Once an author has hit the jackpot, how do you cope with expectations for a follow-up?

For Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos, the husband and wife writing team known as Ellery Lloyd, Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club in 2022 selected “The Club” and it became an instant bestseller.

Now, two years later, they follow that mystery with another, “The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby” (Harper, on sale June 11), a dazzling decade-spanning tale that leaps from late 1930s Paris to contemporary London and Dubai with stops in 1991 Cambridge.

Getting the call – and it was a phone call! – about Reese’s Book Club, “Completely changes everything,” Lyons acknowledged in a joint Zoom interview with her husband from London. “I mean, you get the chance to be in front of however many million followers Reese has which is quite a unique thing.”

Added Vlitos, “We had to keep it quiet for three months. The only people that knew were our agents, an editor and each other.

“That was over the whole December-Christmas holiday period, so we couldn’t even tell our families.”

The good news, they realized, was there was no pressure about “What do we do next?” because they had just finished the first draft of “Juliette Willoughby” when “The Club” was picked.

‘That was incredibly lucky,” Lyons said, “because not only did it take the pressure off that we didn’t feel the need to replicate ‘The Club’ in any way.”

“Juliette Willoughby” revolves around a painter, a woman of inherited privilege, whose masterpiece is rediscovered long after she died young.

“All of our novels are set in a world where it’s sort of crime fiction and mystery fiction. Which takes you behind the scenes of a world that looks glamorous from the outside. Then you’re peeking through the curtain and realizing that it’s not as glamorous,” Vlitos said.

They’re also writing what they know. “I did an art history degree at Cambridge,” Lyons revealed, “which features in the novel. And I actually lived in Dubai for a couple of years where I was a magazine editor. Those felt like two worlds we could convincingly tap into.

“Obviously neither of us have lived in 1938 Paris but we’ve always been very interested in female Surrealists. Who doesn’t love a mystery where there’s a hidden secret in a painting!

“But it also felt like it was something that hadn’t been written about in a mystery thriller. You know, the way that female artists have been neglected or overlooked for their work.”

While murder in “Juliette Willoughby” is very much afoot, “We haven’t killed that many women,” Vlitos noted. “We don’t like to do that.”