MYSTERY SHE WROTE...
COME SIT IN MY KITCHEN
Ahhh, my mystery number nine...
I had intended to write this book, years before I finally got it finished, but it wasn't written as I had originally planned.
I grew up with a dad and uncle [Dad's younger brother] and a grandmother who told oodles of funny and interesting family stories, with colorful characters. With those stories rolling around in my head for decades, this family-memoir was - in my mind - going to be humorous.
However, diving into research for more of the history for global events of their 'time' pointed me in an entirely new direction.
Certainly, all the family members I had prepared to feature were still included, but too many social, global and political events between WWI and WWII kept intruding and got in my way. So, what was happening around them got woven in with the two generations before me in my family as well. And - those events turned out to be [in actuality] very close to home - aka my grandmother's boardinghouse.
*****
George and Mary Thomas, like so many others in the 1930s persevered their way through the depression by renting rooms in their house. But one of their tenants has gone missing and when police ring their front doorbell Christmas Eve, their Yuletide Season is suddenly detoured...
*With the signing of peace treaties after WWI modest people in Europe and North America dared to focus their energy and hope on rebuilding. Believing war and military threat was behind them the general population embraced the 1920s only to be shaken to their core again, this time by a sharp global economic decline in the 1930s. And, while new German leadership was once more shaping an armed storm of turmoil, on a quiet treelined street all unsuspecting inhabitants of the Thomas boardinghouse looked forward to Christmas, 1935.
The very idea of a spy living among them was absurd. But a dismembered body found at a local meat packing company was a gruesome puzzle for local police. Days later when the true identity of the murder victim was confirmed federal investigators from both sides of the 49th Parallel swiftly assumed control. And then - abruptly - the entire Thomas household became reminded of just how close, was Europe and how fragile was peace...
Author website: Patchwork Publishing, LLC
Read a full chapter via: Sherrie Todd-Beshore | Substack
**Every writer's journey is the same, but different...In "FROM THERE TO HERE" a memoir, [of sorts] I share more detail of 'my' unique journey that may be of some help to others who find themselves compelled to write too...