AN IDEA AT ITS ORIGIN.

When a teenager, at the end of an evening, maybe after a movie, several of us would go to the T&R, a large truck stop which also served as one of the many restaurants in our city providing an exquisite dining experience. Actually, you didn’t see many older patrons unless they were doing their own non-culinary business. It was mostly teenagers and young adults several deep in the booths on the restaurant side because they had no legal tender to get into the cocktail lounge.

This was, however, a great incubator to escalate my storytelling.  I had always been a storyteller. Show and Tell was a stage for my realistic imaginings. In the second grade, I told a whooper about how a television crew was coming to our house to film my family, and Mrs. Whitaker decided to make it a “Class trip.”  She asked every day for over a month when the filming was going to take place. This gave me the ability to add chapters to a story once started. When she found out the truth, she said I was a good enough liar to become a writer. Thus…here I am.

There is, after all, a little bit of truth in every story.

While I learned chapter and plot sequences in Show and Tell, I developed strong characters at the T & R. For each person I picked out, I made up a story of why they had come to the restaurant. My friends then began to ask for the back stories of these characters, and I found I enjoyed making up the back story of why they were at the T & R almost more than the invariable reason they were sitting in the booth and what might happen to them.

Lillian Dove in the Lillian Dove mystery series is a little truth in fiction, as well. I never met my Aunt Lillian, my father’s sister. She was estranged from our family due to her over-enjoyment of alcohol. Back in the 1940’s, alcoholism was just becoming understood as something more than just a bad habit. Today, we can actually see generational alcoholic behaviors. Learning that Mormons believe a soul can be saved after they have passed, I decided, to give my Aunt Lillian recovery. Only, there are a great many alcoholic detectives out there in fiction-land, and I wanted to research and advise my readers on other aspects of life besides crime-doesn’t pay.  So, while Lillian IS five years in recovery, her individual journey in the series is to learn how to take on life with all its challenges.

(From Let Her Go.)

If only I could go back and do life differently.

Isn’t that what people say? 

Life would be so much better.

Would it?

            If only was the mantra I’d repeated most of my life. If only I never took that first drink from my father’s bottle of Absolut, wondering at the age of twelve, what he found so exhilarating.

            Why did he like it more than us?

            Would I have always taken that throatful no matter the day or time, the year, or moment? No matter if my father drank himself dead every night? No matter if my mother killed him every day?

            Was it my destiny?

Dahlia, my mother.  Did she want to go back? Do it differently?  She always seemed so sure of herself. Right vs. wrong. White over black. Many people think she is hard to manage. Abusive. But she lived the same life I did.

Might she be unsure? Reactive? Defensive?

Are we so different?

My name is Lillian Dove. I am five years sober.

This rebirth I’ve taken has given me more questions than answers.

I have admitted my life was and is full of mayhem, but I have also admitted I have choices. I have come to suppose there is more for me if I want to take steps to create it.  I choose to believe in the Lillian buried deep inside fighting to come out.

Life shouldn’t be this hard.

Right?

LET HER GO: Lillian Dove Mystery
by D. J. Adamson

About the Book

LET HER GO: Lillian Dove Mystery
Suspense Mystery
3rd in Series
Horatio Press (November 6, 2018)
Paperback: 448 pages
ISBN-10: 1732672210
ISBN-13: 978-1732672215
Digital ASIN: B07G9TTMZ5

Murder. Betrayal. Love Gone Wrong

With her ability to present clues without giving away the endings and offering surprising twists encouraging the reader to the next page, D. J. Adamson delves into a family tragedy ending up in murder and a teenage daughter missing. When Lillian Dove finds herself involved in the police investigation, she realizes the daughter holds the key to unravel who killed her mother.

It is three days before Christmas when Lillian Dove comes across Dr. Conrad standing out in front of his house, covered in blood. When going inside the house to help other members of his family, she finds his wife killed, his son seriously injured, and his teenage daughter, Peyton Clayton, missing. Even more shocking, the police suspect Dr. Conrad. Understanding how emotional dilemmas have strained the family emboldens Lillian to help Detective Jacque Leveque, Major Crimes Detective for the Frytown Police Department, find the prime witness to the Conrad truths.

Let Her Go is a nerve-wracking exploration into a family lost, and the extent love elicits both the good and the bad. In this Third Step in Personal Recovery Lillian works to find Peyton Clayton, while battling the worse arctic freeze in Frytown’s history, untangling human frailties, and confronting the ghosts of Christmas.

About the Author

D. J. Adamson is an award-winning author for both her mystery novels and her science fiction novel. She is the editor of Le Coeur de l’Artiste, a newsletter which reviews books, and a blog, L’Artiste with offers authors the venue to write on craft, marketing, and the creative mind. D.J. teaches writing and literature, and to keep busy when she is not writing or teaching, she has been a board member of Sisters in Crime Los Angeles and Sisters in Crime Central Coast, a member of the Southern California Mystery Writers Organization, California Writers Club and Greater Los Angeles Writer’s Society. Her books can be found and purchased in bookstores and on Amazon. To find her, her blog L’Artiste, or newsletter go to http://www.djadamson.com.

Author Links

Website: http://djadamson.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LillianDoveSeries/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/adamson_dj

GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8511075.D_J_Adamson

Purchase Link

Amazon

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