The backside slide away from my favourite season toward fall moved me from an adirondack chair into one that swivels behind my writer’s desk. Fingers accustomed to holding a tall glass of coolness tap the keyboard.
Capital Ties takes shape. Readers of my first uniquely Canadian political thriller, Capital Strings, want to know Prime Minister Evan Reid’s decision. Does he stay in Ottawa? If so, for how long? If not, who will the party choose to replace him?
The UnMatchables Are Back!
Fans of Chicago PIs Eddie Emerson and Kelly Gillespie wait for Danger Revealed to be released by Purple Porcupine Publishing. Lucas Dominguez has gone missing. The Consulate General of Canada tells Tori Deane that their senior diplomat is away on personal business. Chicago PD dismisses her concerns for his safety as denial from a jilted lover. Tori turns to The UnMatchables for help and answers. Eddie tends to agree with the police. Kelly doesn’t and begins the agency’s specialized deep dive background check into Lucas’s past for clues to his whereabouts and reasons for leaving. The evidence points to Buenos Aires and nefarious links to the horrors of human trafficking and a crime boss with a dual identity.
Ideas flow for the next case to be solved by The UnMatchables. Will the friends turned lovers return as husband and wife? Or will a hot case drag out doubt and cold feet?
So, dear friends and readers, which story most trips your trigger? Send me an email to let me know – teresa@storyteller30.com.
WHAT I READ
Violeta by Isabel Allende
A librarian’s recommendation dropped this gift into my hands. Violeta’s love letter to her grandson will live on in me until my last moment.
Her fictional memoir spans the great upheavals in recent world history. The Depression robs her privileged family of much more than wealth. Exiled from her South American country capital city to a decrepit farm near an impoverished shantytown, the scope of Violeta’s world shifts to long days of laborious work required to survive and months of travel to reach and teach children without a school under the tutelage of a suffragette’s parents. The combined examples of hope through educating and resisting transforms and sustains Violeta through the rise and fall of injustices inflicted by tyrants, the fight for women’s rights, painful personal sacrifice and unbridled abundant joy.
The parallels between pursuits and people in my life and this brilliant book were so subtle that those dots didn’t connect for me until the final pages. Like Violeta, my father was born during one pandemic and lived until the next. Her descriptions of the horrors and losses in the rise and fall of democracy, dictators and military coups in Latin America painted graphic pictures in fiction of the real life testimonials I researched while writing my second romantic suspense novel.
I cared for, worried about and suffered along with Violeta the consequences of life and the loss of every character created by Isabel Allende. Each gaping hole of final separation took me back to the moments when I’ve felt the stab of that irreversible agony and knew that life would never be normal again. Yet Violeta’s story taught me invaluable lessons on letting go and going on. “I didn’t dwell on death because I was excited by life,” writes Violeta as 100 years of living wanes in semi-lucid twilight to an inevitable close. “There’s a time to live and a time to die. In between there’s time to remember.”