Tuesday, July 27, 2021

Nine books with plots pulled from real life

A son of the Finger Lakes in western New York State, Andrew Welsh-Huggins now calls himself a “proud native adopted Ohioan.” By day, he is a reporter for the Associated Press in Columbus. By earlier in the day, he is the author of seven books in the Andy Hayes private eye series, featuring a former Ohio State and Cleveland Browns quarterback turned investigator. “Readers who love old-fashioned detective novels will be in hog heaven as they tear into Welsh-Huggins’ latest adventure featuring Andy Hayes,” said Booklist of Fatal Judgment.

The newest Andy Hayes novel is An Empty Grave.

At CrimeReads Welsh-Huggins tagged "nine books with plots pulled from real life, expanded and turned, like straw into gold, into an altogether new creation." One title on the list:
What The Dead Know, by Laura Lippman

A woman arrested for leaving the scene of an accident confesses to police that she is Heather Bethany, a girl who disappeared with her sister from a local mall in the 1970s, a case that until that moment was never solved. Lippman based the book on the real-life disappearance of sisters Katherine Mary Lyon, 10, and Sheila Mary Lyon, 12, from a mall in Wheaton, Maryland, in 1975. (Though the girls’ remains have never been found, a career criminal finally pleaded guilty to their murders in 2017). “We were raised to believe that we were safe going out in pairs, and the fact that two girls went out and never came home seemed particularly haunting,” Lippman told NPR in 2007.
Read about another entry on the list.

What the Dead Know is among Sarah Stewart Taylor's five top mysteries about characters searching for relatives and Kathleen Donohoe's ten top books about missing persons.

The Page 69 Test: What the Dead Know.

--Marshal Zeringue