Pop Goes the Weasel--Finding Creative Inspiration from Real Life Event
by Martha Reed Two pivotal things happened when I was in high school in 1974 that led me to write NO REST FOR THE WICKED, Book 3 in my Nantucket Mystery series: 1) a girl from my neighborhood vanished on her way home from the community swimming pool, and 2) I read Kidnap: The Story of the Lindbergh Case by George Waller. Both events planted themselves deeply in my teenaged brain. I knew, even before I became a crime fiction writer that I’d have to come back and explore these two things someday. In NO REST FOR THE WICKED, I synthesized the horror of child abduction and the Lindbergh kidnapping into a modern day ordeal. Because authors must torture their characters, I made it even more difficult for Detective John Jarad to solve the fictional Baby Alice Spenser kidnapping by placing the cold case in 1921 - ninety years in the past - so that John has to contend with natural attrition, family myth, fading human memory, deliberate misdirection, and outright lies. He do...