MYSTERY AUTHOR LESLIE WHEELER EXPLORES FAMILY TIES IN HER NEWEST RELEASE

Award-winning author, Leslie Wheeler, writes the Berkshire Hilltown Mysteries and the Miranda Lewis Living History Mysteries. She divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and the Berkshires, where she writes in a house overlooking a pond. When not writing, she enjoys hiking with the local land trust, and tending her flower and vegetable gardens. Learn more about Leslie and her books at her website.   

Family Matters

The mysteries I enjoy most tell me something about human experience in addition to solving a crime. This is also the type of mystery I try to write. In my latest mystery, Wolf Bog, the third book in my Berkshire Hilltown Mystery series, I explore the subject of family relationships in the context of two popular debates. One is the blood versus water debate; the other, the nature versus nurture debate. 

 

The discussion about whether or not family ties are stronger than those of our friends takes place between my main character, Kathryn Stinson, and her romantic partner, Earl Barker. He argues in favor of blood, while Kathryn is inclined toward water. Each has reasons for their positions. Because he comes from a close-knit family that has lived in a Berkshire town since its founding in the 1700s, Earl believes that family ties are stronger. 

 

Kathryn, on the other hand, is the only child in a dysfunctional family in California, where her parents were divorced, and she was raised by her mean-spirited grandmother, because her mother was too depressed to care for her. Her strongest family tie was with her great aunt, whom she visited in Hawaii and whom she adored. But her great aunt’s death and her continued estrangement from her mother leave her with no strong biological family connections. She does, however, bond with the members of Earl’s family, and develops close friendships with others in the Berkshires. She considers one of these friends, an older woman named Charlotte Hinckley, to be a surrogate or substitute mother. She’s happy with her current situation, and feels no need to reach out to her biological mother, though prodded to do so by Earl. At one point in the story, she muses, “We choose our friends, but not the families we’re born into, so why should our ties to them be stronger than those to our friends?”

 

In one way at least, my experience mirrors Kathryn’s. I didn’t grow up in a dysfunctional family and managed to remain on more or less good terms with my parents (while they were alive) and older sister. But living on the other side of the country from my actual family meant that I often turned to friends for a surrogate family. They became the people with whom I shared joys and sorrows in relationships free of the baggage that can sometimes mar biological family relations. 

 

The nature versus nurture debate arises when Charlotte Hinckley, the character mentioned above, is reunited with a daughter she gave up for adoption more than forty years ago. The daughter happens to be a very different sort of person than her mother. This leads Charlotte to wonder how much of her daughter’s personality was in her genes, and how much was shaped by the family she grew up in. There are no easy answers to these questions as I, an adoptive mother myself, know well. Because our son was adopted at birth, it’s pretty clear to me what my husband and I gave to him as parents, but with very limited knowledge of his birth parents, it’s difficult to say what traits came from them. Still, I think it’s important to have these discussions, as Charlotte does with Kathryn in the novel. 

 

Readers, where do you stand on the blood versus water and the nature versus nurture questions?

 

Wolf Bog

A Berkshire Hilltown Mystery, Book 3

 

In the drought-ridden Berkshires a group of hikers that includes Kathryn Stinson discover the perfectly preserved body of a local teenager, missing for forty years, at Wolf Bog. Who was he and what happened between him and Kathryn’s close friend, Charlotte Hinckley, to make her distraught and blame herself for his death? Searching for answers, Kathryn learns of the fabulous parties held at a mansion up the hill from her, where local teenagers like the deceased mingled with the offspring of the wealthy. Other questions dog the arrival of a woman claiming to be the daughter Charlotte gave up for adoption. But is she really Charlotte’s daughter, and if not, what’s her game? Once again, Kathryn’s quest for the truth puts her in grave danger.

 

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BOOK CLUB FRIDAY--MYSTERY AUTHOR LESLIE WHEELER ON A TALE OF TWO HEROINES

An award-winning author of nonfiction, Leslie Wheeler writes the Miranda Lewis Living History Mysteries, which debuted with Murder at Plimoth Plantation, and the Berkshire Hilltown Mysteries, which began with Rattlesnake Hill and continue with Shuntoll Road. Learn more about Leslie and her books at her website.

