Ellen Crosby--Have You Met Your Twin?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I have long been a huge fan of my pal Ellen Crosby's Sophie Medina books. (Ellen also writes the Virginia Wine Country mysteries, which are terrific and much lauded as well.) But photojournalist Sophie is one of my very favorite heroines and I've recommended the first two Sophie books, MULTIPLE EXPOSURE and GHOST IMAGE, repeatedly, so I was thrilled when I learned Ellen had written a new Sophie book, BLOW UP. It's a twisty, high-stakes plot based on a fascinating premise, and here's Ellen to explain!

HAVE YOU MET YOUR TWIN?

In 2019 the CDC reported that 32 out of every 1,000 babies born in the United States was a twin. But did you know there are also lookalikes who are not identical or fraternal twins and are not related to each other by blood? The name for these individuals is a doppelgänger: a biologically unrelated lookalike or double of a living person.

How common are doppelgängers? Is there an almost-you running around in the world somewhere whom you’ve never met? A new scientific study reports the answer is more likely to be yes than we might imagine—though with some qualifications and caveats.

Scientists who study DNA and genetics say that each of us shares 99.5 percent of our DNA with every other human being on the planet, meaning a tiny one-half of one percent is all that makes us different from each other. Which is why it is possible—and even likely—that somewhere in the world there is at least one other person who looks almost exactly like each of us, even though we are totally unrelated. What is even weirder is that our doppel­gänger can be a total stranger who lives thousands of miles away and is someone we might never know.

I became fascinated by the idea of using a doppelgänger in a novel after reading The Likeness by Tana French and The Death and Life of Bobby Z  by Don Winslow. (Two terrific books, by the way). As implausible as it seems, in both stories someone gets away with convincing people who know her (and him) well—even intimately—that they are that person in order to help solve a crime. It makes for a tense, gripping story because the ticking time bomb that keeps you on the edge of your seat is how long it’s going to be before the doppelgänger slips up and gets caught—and what that mistake will be. Because you know something has to happen.

The idea that a doppelgänger might actually meet their look-alike—and what the consequences of that meeting might be—became an integral part of Blow Up, my newest mystery featuring Sophie Medina, an international photojournalist. In Blow Up the two individuals could not be more different in their backgrounds, which made me wonder as I was doing my research, what made doppelgängers so similar. Was it nature or nurture?

As it turns out—and fortunately for my story—many of the similarities are genetic, or more nature than nurture. However they’re also a matter of random chance, according to Dr. Manel Esteller, a researcher in Barcelona, Spain and the author of a 2022 study on doppelgängers. “In the world right now, there are so many people that eventually the system is producing humans with similar DNA sequences,” he said. “With the Internet, it’s a lot easier to find them.”

When my family was living in London in the 1990s and my husband, a former journalist with the Voice of America, traveled often to Northern Ireland to cover the peace talks he always came home and said to me, “I see you everywhere on the streets of Belfast.” Which I found both intriguing and a bit scary since my maternal grandmother came from Ireland.  Did I have a doppelgänger in Belfast? More than one?

So I’m curious: first, has anyone ever met someone who could be their identical twin? And second—I hope you say yes!—are you willing to suspend disbelief and go along with the premise of Blow Up: that two doppelgängers could meet in real life?

With explosive consequences.

 

DEBS: Here's more about BLOW UP:

International photojournalist Sophie Medina and her old school friend Father Jack O'Hara are out for a run on Capitol Hill when they find the body of Associate Supreme Court Justice Everett Townsend lying in an alley, barely alive. When Townsend, a diabetic, later dies in the ER from complications due to hypoglycemia, his death has repercussions for Sophie after Javi Aguilera, a homeless man who is Sophie's friend and was at the hospital when Townsend was admitted, is murdered.

The night before he died, Javi told Sophie a shocking story about Townsend that could have a devastating impact on the nation's highest court if word got out. Unable to persuade anyone that what she learned is true and on the run from whoever is protecting Townsend's dark secret, Sophie searches a collection of her photographs of Washington D.C.'s homeless community, looking for evidence before everything blows up in her face.

 

ELLEN CROSBY is the author of the Sophie Medina mysteries, the Virginia wine country mystery series, and MOSCOW NIGHTS, a standalone mystery. Her most recent book, BLOW UP, is the 3^rd Sophie Medina mystery. Her books have been nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award and the Library of Virginia People’s Choice Award; THE FRENCH PARADOX was chosen as one of The Strand Magazine’s Top 20 Mysteries of 2021. Previously she worked as a freelance reporter for The Washington Post, Moscow correspondent for ABC Radio News, and as an economist at the U.S. Senate. She is currently writing DODGE & BURN, the 4^th Sophie Medina mystery.

DEBS: Here's more good news--Ellen's publisher is giving away TWO copies of BLOW UP to lucky commenters on the blog, so tell us if you've ever seen your doppleganger!