Liz Miliron mines family dynamics for her series #bookgiveaway

 HALLIE EPHRON: It's with the greatest pleasure that I welcome Liz Milliron, a regular presence here on Jungle Red Writers. (I feel a special affinity for Liz since we both from writing (very exciting) technical material to writing crime novels.)

Liz's stories about where she gets her ideas are astounding. We should all have such colorful relatives!

Welcome, Liz!

LIZ MILLIRON: Thanks for hosting me today, Hallie. It’s always fun visiting the “front side” of the blog.

You may be surprised to learn, reader, that I’m in the family way.

No, not like that. I’m way past my childbearing age, at least psychologically speaking. I’m talking in my fiction. Let me explain.

When I sat down to write Thicker Than Water, the sixth in the Laurel Highlands Mysteries and which came out last year, I made a deliberate decision to explore family dynamics. 

It seemed a natural point at which to do so. Jim and Sally were taking their relationship to a deeper level. Once a couple does that, discussion about family comes up. In that book I wanted to explore what makes a family, feelings toward family, the various definitions and types of families, and chosen vs. biological family.

Then came The Secrets We Keep.

In this book, Betty is hired by a soldier home on medical leave. He was raised in an orphanage and was always told he was left in the church. He grew up satisfied with the story, but his brush with death has made him determined to find his biological mother. Of course secrets – and murder – are involved, leading Betty to think about the cost of exposing long-held family truths. Not only that, Betty has to deal with her feelings about her fiancé – and the handsome new man in her life who is definitely interested in more than friendship.

Currently, I’m working on The Lies We Live, the sixth Homefront Mystery, and family secrets and relationship issues again take center stage. Betty’s client is concerned for her brother and Betty has to face her fiancé when he returns from the war, discharged because of an injury.

This intrigued me. I looked at my past books, especially the historicals. The Enemy We Don’t Know explored the relationship between cousins and how it affected the crime. The Stories We Tell involved a character’s grandmother and her potential connections, previously unknown, with the Polish government in exile. The Lessons We Learn revolved around the death of a character’s father and the toll his hidden life took on his family. The Truth We Hide again touched on family dynamics, in this case the estrangement of the victim from his father.

Do you see a pattern here?

None, or very little, of this was planned. My own family history is pretty boring. No deep secrets, no infamous ancestors. My grandfather’s family was full of functioning alcoholics. They owned a bar, which seems to be a bad business model for a family of drinkers. I know my father’s Uncle Fran fell off a dock in Buffalo and drowned (a story I mined for Lessons, although Uncle Fran wasn’t murdered).

My grandfather always described his mother as a “mean old lady,” something my father seconded. There is the story of how she smuggled whiskey into the country from Canada by hiding the bottles in the door panels of her car. One night, the chief of police and the head of Customs at the Peace Bridge showed up at her door. They didn’t want to arrest her. They wanted a drink. (That story may be a tad apocryphal, I don’t know.) But that isn’t a secret.

I know a little about my paternal grandmother’s family. Her brother was a cop and a recovering alcoholic. Her sister-in-law drove a bus. They both told all the stories, though. I know a little more about my maternal grandmother’s family because my aunt has done extensive genealogical research, but she makes all of them sound like saints. Nothing is known about my maternal grandfather’s family. He was a small child when they immigrated from Croatia and he never talked about them.

Maybe it isn’t strange so many of my stories involve family secrets. With a family that doesn’t have secrets, at least that I know of, I want to submerse myself in those that do. Of course, maybe my family is awash in secrets. After all, if I knew about them, they wouldn’t be, well, secret, would they?

Real or fictional, all I know is it’s a great subject to play with. And since my real life is so devoid of secrecy, I guess I’ll continue to make them up.

Reds and readers, did your family have secrets? Were they ever uncovered and, if so, what happened?