A Tale of Two Heroines

The re-release of my very first mystery, Murder at Plimoth Plantation, as a trade paperback gave me an opportunity to get reacquainted with the heroine of that novel and two that followed: Miranda Lewis. I discovered how much I still enjoyed her company. Perhaps because we’re somewhat alike. Like me, Miranda is a Cambridge-based history book writer, my profession before I turned to mysteries. She even looks a bit like me: tall and slender with curly red hair. Like me, she hails from California and has a bossy older brother, while I have a bossy older sister. Aside from these similarities, what makes her fun to be with is her sense of humor. She has a gift for making witty observations about people, including herself. So, why would I ditch a perfectly good heroine for someone else when I came to write Rattlesnake Hill? 

The answer is simple: Miranda made me do it. There’s a crucial scene in Rattlesnake Hill, where the heroine is supposed to kiss a man she’s fallen for, and Miranda refused. I was shocked. Yet when I thought about it, I realized that it was her way of telling me she didn’t belong in the book—that it was someone else’s story. I had to figure out who this other person was. 

The result was Kathryn Stinson, who is different from Miranda in several ways that make her a more appropriate heroine for Rattlesnake Hill and the sequel, Shuntoll Road. She’s ten years younger than forty-something Miranda, and therefore more impressionable. Unlike Miranda, who has recently ended a twenty-year marriage, Kathryn has never been married. She tends to keep men at a distance, though she has a boyfriend when the novel begins. She also has a darker and more complicated backstory than Miranda. Kathryn’s parents divorced when she was four, and her father went on to marry several more times, while her mother plunged into a deep depression which rendered her incapable of caring for Kathryn. Instead, Kathryn was raised by her mean-spirited grandmother. The only happy times in her childhood were the summers she spent with her life-and-love-affirming great aunt in Hawaii. Throughout the novel, Kathryn is torn between her grandmother’s negativism and her great aunt’s more positive outlook.

No wisecracker like Miranda, Kathryn is wary of other people. Still, she doesn’t lack empathy and reaches out to another woman upon learning of a tragedy that has occurred in the woman’s life. She’s also capable of falling deeply in love. She does kiss the man in the story that Miranda refuses to kiss, though only after a struggle between the warring influences of her grandmother and great aunt within her. Miranda has had a passionate relationship in the past, not so Kathryn. The man she kisses becomes her first real love.

Yet, for all their differences, Miranda and Kathryn have certain things in common. Both have a keen interest in the past, fueled in part by their jobs. Miranda writes history books, and Kathryn is a curator of prints and photographs at a small private library in Boston. Her desire to solve a family mystery involving the identity of a nameless beauty in an old photograph belonging to an ancestor brings her to the Berkshires in the first place. Also, both women have withdrawn to a certain extent from active participation in life. After the failure of her marriage, Miranda has chosen to live vicariously through her writing until events force her to become more engaged. Kathryn also devotes herself to her work and keeps people at a distance until she, too, is forced to jump into the fray.

Both women show courage and determination in pursuing their goals—Miranda to clear her niece’s name in a murder investigation, and Kathryn to find out the truth in two love triangles where the woman was killed in mysterious circumstances. These qualities are especially important to Kathryn, as she navigates the darker worlds of Rattlesnake Hill and Shuntoll Road. She represents a main character who was created to fit a certain story. 

Readers, in your writing, which comes first: the main character or the story?

Shuntoll Road

A Berkshire Hilltown Mystery, Book 2

Boston library curator Kathryn Stinson returns to the Berkshires, hoping to rebuild her romance with Earl Barker, but ends up battling a New York developer, determined to turn the property she’s been renting into an upscale development. The fight pits her against Earl, who has been offered the job of clearing the land. When a fire breaks out in the woods, the burned body of another opponent is discovered. Did he die attempting to escape a fire he set, or was the fire set to cover up his murder? Kathryn’s search for answers leads her to other questions about the developer’s connection to a friend of hers who fled New York years ago for mysterious reasons. The information she uncovers puts her in grave danger.

