Florence Grimes is a mess. Once part of a popular girl rock band, after a brief interlude with the manager who is really in love with another of the women in the group, she’s cast out and left with a baby to raise courtesy of the man who fired her. Sure, he pays for their son to go to a posh private school, and she adores her child, but her royalty checks are dwindling and let’s face it—she shouldn’t be spending what little money she has left on fancy nail art and other unnecessary items.
But then Flo isn’t someone who knows how to manage her life, She just doesn’t fit in with the other mothers, but then she doesn’t try that hard—her clothing and attitude impairing her ability to be accepted.
Finally, there’s hope. She gets a call about meeting an old colleague and she dreams of returning to the stage, but, as always with Flo, bad stuff happens and this time it’s really bad. Her son’s class bully mysteriously vanishes on a field trip, and Florence’s quirky, misunderstood 10-year-old son becomes a suspect.
“To save her son, Florence has to figure out what actually happened to the missing boy,” says Sarah Harman, author of All the Other Mother’s Hate Me (G. P. Putnam’ & Sons 2025). “But the more she uncovers, the more she realizes her son might not be as innocent as she’d like to believe,”
Books about missing children and women on the rocks aren’t typically funny but Harman, who describes the subject as a “fine line to walk” uses humor in recounting Flo and her attempts not only to resuscitate her career—and her life—but find out what really happened. And Flo, despite all her faults and mishaps, is someone to root for.
“Personally, as a parent, I have zero interest in fiction about bad things happening to children,” says Harman. “There’s enough of that in the real world; I do not want to consume that darkness in my limited free time. So, it was important to me to telegraph to the reader from the outset, that while this is a twisty mystery about a missing boy, this is not a book where children are going to suffer.”
Harman was never in a girl band (that’s what they called them back then) but she was inspired to write the novel by thinking back to the early aughts and the way that female celebrities were treated by the media and society in general. She references Britney Spears as one example.
“Or remember how the paparazzi took a horrible upskirt photo of Anne Hathaway and then Matt Lauer asked her on national television ‘what lesson she learned from the experience?’” she says. “That was in 2012. It really wasn’t very long ago. When I was writing Florence, I was thinking about how coming of age creatively in that sort of environment might shape a person’s worldview —and the rest of her life.”
The book, which came out in March of this year, is so compelling that even before publication, foreign rights to it were sold at auction in 14 markets and the TV rights bought by FX and The Bear creator Chris Storer, Not bad at all for any novel, but this is Harman’s first which makes it even more impressive.
Like Flo, Harman is an American living in the West End of London, and she notes that navigating the class system is much different than here. But there are some things that are common worldwide and one of them, she says, the redemptive power of female friendship.
“When we meet Florence, all the other mothers hate her—and for a good reason,” she says. “She’s kind of awful. Over the course of the novel, as Florence forges an unlikely alliance with another mom, Jenny, she discovers that she actually is capable of caring about something other than herself. It’s only by learning to be a friend that Florence is able to move on from her past and forgive herself for her failures. Ultimately, my hope is that this book makes readers feel it’s never too late for a comeback.”
Mesmerizing, atmospheric, Gothic, and lyrical, Isabella Valeri’s first novel in a trilogy, took me into an opaque and lawless world of ancestral and deadly family dynasties beholden to no nation and no one but themselves. Valeri, who writes and lives under an assumed name and in an undisclosed Alpine location, is described as an avid markswoman, skier, equestrian, and pilot. I had the chance to interview her as she was writing the upcoming sequel, The Prodigal Daughter due out July 7, 2026.
Q. What inspired you to write Letters from the Dead (Atria/Emily Bestler Books/Simon & Schuster)and explore the world of old European dynasties and how much impact they have on the world?
A. I had rather an unusual childhood and when I was quite young I read The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival a work written by the British military officer Sir John Glubb. Glubb describes a set of phases that empires go through during their rise and decline.