***I’ve got three ARCs of The Secrets We Keep I’ll give to three commentators (US only – sorry).***

Liz Milliron is the author of The Laurel Highlands Mysteries series, set in the scenic Laurel Highlands and The Homefront Mysteries, set in Buffalo, NY during the early years of World War II. She is a co-host of the crime fiction podcast “Guns, Knives & Lipstick." Liz is a member of Pennwriters, Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers, and The Historical Novel Society and is the current vice-President of the Pittsburgh chapter of Sisters in Crime and the Education Liaison for the National SinC board. Liz lives in Pittsburgh with her son and a very spoiled retired-racer greyhound.

About Secrets We Keep: June, 1943 Betty Ahern isn’t a novice PI anymore. After solving several dangerous cases, she is hired for what she hopes will be simpler one. A soldier home from Europe on medical furlough wants her to find his birth mother. Left at a church and raised an orphan at Father Baker’s Home for Boys, his only clue is a silver St. Christopher medal with a French inscription on the back.

Betty tracks down the unmarried daughter of a wealthy businessman who mysteriously vanished from society for several months in the early 1920s. Against her better judgment, Betty tells her client, who rushes off to meet her. But when the woman is found murdered, and her client is arrested for the crime, Betty must switch from locating a missing mother to clearing his name.

Aided by some new partners, Betty once again delves into the secrets of Buffalo’s elite. What she finds threatens to rip open secrets long buried. Can she find a killer and reunite a family? Or will the hunt cost Betty and her client everything, including their lives?

A Family Dilemma

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I’ll never forget the day my mom called me, all upset, and, I’ll admit, enraged. She was very unhappy with me, to say the least, because she’d decided that I’d modeled Charlotte McNally’s gorgeous but hyper-critical mother after her.  And moreover, that this person had gone to Boston to have a facelift. And now, she complained, everyone would that that was her.

I explained my way out of it, and ended by saying—Mom, it’s fiction. Charlie McNally is fictional, and Mrs. McNally is fictional She’s not you.

And there we left it.

Mom was right, of course, but I never admitted that.

Families can be tricky. As the wonderful Bryan Reardon explains.

THE PERFECT PLAN?

       By Bryan Reardon

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

             George Bernard Shaw

 

Is that good advice for a writer? I wonder. Recently, at a book festival in Michigan, someone asked me if I write a series. The easy answer was, 'no.' When I thought about the question, my mind made a new connection between my first two books, and my third which comes out this year. The first book is about a school shooting. The second about the bombing of New York's Penn Station. The third book about an abduction. They've been categorized as thrillers, but that never felt 100 percent accurate to me. 

When I got past the action of the concepts, I realized that the three had something much deeper in common. Not a series, but a trilogy of thematically themed stories, all focusing on family.

THE PERFECT PLAN (June 18, Dutton Books) is the story of the two brothers. Together, they seem to have survived a horrible childhood. People see them as strong, resilient and fiercely loyal. That's on the surface. If anyone looked too closely, though, they might see the cracks. They might catch a glimpse at their skeleton.

The older brother, Andrew, is a rising politician, running for office. The younger, Liam, is dangerous and unpredictable. Their story begins with Liam stalking one of Andrew's campaign staffers. When he abducts her in a parking lot, things get worse. Liam seems to taunt Drew with behaviors that seem out of control. 

But, when it comes to the Brennan brothers, things are never how they appear. Their family secret runs deep and dark. And by the end of their story, it will be dragged into the light.

It is in their back story, that I realized this story focuses on family. The brothers grew up in an abusive home, the children of an alcoholic mother. I dove deep into that portion, painting their childhood as vividly as I could. But there is a very real danger in doing that. See, as a writer, if you write about family, your family is automatically going to think you are writing about them.

I certainly don't write about my family. When you plot a story, you need your character to be a certain way, make certain decisions, all to further the arc. If I was to actually write about my family, I doubt too many people would want to read it. My life is normal. Boring. Certainly no one has been abducted. So, I make stuff up.

But…..