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#TRAVEL TO THE BERKSHIRES WITH GUEST AUTHOR LESLIE WHEELER

Leslie Wheeler’s mystery fiction includes three novels in her Living History Mystery Series, and short stories that have appeared in several anthologies. Rattlesnake Hill is the first book in a new series of Berkshire Hilltown Mysteries. Learn more about Leslie and her books at her website.  

Location, Location!

Location is important in books, as well as real estate and movies. For me, setting, rather than character, is where a book begins. I choose settings that interest me or that I love because I know I’m going to spend a lot of time there.

For my current book, Rattlesnake Hill, the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts was an obvious choice. I not only love the area but know it well, having lived there for many years. But which Berkshires? The one that draws tourists and wealthy weekenders in the summer for numerous cultural attractions, as well as chi-chi shops and restaurants, and again in the fall for brilliant foliage? Or the Berkshires of small towns and villages off the beaten track, where people whose families have been there for generations eke out of lives, not necessarily of “quiet desperation,” but sometimes close to it?

 I chose the latter. As a resident of a small backwater town myself, it’s the Berkshires I know best. As my main character, Kathryn Stinson, herself a city dweller as I was and still partly am, describes the difference between these two Berkshires:

“Main Street [of Stockbridge] was decked out with boughs of holly, pine wreaths, and Christmas lights in readiness for another holiday a la Norman Rockwell . . . Even on a weeknight in December, visitors strolled along the sidewalk or sat, bundled in fur and down, on the porch of the Red Lion Inn, sipping hot chocolate and hot buttered rum.

 But it was the other Berkshires she was traveling to—the Berkshires of lonely towns perched high on hills, of narrow back roads whose winding darkness come nightfall never ceased to amaze an urban dweller like her. She’d been away less than a day, but already she’d half forgotten what it was like to turn off the main thoroughfare and plunge into a world of blackness, broken only by the lights of an occasional house, or if the sky was clear like this evening, a crescent moon and a pinprick pattern of stars. Past experience had taught her to drive these roads with care, because you never knew when a deer might dart out, or when rounding a bend, you might find yourself on a collision course with a wrong-sided vehicle.”

Of course, setting isn’t just about place; it’s about the time—centuries, years, months, days. Rattlesnake Hill is set in the present, with forays into the past, and despite the Christmas holiday references above, the novel actually begins in November, a dark time of dwindling light when the foliage is gone and with it the tourists. I chose this month, because I wanted to focus on the tension between my main character and the locals, who are suspicious of her. As one local, who especially resents her presence, puts it, “Nobody moved here in this off-season time before the last of the foliage and the first snowfall.”

Which brings me back to another important element of setting: people. Small towns in rural areas are places where everyone knows everyone else’s business, and strangers are not readily welcomed. Kathryn Stinson discovers this when she starts asking questions about an event in the distant past. And when she seeks answers to a more recent mystery: the murder of a woman who once occupied the house she’s renting, her neighbors become openly hostile.

So why does she stay? In part because she’s stubborn and is determined unlock the secrets the locals are withholding from her. But another part has to do with the area’s great natural beauty. From her very first view of the landscape outside the house she rents, Kathryn is enchanted by its loveliness.

Throughout the novel, Kathryn finds peace but also draws inner strength from her surroundings. It’s why I’ve stayed in the Berkshires, too.

Rattlesnake Hill

A Berkshire Hiltown Mystery

It’s November in the Berkshires, a dreary time of dwindling light when the tourists have fled along with the last gasp of fall foliage. So when a stranger shows up in the sleepy hilltown of New Nottingham and starts asking questions, the locals don’t exactly roll out the welcome wagon.

 Bostonian Kathryn Stinson is on a deeply personal quest to solve a family mystery: the identity of a nameless beauty in an old photograph an ancestor brought with him to California over a century ago. But, as Kathryn quickly discovers, the hills possess a host of dark secrets – both ancient and new – that can only be revealed at the price of danger and even death.

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