I was also fascinated by the “Course of Empire” series of paintings by Thomas Cole, and I remember being saddened by the fifth and last in the series “Desolation” that Cole himself describes thus: “The gorgeous pageant has passed – the roar of battle has ceased – the multitude has sunk in the dust – the empire is extinct.”
But dynasties, particularly the hereditary variety, I realised, can outlast empires. The Yamato Imperial House of Japan endured for more than 2,500 years. This made me wonder what sort of properties permitted dynasties to endure for so long.
When I began to write Letters from the Dead, it seemed the perfect theme for my young anti-heroine to explore: the way that dynasties subsume their members, and inevitably corrupt them so that the dynasty itself can survive. How does one fight such an entity, particularly as the youngest and the only girl of a generation?
I won’t spoil it, but I hope that the Letters from the Dead series answers that question.
Q. Did any real-life families or historical events influence the creation of the protagonist’s family and their legacy? Or is some or all of it based upon your own experiences?
A. Certainly the House of Hapsburg and its fate after the First World War provided some inspiration. Their influence was of such concern that the “Hapsburg Law” of 1919 stripped the family of power, seized all its property, and banished its memebers from Austria unless they renounced all their titles and claims.
Some refused and went into exile. In fact, the Imperial family was later deported from Switzerland when the authorities discovered that Charles I was, for the second time, trying to mount a coup, restore the monarchy to power, and install himself on the Hungarian throne.
The Russian Imperial Romanov family in early years. Wikimedia Commons.
The fate of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine (and the murder of the Russian Imperial Romanov family at the hands of the Bolsheviks a year earlier) certainly provided an incentive for dynastic families to adopt rather a lower profile. Concepts like exile and secret power structures and the clandestine machinations they wield are certainly rich ground for an author to mine, and so themes like secret societies, banking secrecy, and the goings on in shadowy halls of power play central roles in Letters from the Dead and the rest of the series.
Q. The Alpine estate feels almost like a character itself. How did you create such a vivid and atmospheric setting? And did the remote estate mpact the people who live there?
A. I worked very hard to imbue my prose with that feeling I’m very glad to know that this comes through in the book. In a way, the dynasty that my anti-heroine is born into is a living, breathing thing. It has wants, needs, and desires. What are the dynasty’s ancestral lands and the “family seat,” the centre of the family’s power, but the physical manifestations of the dynasty itself?
Photo courtesy of Isabella Valeri.
Certainly my anti-heroine, who knows nothing of the outside world for the first twelve years of her life, finds herself born as part of that ecosystem. There’s always a hint of the supernatural in my books and the suggestion that the family’s ancestors do their best to wield their influence from beyond the grave.
This concept was a fairly central tenant of belief in Ancient Rome and the title Letters from the Dead certainly alludes to the influence of “those who have gone before.” The estate is their only connection with the living so it does take on life of its own now and again, and for good or for ill, has a seductive influence over everyone who walks on those lands.
Photo courtesy of Switzerland Tourism
Of course, it helps that the Alpine foothills and the High Alps, where large portions of my books are set, are breathtakingly beautiful. My writing retreat is far up in the mountains and the descriptions of the hills, valleys, fogs, mists, and clouds on the estate were some of the first passages I wrote while looking down from there.
Q. I loved how you meshed the intellectual with a high-paced thriller.Was that difficult to do?
A. It was, in fact, very, very difficult. Early on I was repeatedly warned that it was nearly impossible to publish longer books. I am beyond grateful that Emily Bestler, my publisher, proved that untrue.
I think and hope that longer form fiction is making a comeback and that even younger readers have tired of the quick dopamine fix of social media. I set out to write the books I wanted to read and almost all my favourites are longer works shot through with texture and detail and with very intellectual themes. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, perhaps my very favourite novel and a huge inspiration for me, is nearly 200,000 words.
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, an absolutely beautiful book, is longer than that. A.S. Byatt’s wonderful Possession is also nearly 200,000 words.
