Author Guest Post - Pat Bertram (& a Giveaway - closed)

CONGRATS TO LUCKY WINNER – KAREN!

       

Readers, please join me welcoming Pat Bertram, author of Daughter Am I who’s guest blogging here today!

In Daughter Am I, when twenty-five-year-old Mary Stuart learns she inherited a farm from her recently murdered grandparents-grandparents her father claimed had died before she was born-she becomes obsessed with finding out who they were and why someone wanted them dead. Along the way she accumulates a crew of feisty octogenarians-former gangsters and friends of her grandfather. She meets and falls in love Tim Olson, whose grandfather shared a deadly secret with her great-grandfather. Now Mary and Tim need to stay one step ahead of the killer who is desperate to dig up that secret.

Often writers will tell a story and then go searching for the facts, which can be a challenge, but I wrote Daughter Am I to fit what I knew about bootleggers, gangsters, and the mob. I had to research cars, because what I know about vehicles wouldn’t fill a carburetor, but the rest was easy until it came time to figure out why my robbers buried the gold they stole.

The story depended on the stolen gold disappearing for decades, and I simply could not figure out a believable explanation. I thought perhaps I’d have to abandon the story, but that very evening I happened upon a book a friend was reading about the gold standard. I leafed through the book, and there it was – the robbers’ motivation.

On Sunday, March 5, 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced that saving gold was prohibited, and those who had gold coins, bars, ingots had to surrender their stash. On March 13, armed treasury agents went after everyone known to have gold that hadn’t been turned in. This shocked me so much I knew I had to use it for my story.

Serendipitous findings such as this are so common that author Graham Hancock found a term for it, “gifts from the library gods.” I am particularly grateful for this gift – without it, there would have been no Daughter Am I.

Pat Bertram
author of DAUGHTER AM I, MORE DEATHS THAN ONE, and A SPARK OF HEAVENLY FIRE — available online from Amazon, Smashwords, and Second Wind Publishing, LLC
http://patbertram.com
http://ptbertram.wordpress.com

Lucky for us you found that interesting tidbit, Pat!

GIVEAWAY

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Deadline   Midnight CST of December 11, 2009.

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