.jpg)
FRACTURE-a mystery/thriller
There is blood everywhere, but Maggie doesn’t know it. It’s August in Cambridge, MA, and she’s fiercely preparing for a late-career breakthrough in her piano concertizing career.
Then the key arrives--the key to the home of her beloved uncle, her only living relative, environmentalist Henry Bredon. The same mail also brings a divorce decree ending an atrophied marriage, opening freedom yet aloneness. Though concerts loom, the key feels like a summons, sending Maggie driving six hundred miles to rural southwest Pennsylvania.
Where Henry has disappeared, no explanation. Neighbors are unwelcoming and suspicious, even Maggie’s childhood friend Aggie McGanty. Maggie learns a frack company is pressuring the community, desperately poor after steel’s collapse, with only days left for people to sign on. Henry’s pro-environment stand is well known, and as violence escalates, Maggie suspects foul play.
When she finds clues Henry has hidden, Maggie calls in Pittsburgh friends for help, but when police find Henry’s blood in an outbuilding, Maggie goes undercover, risking both her career and life to learn what Henry summoned her to do.
FRACTURE is an 88,300-word mystery nestled between Tana French and Sara Paretsky: character-driven, lyrical, with family secrets and social justice themes. Contact me for pages and more information.
Then the key arrives--the key to the home of her beloved uncle, her only living relative, environmentalist Henry Bredon. The same mail also brings a divorce decree ending an atrophied marriage, opening freedom yet aloneness. Though concerts loom, the key feels like a summons, sending Maggie driving six hundred miles to rural southwest Pennsylvania.
Where Henry has disappeared, no explanation. Neighbors are unwelcoming and suspicious, even Maggie’s childhood friend Aggie McGanty. Maggie learns a frack company is pressuring the community, desperately poor after steel’s collapse, with only days left for people to sign on. Henry’s pro-environment stand is well known, and as violence escalates, Maggie suspects foul play.
When she finds clues Henry has hidden, Maggie calls in Pittsburgh friends for help, but when police find Henry’s blood in an outbuilding, Maggie goes undercover, risking both her career and life to learn what Henry summoned her to do.
FRACTURE is an 88,300-word mystery nestled between Tana French and Sara Paretsky: character-driven, lyrical, with family secrets and social justice themes. Contact me for pages and more information.
FRACTURE's spark
Sometime in 2015, I came across a squib in the paper about a community in southwest Pennsylvania torn apart by controversy over hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. I'd also met a strange creature in my imagination, a pianist who called herself a sleuth. It was only a year later that Maggie Drake and Fracture overtook me and launched.
...and background
The politics behind hydraulic fracturing is a huge topic, and the debate ongoing. The energy needs of our country balanced by the health and well-being of people. I owe a huge debt to each of these authors who delved in such detail to open FRACTURE's story:
Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild,
a sociologist's search for how we can surmount the walls that divide us.
Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracking of America by Eliza Griswold.
I came to this prize-winning book late, but it confirmed all I had feared.
The Real Cost of Fracking: How America's Shale Gas Boom Is Threatening Our Families, Pets, and Food by Michelle Bamberger and Robert Oswald. A pharmacologist and a veterinarian pull back the curtain on the human and animal health effects of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”
...and music
My background as a pianist and piano instructor made me somewhat of an insider to Maggie's world. Here are a few of the pieces she enjoys. You might, too.Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto-Fedorova
Brahms Intermezzo op.18 no2- RubensteinChopin's Raindrop Prelude, Vladimir HorowitzChopin's Revolutionary Etude, Khatia BuniaishviliMozart's Concerto no. 20 in d minor, Mitsuko UchidaGershwin's Blue Prelude, Rubenstein
And still in print since 1976...
The Bumbershoot
Blast from the Past: Still in print since 1976, The Bumbershoot was written with illustrator Bruce Hammond as a stimulus for creativity, and also for deaf children learning sign language. The tale is told entirely in pictures. Lucinda crafted the storyboard from theater games both from her children's theater, Andy's Summer Playhouse, and her work with the National Theater of the Deaf. Buy a copy on Amazon here.