Wikimedia Commons
I think it’s hard to fully appreciate The Secret History unless you understand quite a bit about Dionysus and the Eleusinian Mysteries. But Tartt gives that to her readers in rather a clever way by bringing them along for her main character’s lessons where those concepts are discussed.
There are so many deeper themes in Letters from the Dead that I also felt as if I needed to show my readers how my anti-heroine uncovers them, and how, at a young age, she develops the skills and tools she needs to embrace her destiny.
Moreover, I cannot abide the tendency of female characters to devolve into “Mary Sue”s, young women who apparently sprung from the womb as already accomplished international jewel thieves with incredible gymnastic abilities and an innate immunity to cyanide (that conveniently saves their life in the middle of Act II).
To me it was very important to let my readers learn how my anti-heroine acquires what she needs to follow her character arc, and maybe even to learn along with her.
You can’t fight an old world dynasty, after all, unless you understand something about trusts and estates law. I’m still not sure that I struck the right balance between the intellectual concepts in the book and the pace of the story, but I’m told that all authors fret about such things even well after publication.
Q. Without spoilers, what was the most difficult plot twist or revelation to write?
A. The dynasty my anti-heroine is born into obviously uses violence, even murder, to its own ends. But, such a structure would not survive long if such acts were perpetrated in the open.
So, much of the violence in Letters from the Dead occurs “off-camera” so to speak, hidden in the shadows, hinted at in ways that cause my anti-heroine to speculate, even if she cannot be sure what is and isn’t true. There is one plot twist, however, that sparks a terrible act of violence that has horrible and long-lasting consequences and one that I knew that, as an author, I could not shy away from.
That was a very difficult scene to write because elements of it were deeply personal to me. I also knew that this scene would be critical not just to Letters from the Dead, but the whole series and therefore it had to hit a certain tone perfectly.
I revisited and revised the scene maybe a dozen times which was deeply traumatic and prose quickly became so visceral that even to this day the scene upsets me. But, I really felt that I had to inflict that pain on myself and to really pour that agony into the passage or I would always feel like I had cheated my readers somehow.
Q. Did you always know how the story would end, or did it evolve as you wrote?
A. I started off as a “pantser,” a writer who writes by the seat of her pants, but a very unusual thing happened to me that turned me into a devoted “plotter,” committed to mapping out the entire work in advance.
I was amazingly lucky to be hosted by director David Leitch and his wife and producer Kelly McCormick at the famous Shepperton Studios in Surrey, England. One of my favourite movies of all time, Alien, was filmed there.
They were astoundingly gracious with me even though they were busy filming Hobbs & Shaw at the time and I got a complete tour of the shoot. What really stuck with me was the “war room” where they had just taken over a whole conference room and laid out the entire film on every surface with photos, magazine cutouts for costume concepts, and detailed dioramas of sets.
You could sit in a swivel chair in the middle and spin around and see the entire concept of film unfold. I was so taken by that idea that the moment I got home I turned one of the conference rooms in my own offices into the “war room” for Letters from the Dead.
Before I was done I had covered the walls with detailed scene-level timelines of every book in the series complete with full-colour pictures of the characters, settings, key events. Some of the timelines four feet tall and twenty feet long. So, yes. All the way at the end of the timeline for the last book the last scenes in the series are depicted (and readers will finally learn her name).
Q. Your life sounds almost as mysterious-and maybe as fraught with danger– as the lives of those in the book. Do you have any comments about that?
A. I have a friend who likes to speculate that I’m a “retired Bond girl” and that my writing retreat in the Alps is a “Bond villian’s lair” obviously references to the old James Bond movies. I always jest back with her and say: “Who’s retired?” Certainly, I’ve had an unusual life, but I don’t want that to distract from my books and I think there is something at least mildly distasteful about the post-modern urge to make “the messenger,” so to speak, so much of the “story.”
