Dear Reader,
I have a confession. The first time I tried to write a story, I was, at best, seven years old. It was also my first foray into crime.
I was a big reader, coming home from the library each week with a stack of books. My favorites were the Ramona Quimby books. Then, one day, I noticed that someone’s name, not just Ramona’s, was on the cover of my favorite book. Who was this Beverly Cleary person?
That’s when I realized authors existed, and that I wanted to be one. I immediately gave it a try, writing my own Ramona story. Today we would call it fan fiction, but back then? It would have been cold-blooded copyright infringement.
But I was off to the races. I was a writer!
Not an author. It would take me a long time to get to that stage. But writing has been with me always—sometimes a frustrating way to spend my time, sometimes a life raft.
That’s not even a metaphor. During the pandemic lockdown, I was working on the hardest writing project of my life, a historical set at Agatha Christie’s holiday home during World War II called Death at Greenway. When I couldn’t leave my house, I could still escape to Agatha’s house. In 2022, when I was once again captive—this time, to cancer treatment—I turned to writing, to remind me who I was.
I wrote The Death of Us, a book about family, secrets, and truth brought up from the depths of time. (I’m also healthy now, thanks for wondering.) I got the idea for The Death of Us from looking out the window of a plane on a clear day and far, far below, identified a water-filled quarry. I thought, as any crime novelist would, there must be a lot of dead bodies hiding in water like that.
Hope you will check out The Death of Us or another of my novels, dear reader, and support this fantastic independent bookstore.
Lori Rader-Day
