” she said.