Jack Carr has a wonderful discussion about such things in the preface of his debut novel The Terminal List. Of the book’s main character he writes: “I am not James Reece. He is more skilled, witty and intelligent than I could ever hope to be. Though I am not James Reece, I understand him.”
Similarly, I am not my anti-heroine. But I certainly understand her. Of course, Jack Carr has a good reason to write that disclaimer: he was a Navy SEAL and many of his missions were classified. There is an element of “write what you know” in my novels, as there must be. Thankfully, however, my life is quite a bit less exciting than Jack Carr’s.
Q. Letters from the Dead is the first in a series. Can you give us any hints about what’s to come in The Prodigal Daughter?
A. Gillian Flynn, the author of Gone Girl, wrote some comments about female main characters that always resonated with me to the effect that many of them are boring. Of course, her own female characters can be downright evil and I think that’s a refreshing change from books with those happy endings where the female protagonist ends up with the man of her dreams just as he inherits the winery in France and they live together happily ever after (and in such cases the author has clearly not realised how much work a vineyard is).
It is one reason that I write anti-heroines instead of female protagonists. One of the major themes in the Letters from the Dead series is the conflict between freedom and duty or loyalty.
The Prodigal Daughter is about a return from exile, discovering the dark plans the dynasty she was born into has in store for my anti-heroine, and the trials she must, at the greatest personal cost, go through first to understand what her destiny is, and eventually realise it. In Letters from the Dead her grandfather tells her: “My dear, sometimes the patriarch must embrace total amorality, even immorality, in order to grant to his family the luxury of morality.”
In The Prodigal Daughter she must come to terms with the true implications of that advice, and what it will take to either accept or reject it.
Q. Besides a great read, what else would you like readers to take away from your book?
A. Another major theme in Letters from the Dead is secrecy and hidden worlds. I hope that my readers will be inspired by the book to look into the shadows they are normally discouraged from investigating. Letters from the Dead is also a coming of age story focused on the youngest sibling and the only girl of her generation and the non-traditional things she becomes interested in that shape her destiny in unexpected ways.
I would love someday to hear that the novel inspired a young woman to investigate forbidden mysteries and undertake strange and unusual pursuits that opened up new worlds for her (though hopefully not by angering a powerful and potentially murderous dynasty along the way).
Point Mettier, Alaska is no one’s idea of paradise. Its inhabitants—all 205 of them—live in the same high-rise apartment building and the only access to town is by a tunnel or the sea.
But Point Mettier is perfect for many of those who live there. It’s a chance to invent new names, identities, and lives. For some, it’s a safe harbor such as an escape from an abusive spouse. For others, the reasons for disappearing into the void of a place like Point Mettier are darker. And so when a severed hand and foot wash up on shore and Cara Kennedy, a police detective arrives from Anchorage, she finds the inhabitants to be aloof and evasive. Everyone, it seems, has something to hide.
“City Under One Roof” (Berkley) is the first novel written by Iris Yamashita, a screenwriter nominated for an Academy Award for the movie “Letters from Iwo Jima.” The inspiration, she says, comes from a documentary about Whittier, Alaska she watched more than 20 years ago. At the time, Whittier only was accessible by boat or through a 2.5-mile long tunnel.
“Jumping off point for me was the tunnel,” says Yamashita, who has been working in Hollywood for 15 years developing material for both film and streaming, “I had the feeling I was going down into the rabbit hole like Alice in Wonderland. Cara is like Alice, she too fell down the rabbit hole.”
And there Cara meets a wide range of quirky characters including Lonnie, who has a moose she has rescued as a pet, and Amy, a teenager who delivers the Asian food her mother makes to the building’s residents.
Cara has her own burdens, her family died in a tragic, terrifying way. And working with local policeman, Joe Barkowski, stirs feelings she has thought were gone forever.
But even as their feelings for each other grow, the two have to contend with another crisis. A storm closes the tunnel and the residents of Point Mettier—and Cara—are trapped. But though help from the mainland is days away, mayhem is close by when a gang from further north arrives to terrorize the community and that’s when everyone’s secrets start to come out.