Here's where it gets dangerous. Although no one in my stories is an actual real-life person, I can't say that about some settings, or incidents. In The Perfect Plan, some of the story takes place in the backyard of my childhood home. My brother did teach me to tie my shoes. There are a few real-world nuggets thrown in there. I find myself doing that to help me ground the story. Make the characters more believable. The problem is, if some is true, then people might believe all of it really happened. When you write the kinds of books I write, that is not a great thing.

As writers, it can be scary. We are putting ourselves out there in a very real and vulnerable way. As our stories unfold, we might come across a choice. Use something that might resemble a person in our lives. Or shy away, afraid of what they might think.

 Right or wrong, I have chosen the former. It is a risk. There are still people in my life that don't speak to me because they think they were in my first book (though they weren't). But I do it because it works for me, despite the risk.

The funny thing about family, though, is that we tend to keep it all locked inside. On the surface, everything looks great. Just check our Facebook pages. But that's never the whole story, is it? We do anything we can to keep that skeleton locked away. We certainly don't let it dance in front of the neighbors. And I find myself asking the same question over and over again. Do we really know the people we are closest to? And, more interestingly, do they truly know us?

HANK: Yup, that’s a tough choice.  Is what’s best for the book what’s best for the real people? And how do we even know?

What do you think about using your real life in a book? Or—even more difficult—appropriating someone else’s?

And a copy of THE PERFECT PLAN to one luck commenter!

(And yesterday’s winner of  A LONG WAY DOWN  is Margaret Hamilton! Email me your address! Yay!)

THE PERFECT PLAN 

From New York Times bestselling author Bryan Reardon comes a tense, twisting story about two brothers locked together in a dangerous game—and an unforgettable tale of a family’s dark secrets.

Liam Brennan teeters on the edge. Early one morning, he snaps, kidnapping a young woman who works for Drew Brennan, Liam’s older brother and the upstart candidate in a heated election. This sudden, vicious attack appears to be the beginning of an unthinkable spiral. But when it comes to the Brennan brothers, nothing is what it seems.
 
To the rest of the world, Liam is the troubled problem child who grew up to be his brother’s enforcer, while Drew has always been the perfect son and a charismatic leader who has his sights set on the governor’s mansion with his charming and beautiful wife, Patsy, by his side.
 
Now, as Liam tries to stay one step ahead of the authorities and his brother, every passing minute provides a deeper glimpse into the brothers’ past, long hidden behind a picture-perfect suburban veneer. With the threat of the truth surfacing, Liam and Drew are driven toward one final, desperate act...

 Bryan Reardon is the bestselling author of Finding Jake and The Real Michael Swann, and now, THE PERFECT PLAN (from Dutton.).  Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Bryan worked for the State of Delaware for more than a decade, starting in the Office of the Governor. He holds a degree in psychology from the University of Notre Dame and lives in West Chester, Pennsylvania, with his wife and kids. 

HARVEST OF SECRETS: A VISIT FROM ELLEN CROSBY

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RHYS BOWEN:  Ellen Crosby and I have been friends for quite a while and I was delighted to catch a short visit with her when she came to the Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale on Saturday. Here we are with store owner Barbara Peters.

Of course she was there to talk about her new book, HARVEST OF SECRETS, the latest in her Virginia Wine Country mysteries. And now she'll share some secrets with us. Welcome, Ellen:

ELLEN CROSBY:  A wise person once told me that we are all entitled to a private life, but living a secret life will get you in trouble. When I heard that it was like an earworm without the music: every now and then something would happen that made it pop back into my head and refuse to go away. So I knew sooner or later that bit of wisdom would find its way into one of my books. Harvest of Secrets is a story of family secrets, the heartache and trouble they cause, and the consequences of revealing a secret that will destroy someone’s private life.

A couple of winters ago a friend and I spent the morning at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., a field trip to view an exhibition we both wanted to see. As we were standing in front of one of the paintings, she casually mentioned that she had subscribed to one of the find-your-ancestors services without telling anyone and got more than she bargained for when she received her results: an older half-brother she never knew existed. Not only that, he had been looking for her for years. When the two of them finally connected, her “new” brother told her that although he had been given up for adoption at birth, he had been raised by loving parents who had given him a wonderful, happy life. But after his adoptive parents passed away he knew he needed to find out who his biological parents were and what their story was. Because it was his story, too. Through the same DNA testing service my friend used, he found his mother—my friend’s mother—but couldn’t learn anything about his father, nor the circumstances surrounding his biological parents’ relationship and his birth. And only one person in the world could answer those questions.