Yamashita has always loved writing and for a while, it was a hobby. She has a degree in mechanical engineering and says her “Asian parents always told her ‘you can’t make a living as a writer.’”
“And so I worked at my day job until I had a contract in my hand and then I quit,” she says. “Now I’m working on my next book.”
It’s an archaeological dig so finding human remains shouldn’t be a surprise, but Dr. Molly Moore immediately recognizes that the skeleton they’ve unearthed is much more recent than what you’d find on a site dating back 12,000 years. Indeed, the body is that of a young Black reporter who disappeared just decades ago when covering the racial unrest in Cairo, Illinois.
The loss of his mother has left a large void in the life of Chicago Police Detective Randal Jenkins, and he travels back to Cairo, where he lived as a young boy, to learn more about the case. But it soon becomes clear that this is more than just the murder of an investigative reporter during a tumultuous time. Moore finds herself pressured by her long-time mentor and supporter, retired military general and contractor William Alexander to complete the dig and minimize her discovery. As Moore and Jenkins, each with their own family issues to deal with, work at discovering answers they realize that the General is trying to disrupt the process of a disarmament agreement being developed at a global peace summit taking place in Chicago. The stakes are so high that not only are their lives in jeopardy, but the world may be hurling towards a nuclear disaster.
Disturbing the Bones (Melville House 2024) is the first joint effort by director and screenwriter Andrew Davis, a native of Chicago’s southside and Jeff Biggers, an American Book Award-winning historian, journalist, playwright, and monologist.
In writing the book, Biggers, whose work has appeared in American and foreign newspapers and magazines as well as numerous anthologies, relied upon his knowledge of archaeology, the environment, culture, and history as well as his abilities as a researcher. He is the author of such books as Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartlandand The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture, and Enlightenment to America.
“I’ve been around a lot of archaeological digs,” he said in a joint conversation with Davis and this writer.
It’s also a timely story in that there’s a presidential election going on as Jenkins and Moore race to solve the mystery.
“It’s the only novel with a woman running for the presidency but in the book she’s from Chicago,” says Davis, noting that, as in the book, he sees this election as a turning point in our history. “The story is a blending of art and action, and it asks provocative questions which I think any good book should do.”
Any enjoyable book should, as it tells a story, also open another world for us. The authors do that here as we learn about archaeology, what happens on a dig, and the social upheaval the country went through during the Civil Rights movement. It also explores the psychology of Jenkins and Moore whose personal lives affect their profession and the decisions they make.
This was the first collaboration between Biggers and Davis, but it won’t be their last. The two are also working on a screenplay for the book. Davis has an extensive background in this area, having worked on a myriad of films such as “Holes”, “Under Siege”, “Code of Silence”, “A Perfect Murder”, and “The Guardian.” Known for directing intellectual thrillers, his film “The Fugitive,” was nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture.
Biggers, who served as the Climate Narrative Playwright-in-Residence at Indiana University Northwest several times and lived in Miller Beach during his time there, enjoyed the collaborative process.
“I’ve written a lot of books on my own,” he says, “but this was, in ways, the best of both worlds as we went back and forth and exchanged ideas and shared thoughts.”
Only a master storyteller like Erik Larson could turn the five tumultuous months leading up to the Civil War into “The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroes at the Dawn of the Civil War” (Crown), a compelling, page-turning read, chock full of anecdotes, psychological profiles and obscure but compelling tidbits of history all set against a relentless march towards a conflict that would kill over 620,000 soldiers and devastate a nation.
Larson, the author of six New York Times bestsellers whose previous works include “The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America,” about a mass murderer and the 1893 Chicago’s World Fair, writes in a novelistic style that makes history come alive. He does so through his ability to weave together the familiar facts of history with information that can only be gleaned through relentless and extensive research.
Yes, most of us know that the Civil War began with the firing on Fort Sumter, which was located in Charleston Harbor and under the command of U.S. Army Major Robert Anderson. But did you know that Anderson had owned enslaved people and was a defender of slavery? That Lincoln often misspelled Sumter as Sumpter? Or, more importantly, South Carolina did not have to succeed because of Lincoln’s election, as he had no intention of outlawing slavery in the Southern states?
“When I started out doing this, one concern I had was that the Civil War has not exactly been underwritten,” Larson told me during a phone conversation earlier this week, noting that a quick Google indicated around 65,000. “I had vowed over the years never ever to write about the Civil War.”
That changed when, as he was looking for the topic of his next book and watching the events of the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, he began to consider the deep divide and unrest of our own times.
Faced with what he describes as an intimidating world of previous scholarship, Larson says “What I really wanted to do was to provide a rich sense, on an intimate level, of what the forces were and the motivations for the start of the Civil War.”
The magic of his writing is that he accomplishes this by immersing the reader in details, descriptions, and personalities mostly unknown to many of us, including “eight typical characters” such as Charleston society doyenne Mary Boykin Chestnut, who kept a detailed diary, and James Henry Hammond, a Charleston planter who was a leader of the secessionist movement and who later became a U.S. senator despite public knowledge of his sexual relationships with four nieces ages 13 to 19.
The Southern mindset among the owners of enslaved people of the time is best summed up in a letter written to President James Buchanan, president before Lincoln, by Arthur Peronneau Hayne, a U.S. senator from Charleston. In it, he writes that without slavery “our every comfort would be taken from us. Our wives, our children, made unhappy — education, the light of knowledge — all lost and our people ruined forever. “
“White southerners had persuaded themselves that slavery was a good thing for all concerned, especially for the enslaved blacks,” said Larson. He also notes that many of these same men were devoted readers of writers like Sir Walter Scott, author of “Ivanhoe,” and believed fervently in honor and the code of chivalry.
As outrageous and hypocritical as that seems today, Larson says when writing about a different era it’s important to consider the point of view of those times to accurately reflect how events unfolded.
“It gives a better sense of what the forces were that did lead to states like South Carolina succeeding from the Union and the Civil War,” he said, noting that understanding is not condoning, but historic context provides a lesson for the present and future as we struggle with political division today.
“In those years, the hardest of my childhood, Echo felt like a kindred spirit. I memorized her lines in Slugger 8. I practiced her stance on the field in the mirror. I cut out snapshots from Teen Beat magazine. I bought four copies of her cover issue of Sassy, the one where she wore a red cropped T-shirt with big lips smacked across her flat chest. I made a collage, carefully glued images of her together, draped it with a heart garland, and hung it over my bed. My favorite was a photo of Echo and her also-actor dad, Jamie Blue, leaving a restaurant, his arm slung over her shoulders, protecting her, the way I wished my father did.”
Goldie Klein, a writer for Manhattan Eye, has it bad when it comes to Echo Blue, the famous child actress. The obsession that worried her parents when she was growing up still has a hold on her even now. And when she learns that Echo, who was scheduled to appear on MTV’s New Year’s Eve Y2K special, one that will help her regain her foothold on stardom, hasn’t shown, Goldie knows it has to be more than just a relapse and stint in rehab. Echo has really disappeared.
Currently, Goldie is writing the kind of stories she hates and that her father, an overly critical professor loves, including her most recent article on boxing. But Goldie’s aspirations are to cover subjects much hipper and more compelling. And she sees Echo’s vanishing as just the ticket. She manages to talk her editor into sending her to Los Angeles to track down the missing star. But it’s going to be difficult. Even those close to Echo have no idea where she is, and they’re upset that Goldie is looking for her.
But in her adoration of the Echo, Goldie has spun a mythology in her own mind. She saw Echo as the only friend she had during her early teens. The boy-crazy girls in her class intimidated her with their talk about sex while Goldie was still playing with dolls. She tried to connect but it just didn’t happen despite the best efforts of her mother who planned slumber parties to help her make friends. And so, Goldie further immersed herself into Echo’s world—or the world she thought Echo inhabited.