Their mother.


To this day my friend’s mother still does not know that her son and daughter have met and become close. “What do I do?” my friend asked me that day at the National Gallery. “When my mother gave up my brother for adoption sixty years ago she had every expectation that her secret would remain a secret for life. She signed papers she believed guaranteed her privacy when she gave him up forever. Do you think she would want to meet him now? Did she ever tell my father about him? Was she raped or was it a consensual relationship? Should my brother and I tell her about our relationship? And what about my sister?”


There are no easy answers to those questions; I’m not even sure there are right or wrong answers. But it was enough to start me thinking about what happens when we find out things we didn’t know about our parents or grandparents or long ago ancestors, and how we deal with that new knowledge. How it changes us and what we do going forward if we discover, say, we’re related to a serial killer or we’re not actually Jewish or Native American. Unlike medical DNA testing, I’ve heard these advertised-on-television services referred to as “recreational genetics” because for $99 anyone can find out who else is hanging on their family tree. Even in their family forest. And you might not always like the people you find on those branches. (And, yes, I spit in a vial and sent it off to some lab because it was book research. And no, no surprises).


In Harvest of Secrets, Lucie Montgomery discovers the skull of a young woman buried just outside the family cemetery where all of her ancestors have been laid to rest since the late 1700s. The skull dates from the Civil War and Lucie is certain the woman is related to her. When she learns the woman had been bludgeoned to death, Lucie figures there are two possibilities: either the woman was a relative . . . or the killer was.

Like my friend, Lucie had been curious to learn more about her family’s heritage and secretly sent off a DNA sample to be tested. Also like my friend, Lucie’s results revealed something shocking, a secret she never expected to uncover. And now she has to deal with knowledge no one expected her to have.


Just as the long-ago past comes back to haunt Lucie, so does the recent past when a neighboring vineyard hires Jean-Claude de Merignac, a winemaker from a wealthy aristocratic French family who happened to be Lucie’s first big crush when she was a teenager. Like everyone else, Jean-Claude has secrets that he believed were safely buried in France. But before long his past catches up with him and he’s found stabbed to death with a pair of pruning shears. Suspicion falls on an immigrant worker—an easy target—but Lucie’s Hispanic farm manager tells he’s innocent, warning that if she will not help prove that someone else is the killer, none of her field hands will show up in the next few days to pick grapes during harvest.


It’s now imperative for Lucie to find out who murdered Jean-Claude, and she also wants to know what happened to the woman buried outside her cemetery. Finally, she needs to come to terms with what she learned about her own family.


What she finds in each instance is messy, complicated, and nothing she was expecting. But as she says in Harvest of Secrets, “When I opened Pandora’s Box and explored my DNA and my family’s history, I couldn’t stuff what spilled out back inside.” What Lucie finally realizes—as I have while writing this book—is that even though we each might be entitled to our privacy, in this day and age of the Internet, cameras that watch us everywhere, smart home devices, recreational genetics, and social networking, privacy is something that is becoming ever more elusive.


And like losing your virginity, once it’s gone, you can’t have it back.

ELLEN CROSBY is the author of the Virginia wine country mysteries, including HARVEST OF SECRETS, featuring vineyard owner Lucie Montgomery, which will be released by Minotaur Books on November 6, 2018. Her books have been nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award and the Library of Virginia People’s Choice Award; THE RIESLING RETRIBUTION won the 2009 Gourmand World Cookbook Award for Best US Wine Literature Book. Crosby has also written two mysteries featuring international photojournalist Sophie Medina and MOSCOW NIGHTS, a standalone mystery. 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 the 10th wine country mystery; learn more at http://www.ellencrosby.com.