But Echo’s life was also difficult. Her mother, a washed-up television actress, is a depressive who has locked herself away in their house. To escape that environment, Echo opted to live with her movie star father who was always away on location hoping to become an Academy-award winning actor and never had time to talk on the phone, changed girlfriends monthly and really wasn’t that concerned with his daughter’s well-being. Echo had handlers that raised her and like Goldie she was terribly lonely with just one friend. Stardom couldn’t make up for not having the type of normal life most teenagers have.
Goldie manipulates herself into the lives of people who know Goldie, including Jamie Blue. Accompanying an actor to his house, she eats a marijuana-laced cookie at the door and becomes completely stoned.
“Don’t you know not to eat cookies at a stranger’s house without asking what’s in them?” her editor asks incredulously when Goldie calls to tell her as if that’s a basic fact everyone should know. And though Goldie wants to leave, her editor tells her that she’d better get in the hot tub with Jamie, even though he’s likely to be naked.
Welcome to Hollywood.
Goldie begins to get the idea of what Echo’s life was like as she continues to hunt for the missing star. The story cuts back and forth between 2000 and the 1990s, capturing the era precisely and what life was like for Echo as she became an Oscar-winning child star. In her pursuit of her story, Goldie realizes that it’s time to chart a new course in her own life.
“what could be better than a cursed island, some supernatural happenings, and the righting of centuries of social wrongs?”
“It was a ship from Virginia, called Venus and it had around 400 slaves on board, packed like sardines,” bookstore owner Bruce Cable tells Mercer Mann, a writer who is looking for a new book subject. “Well, it left Africa with 400 but not all made it. Many died at sea. The conditions on board were unimaginable, to say the least. Venus finally went down about a mile to sea near Cumberland Island. Since the slaves were chained and shackled, almost all of them drowned. A few clung to the wreckage and washed ashore in the storm on Dark Island, as it became known. Or Dark Isle. It was unnamed in 1760. They were taken in by runaways from Georgia, and together they built a little community. Two hundred years went by, everybody died or moved away and now it is deserted.”
One of the many facets of John Grisham’s enthralling fiction is his ability to take complex social issues and weave them into the fabric of his novels so that they make for a compelling read.
In Camino Ghosts, the third book in the Camino series, he does it again with his compelling story of Lovely Jackson, an 80-year-old Black woman who is determined to save Dark Isle, the now deserted island once settled by both shipwrecked Africans kidnapped into slavery and escaped slaves. Lovely is the last of those who settled on the island, and she stopped living there when she was 15, only returning to tend to the cemetery where her ancestors are buried.
For years no one wanted the island, an inaccessible and unfriendly barrier island of impenetrable jungle, poisonous snakes, and prowling panthers. But Hurricane Leo has changed the island’s topography and rabid land developers with politicians in their pocket see Dark Isle as the place to build a sprawling casino and resort complex.
But Lovely is determined, believing she is the sole owner of Dark Isle and the protector of her ancestors’ history and graves. She also happens to be the only one who can lift the curse of her great, great, great grandmother, Nalla, a woman who was kidnapped from her village in Africa, taken away from her husband and only child, chained in the hold of a ship as it crossed the Atlantic, and raped repeatedly by the crew members. No white man who has stepped on the island has survived.
Camino Ghosts is the third in the series about bookstore owner Bruce Cable, who likes fine wine, good food, pretty women (he and his wife, an importer of French antiques, have an open marriage), and books. But he is more than a bon vivant and purveyor of tomes, he likes to intervene in the island’s business to produce the best outcomes and is extremely supportive of his writers. Good at pulling strings, he is the force uniting the factions fighting the development and is also helping his former lover, Mercer Mann, a bestselling author with writer’s block, find her next subject. And what could be better than a cursed island, some supernatural happenings, and the righting of centuries of social wrongs?
Shelf Life 